Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham is an American actress, filmmaker, and writer. She was the creator and lead actress of the HBO series *Girls.* Jack Antonoff dated her for five years between 2013 and 2018. Lena and Jack had a dog named Lamby, but she got rid of Lamby in 2017, saying that he was too poorly behaved for her to keep.

## Music

### Bleachers

She has background vocals credits on Gone Now's "Goodmorning" and "Let's Get Married."

### Taylor Swift

Dunham spoke about her relationship with Antonoff to Taylor Swift, which partially inspired Swift and Jack Antonoff to create "You Are in Love" for the singer's fifth album, *1989*. In 2014, Dunham tweeted that it would be her wedding song . However, Dunham married Luis Felber in 2021, with Taylor Swift serving as a bridesmaid.

## Controversy

Dunham has come under fire several times throughout her career. It is said that she hides behind her 'rich white girl privilege' when she is criticized. The inability of Lena Dunham to see things from anything beyond a heterosexual white woman's perspective, her constant insensitivity, and her inability to properly apologize and learn from her transgressions are what gets Dunham in trouble time and time again.

### Outing her sister

Grace Dunham, Lena's younger sister, told her that she was lesbian when she was 17. Lena outed Grace to their parents without Grace's permission.

### *Not That Kind of Girl* & Sexual Assault Accusations

In her 2014 memoir *Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned,"* Dunham described a situation in which she, at the age of seven, opened her one year old sister's vagina with her fingers and discovered several pebbles inside. People did not enjoy the way that Dunham spoke about the sensitive topic of child molestation, as she chose to play up the comedic aspect of the situation rather than treat it seriously. Her choice of words -- "she didn't resist" -- were also seen as insensitive, especially given that she was talking about a baby. In another portion of the memoir, she wrote that she attempted to bribe her sister, Grace, with candy and "anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl" so that she could kiss her on the lips. She later apologized for the the 'sexual predator' joke, saying that she is "aware that the comic use of the term “sexual predator” was insensitive". The book also includes a scene where Lena masturbated beside her sister in bed.

Lena Dunham hosted Saturday Night Live in March 2014. One sketch poked fun at the amount of nudity in *Girls,* which caused a Twitter user to tweet that she 'doesn't always have to get naked.' Lena Dunham responded -- in a now deleted tweet -- "Please tell that to my uncle, mister. He's been making me!"  Lena then apologized for the molestation joke, chalking up the gaffe to being sleepy. Critics would argue that normal people don't make molestation jokes, even when they're tired.

### "Dog or Jewish Boyfriend"

Lena Dunham wrote a quiz that was published in the *New Yorker* titled "Dog or Jewish Boyfriend." It compared her dog Lamby to her Jewish boyfriend, Jack Antonoff, wondering if she should give him up in favor of her dog. With the piece was published a drawing of a dog wearing a doorman's uniform and a man wearing a cone to keep from scratching . The article played on Jewish stereotypes of Jewish people being cheap and money-hungry. One cannot help read her article and be reminded of signs that used to be posted that read: "'No Jews or Dogs Allowed." The antisemitism watchdog group the Anti-Defamation League called the piece "tasteless" .

### Odell Beckham Jr. & the Met Gala

At the 2016 Met Gala, Lena Dunham was seated at a table with Amy Schumer and New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.. Four months after the Gala, Dunham was still upset that the football player did not speak to her over the course of the dinner, projecting her own insecurities onto him and in the process defaming him.

https://theundefeated.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dunhamschumer1.jpg?w=936

Dunham turned to Twitter to half-ass cleaning up yet another of her messes: “.@OBJ\_3 is talented, stylish, seems super awesome and wasn’t into chatting with me at a fancy party. My story about him was clearly (to me) about my own insecurities as an average-bodied woman at a table of supermodels & athletes. It’s not an assumption about who he is or an expectation of sexual attention. It’s my sense of humor, which has kept me alive for 30 years. Glad the outrage machine roars on though, right @amyschumer?” Her "sense of humor," however, more so served to try to make Beckham look bad. She characterized him as looking at her and thinking, "That's a marshmallow. That's a child. That's a dog," all while he was simply scrolling through Instagram instead of talking to a stranger. The way that she talked about it *was* an assumption of what he was thinking and hints that he should have paid attention to her, though she does not say anything about trying to initiate conversation herself. Dunham considers herself to be "rejected" by the athlete for wearing a bow tie, despite herself being in a relationship with Jack Antonoff at this point in time.

