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A couple of the ladies over here at MadameNoire have been pretty open about our admiration of Lena Dunham and her show Girls. But our appreciation is not blind. And recent excerpts from Lena Dunham’s newly released book Not That Kind of Girl have us all calling foul.
In her book, Lena Dunham describes what reads like a mild obsession with her younger sister. But it’s the way she expressed this obsession and the way she describes in it retrospect that literally have our mouths twisting and our stomachs churning.
Recently a website called Truth Revolt published this excerpt about a 7-year-old Lena and her 1-year-old sister Grace.
“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.
“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I look at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.
“Does her vagina look like mine?”
“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”
One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.
My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”
My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.
And then Glamour pulled this quote.
‘As she grew, I took to bribing her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a “motorcycle chick.” Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just “relax on me.” Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.’
Lena also included another story where she masturbated while her sister was in bed beside her.
If you know Lena Dunham’s brand of art, you know that there’s a lot of shock value involved, a lot of pushing of the proverbial envelope. She’s naked all of the time, in an attempt to challenge people’s perceptions of a what a normal body looks like. She’s different and quirky. And I’ve understood most of it. But there’s a difference between sharing a quirk and putting what sounds like family dysfunction on display of the world to read and pretending like it’s normal.
First, I don’t want to label Dunham as a sexual predator or liken her to Woody Allen as others have suggested. Lena recounts her mother explaining the female anatomy to her. So she was curious. I get that. My mother owns and operates a daycare. I’ve heard plenty of stories. Children do those types of things, unsettling things. There’s this whole thing about children “playing doctor” and sons asking their mothers about their sister’s lack of penis. Most of the time it’s innocent. As I believe Lena’s exploration may have been. But there are so many troubling elements in the retelling of this story. First, there’s the fact that she wrote her sister “didn’t resist.”
Ummm…she was a one-year-old.
And then there’s this business about a one year old being cognizant of not only the location of her vagina but having the motor skills to insert six or seven pebbles into it.
It sounds virtually impossible.
But what strikes me more than anything is Lena’s mother’s response to all of this. “My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did.”
Problem.
Clearly, Dunham didn’t have the most conventional parents. But it’s unfortunate that they didn’t establish boundaries. After her mother removed the rocks that were in her sister’s vagina (completely unbelievable), she should have had a conversation with her already-school-aged daughter about the importance of respecting people’s bodies enough not to touch their private parts.
Then later, Lena describes the tactics she used to gain her sister’s affection. There’s the questionable “relax on me” line and the part where she likens herself to a sexual predator. Perhaps it was supposed to be a joke. But sexual predators aren’t exactly funny and when you describe your interactions with your sister in what could be interpreted as a sexual manner, it would be wise to avoid that type of language. Instead, Dunham put the very strong image of “sexual predator” in the readers’ minds and then was outraged when people drew the same conclusion.
She took to Twitter in what she called a rage spiral to address the accusations.
Source: Twitter
Do I think Dunham molested her sister? No. But I do believe it was inappropriate. For me, a lot of this boils down to Lena’s parents failing to establish boundaries with her little sister’s body and then Lena struggling to see her sister as a person, separate from herself.
Tellingly, in an interview with New York Times Magazine, where the sisters talk about the time Lena took it upon herself to come out for her sister to their parents. Lena said:
“Basically, it’s like I can’t keep any of my own secrets,” Lena said. “And I consider Grace to be an extension of me, and therefore I couldn’t handle the fact that she’s a very private person with her own value system and her own aesthetic and that we do different things.”
And Grace said:
“Without getting into specifics, most of our fights have revolved around my feeling like Lena took her approach to her own personal life and made my personal life her property.”
For me, that’s the crux of all of this. As someone with a younger sister, I can relate to Lena viewing her sister as an extension of herself. It’s not hard to make the leap that in exploring her sister’s body, she felt like she was gaining insight into her own. I know what it’s like to feel like your little sister belongs to you. Without any genital touching, I remembering spending a significant portion of my childhood manipulating my younger sister in one way or another, trying to wield control over this “other part of me.” But it never got to genital touching because my parents nailed “good touch, bad touch” into our heads. There was a boundary. My sister was the keeper of her body, like I was the keeper of mine. If I had to explore, I could look at my own body. But apparently, Lena’s upbringing was different. I’d argue, judging by her mom’s response after the pebble incident, that she didn’t get that message.
I even understand sharing your sister’s secrets and stories. I was in my twenties when I went around telling entirely too many people that my sister’s boyfriend had cheated on her. At the time, hand to God, I didn’t see anything wrong with it. It wasn’t until my sister threw eye daggers at me right as I was about to tell the fifth person, that I realized I was doing entirely too much. Before the look, in my mind it was our shared pain and our shared story, which I felt I had the right to tell. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
And while I hope Lena got her sister’s permission to tell these stories, her track record does make you wonder if Grace is really cool with all of this. Lena is the sister who likes to share and overshare. Grace is not about that life.
Grace, like her sister, also responded to the recent criticisms that have been lobbed at her sister.
Source: Twitter
Like I said earlier, I don’t believe it was molestation, just normal, albeit disturbing childhood behavior that went unchecked. The fact that Grace says she didn’t internalize these incidents as harmful may mean that it’s true.
It’s just interesting that Lena Dunham thought these instances were suitable for her memoir in the first place. Everything doesn’t need to be shared, specifically when it’s something that could be interpreted as predatory or molestation. And while Lena’s story is gaining some traction, I shudder to think how this book would have been received if it had been written by a man or a person of color. It would have never made it past editors. But because Lena is white, privileged and has marketed herself as a feminist/proponent of women’s issues we were supposed to laugh at her childhood quirks and keep it moving.
It was just anything but funny.
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