If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions — Lena Dunham’s sexual abuse, specifically, of her younger sister, Grace, the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections. Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina — “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation. “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”
Lena Dunham reacts to the accusation via Twitter ... after the jump
Comments?
45 comments:
Who is Lena Dunham, and why should we care?
Looking into her book on Amazon, not to mention the page is this post, my eyes glaze over after three sentences.
Tim, she's also on TV. And somebody, somewhere, thinks she's funny - although I can't verify that.
That makes her a very important person in 2014.
I find your lack of celebrity knowledge positively Un-American.
Kevin Williamson is one of today's most talented writers. Lena Dunham will be an unknown has-been in a few years.
"Who is Lena Dunham, and why should we care?"
“I think I may be the voice of my generation.” So says Lena Dunham in the role of her alter ego, Hannah Horvath, in the first episode of Girls, the HBO series she has been writing and starring in since 2012.
This reminds me of the Nixon tape where RN - in between enemies lists - sees 10 minutes of All in the Family and asks Bob Haldermann what its all about. Bob explains it and gets about 1/3 of it wrong.
The end result: The Christmas Bombing of Hanoi.
Moral: Celebrity Knowledge is vital.
Now I know why I don't care.
Next time I bomb Hanoi, I'll be sure to check.
Did she molest her sister?
Yeah, based on her own account. Of course, that may not be accurate.
But cursing others for actually reading your stuff? Not so good.
Well, I'm safe from Ms. Dunham's opprobrium.
What a disgusting animal she is.
She basically one the last election for Obama with that commercial.
So even if we find her gross and disgusting, she's a growing trend.
Hey, is there an echo in here?
Where are her defenders?
Ugh.
I don't like Dunham, don't like her perspective, don't like her looks, don't like her having the 'voice' that she has. She's an idiot far as I can tell.
We all had different experiences, growing up, of course. I suspect mine, 67 years ago, was very atypical. As in, this is actually a very difficult subject, touching as it does on sexual behavior at such an early age. But you know what, it happened, then. It happens now.
This is not said in support of the above assholes memoirs, just said in the sense that sex is so much a part of our being.
Sorry I'm not better at articulating my thoughts, of which here, I guess, I said nothing of relevance. I just don't know how to do such, not wishing to appear my own idiot.
She is the ultimate hipster twat.
Good summation.
That little sister is now a lesbian.
My thoughts on it...
Kids play doctor. They try to bully each other into letting the other "see" because they are fascinated that I'm a girl and you're a boy.
There are other things that I don't think happen, that don't even occur to small children unless they're trying to process "adult" information that they ought not have been exposed to. "What does it look like to look up a vagina" is one of those. But, presumably, there were paintings with huge pink labia on them in her life, and pictures of her mother naked on the walls of her life.
The passage in the book that is quoted (not the one where she relates messing with her little sister's vagina or masturbating, which her sister may well have known nothing about) seems like that sort of "off" thing that abused children do when they're not quite sure how to relate appropriately.
The behavior that people have been listing as sex abuse made me think of the foster sibs I had who were that age. Not that they did the same things but that they did *odd* things and things that were age inappropriate because their "childhood" was messed up with adult things, sexual or not.
Particularly if one is a girl, I think, looking at another girl's bottom just doesn't have the "curiosity with differences" thing going on. Curiosity is solved by looking at yourself... or for boys, looking at yourself. And trying to look inside? Who even thinks of that or conceives that there *is* an inside when you're 7?
Except someone with the stuff plastered all over the walls of your home, and clearly desperate for affection.
By the way you have been on fire with your posts today Lem.
Being older, I have a number of age-related health issues, including floaters in my eyes. As a result, I am very cautious when it comes to vision. I noticed my eyes glazing almost immediately at Ms. Dunham's prose. Concerned, I consulted Boredom for Dummies and found the following about eye-glazing:
Eye-glazing caused by fewer than three sentences is a dangerous medical condition requiring immediate attention. Call 911 now, or, if you live near an ER and have transportation, get yourself there immediately. DO NOT look at reading material in the waiting room.
If you have managed three sentences or more before symptoms occur, glazed eyes are usually successfully treated with thorough inattention. This is especially true for screen-based material. No further contact with the eye-glazing content is the only way to ensure complete recovery.
So, there you have my solid medical reasons for remaining ignorant of Ms. Dunham and what's wrong with her.
@DB@ If you stop by - thanks for that other thing.
@TT: The less you know about Dunham the better. I only know about her via Althouse who seems to admire her. Titus is huge a huge fan as well.
I have not watched HBO's "Girls" which Lena Dunham writes, and in which she performs. Having heard the general theme of the show, I cannot fathom how watching one moment of it would make me a better man.
Dunham is, supposedly, "edgy", whatever that is taken to mean. The problem with being edgy is that it becomes all too easy for one to fall off of the edge, on the wrong side. It seems that is what has happened to Dunham.
Moral foundations are such an unseemly thing to many people. That is so sad, really. We are lectured about the evils of placing restrictions and constrictions on people's beliefs and values. Get your (something or other) out of my (watchamacallit)! they protest.
Yet the most freedom a person can have is to be free of the things modern society says are "edgy", to live a life free of the obligation to indulge in any and all trendiness post-modern society places before oneself.
Ms. Dunham, I fear will not learn this lesson. She will protest, complain, and continue with evermore of the same behavior. It's a shame. She clearly has writing talent, but it will soon burn out, and her life will become miserable, and remain unexamined in the quiet morning of change.
It is telling that on HBO's website for Girls, the Twitter feed has been turned off. Ms. Dunham may not believe that she has a problem, but the network that has to sell advertisers time on her show most certainly does.
chickelit: I'm finding great solace in ignorance of pop culture, including "books."
@TT: In the Orwellian sense we've discussed lately, Dunham is a sawyer admired by certain lawyers and voyeurs.
chickelit: The only sawyer I care to read is "Tom."
He was about 3/5 of the way through. Given where we are now, it's too late for Ms. Dunham to do anything but operate the wood chipper.
I saw the first season of Girls, mostly because it was on right after GOT and right before VEEP. I didn't particularly like the show, but Dunham has a fresh voice and an authentic, if skewered, way of looking at things. There was something vaguely annoying about the show. The protagonists were all rich, white girls searching for some way to make their teenie, weenie problems seem significant and tragic. In one show, Lena's boyfriend pissed on her in the shower. That's so far out in left field that it seems authentic. It's not the kind of thing that happens in most rom coms. It's probably not the kind of thing that happens much in real life either although, to be fair, I don't know much of the mating rituals of Brooklyn hipsters. Anyway, it was something different.......Most shows featured a nude scene with Lena. By real world standards, Lena is in the dull normal range, but by Hollywood standards she's a gargoyle. People who look like that don't take their clothes off to entertain a mass audience. But she does and does it in a self righteous way. Chunky girls are entitled to love and respect and if you don't give it to her, by God, you're ignorant and sexist. She reminds me of that Ebola nurse who kept looking for some taboo to break so that she could feel prosecuted. I wish her love and happiness, but looking at her naked body does not make me a better person.......So far as the child abuse thing goes, if it happened when she was seven I'd give her a pass. But there's sme weird shit going on in that girls libido that's fairly repellent.
Yeah, and it explains a lot.
You know the parents are insane, but anybody who would endorse Obola in terms of losing her maidenhood has been messed up a long time.
(of course, considering what he's done to the country in 5 1/2 years, the analogy does have a certain sting...)
PS Didn't TOP go along with the idea she really was the voice of her generation?
PPS You think about it for a second and she fits right into the era of another over-hyped, self-important diversity hire named Dunham IYKWIMAITYD.
I think it readily pardonable to be blindly envious of someone young, snotty, rich and famous, someone who makes it look easy, someone who makes it look like fun, someone who makes it seem dangerous.
The ham is dun. Put a fork in her.
I knew she had at least one pun in her.
She is pretty foul, even as celebrities go, but she was 7 when this happened, so I don't find it all that offensive, and I don't think it's weird. Just as kids who torture animals don't all end up serial killers. Kids do weird things as they are exploring the world and creating themselves as people. The things that matter are what they continue to be fascinated with as they develop. On sex, she seems to be stuck where she was back then.
"The voice of her generation"? Really just one voice, and in the same way as your toilet is just one piece of the furniture that makes up your home - necessary, but not your best piece, nor really indicative of much more than the fact that poop exists. Now if you put your toilet in the living room, right in front of the TV , then maybe it does say something about you.
Lena just might have stepped on a third rail with this. Sex and very small kids causes the "ewws" in just about everyone. A lot of people won't hear the bit about her being only seven at the time -- I read some other excerpts of the book, though, and it seems it was going on when she was older as well -- all they'll remember is her peering into a one-year-old's vagina.
I guess I really don't know what exactly what to make of it... whether to condemn her or not. My judgment is questionable as to whether it amounts to a hill of beans really. In the grand scheme of things.
I just like to think she is afraid for the first time in her adult life.
That may be some thing I need to work on. Enjoying the suffering of others, no matter how I may perceive it to be justified, is not Christian of me.
I was going to tweet asking for an authority on sexual matters of this nature, but changed my mind realizing how I would troll that myself where my shoe in my other foot... or something.
Don't pay attention to the guy trying to amuse himself.
It comes down to Lena's judgment. She could use some.
It helps if you neither know nor care who she is. She seems a bit like the 60 Hz hum and road noise that most people live with somewhere in the background.
So it turns out Dunham was connected. What with those patrician avant garde parents she had an "in." What she made of it is another matter.
Well, for whatever is worth, here is Lena Dunham on Woody Allen...
Link
Something about being measured with the same yard stick... karma, on and on.
Sort of ironic, too, that she's been hailed as the millenials' Woody Allen and J.D. Salinger. Both guys whose reputations have been harmed by charges of sex with the too-young.
Honestly, Dunham molested me just be her looks. I've seen what she looks like and I've been violated.
As Father Fox has asked, did she molest her sister? As a very young child herself touching her sister in this way rise to the level of molestation? If the answer is yes, then we have a bigger problem in the America if not the world than we realize.
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