Lena Dunham also mentioned that she tried to dance on actor Michael B. Jordan for "twenty minutes" in the interview with Amy Schumer. She also tweeted, "ps I'll try and dance myself onto @michaelb4jordan if I have the chance, even when I'm a married grandma. I'm a red blooded str8 woman!" She boasts about trying to grind on an uninterested man for a prolonged period of time. Critics argued that if a man had attempted to do so with a woman, people would be enraged about it, but since it's Lena Dunham harassing Michael B. Jordan, no one cares. This incident also resurfaced Lena Dunham's issues with Black people in the past, particularly the fact that she did not have any Black characters in *Girls.* One critic tweeted: "its ironic Lena Dunham said there aren't black people on her show cuz she can't write them "truthfully" but can now read our minds #racist" . In response to this, Dunham cast Donald Glover -- known as Childish Gambino -- as her character's love interest for a short story arc. She also issued yet another wishy-washy apology on Twitter and Instagram, where she did not take any real responsibility. She said, "I would never intentionally contribute to a long and often violent history of the oversexualization of black male bodies- as well as false accusations by white women toward black men. I'm so sorry, particularly to OBJ, who has every right to be on his cell phone. The fact is I don't know (I don't know a lot of things) and I shouldn't have acted like I did" . Unfortunately for everyone, Dunham does not seem to learn from her mistakes, or think before she 'jokes.' She wanted the sexual attention of two Black men that night at the Met Gala, and she did sexualize them in her story. She attempts to joke again with the line "... has every right to be on his cell phone." He, of course, did have every right to be on his phone rather than dedicate his time to making conversation with a stranger, who was already seated at a table with her own friend, Amy Schumer. Dunham consistently fails to keep in mind that she doesn't know a lot of things and she shouldn't act like she does. What she *should* do is educate herself to avoid issues like these from arising.

### Abortion controversy

In December 2016, Lena Dunham said on the "Women of the Hour" podcast that she "realised that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue. Even I, the woman who cares as much as anybody about a woman’s right to choose, felt it was important that people know I was unblemished in this department... Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had." She later apologized for her "distasteful joke."

People do not "wish" to have abortions and it is not a right of passage as a woman to have an abortion. It is not a shameful thing to have an abortion either. It is a medical procedure, and oftentimes a sensitive one. Few would find it appropriate to joke about abortion.

### Time's Up & (more) sexual assault issues

In January 2018, Dunham posted a photo with several other celebrities in support of the Time's Up campaign, which aims to raise awareness of sexual assault in the workplace. The caption read: "Humbled to stand alongside these amazing women and say #TIMESUP on systemic oppression, underrepresentation, discrimination, abuse and violence in all industries." However, actress Tessa Thompson -- who was also in the photo -- said that "Lena was not anywhere present in our group during the countless hours of work for the last two months," and that the Time's Up campaign advocates had "hosted an open house for actresses for red carpet messaging and Lena's presence was a surprise to us all".

Dunham had already taken heat in the past over underrepresenting people of color in *Girls,* leaning into her white woman privileges, and for her insensitive manner of speaking about her sister's body in her memoir, *Not That Kind of Girl.* To top this off, Lena Dunham had publicly supported her *GIrls* writer Murray Miller after he was accused of raping 17-year-old Aurora Perrineau in November 2017. Lena Dunham wrote off Perrineau's claim and accused her of being "one of the three percent of assault cases that are misreported every year". Dunham also tweeted, "I believe in a lot of things but the first tenet of my politics is to hold up the people who have held me up, who have filled my world with love" . It was argued that championing one's personal relationships over the autonomy and safety of others was deeply selfish and deplorable.

Dunham lied about being sure that the accusations were false, as she later admitted. “There are few acts I could ever regret more in this life. I didn't have the ‘insider information’ I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all... I wanted to feel my workplace and my world were safe, untouched by the outside world (a privilege in and of itself, the privilege of ignoring what hasn’t hurt you) and I claimed that safety at cost to someone else, someone very special..." Lena Dunham attacked a sexual assault survivor, called her a liar, and stood by the side of an accused rapist so that she could live in a fantasy world where her work with *Girls* wasn't tainted by all that sexual assault nastiness. She chose her own comfort over protecting a victim, or even choosing to be silent until she had more details. Dunham may claim to be a feminist, but she surely does not act like one.

People were understandably annoyed and irate with Dunham, who, with her Instagram caption and apparent alignment with the Time's Up campaign, appeared to pretend like she wasn't part of the problem when she has been, in fact, guilty of some of the things she listed in her caption.

## Trivia

* She is a longtime friend of Taylor Swift. In 2021, Taylor served as a bridesmaid at her wedding. In 2015, Swift listed Lena Dunham as one of the ten women in her life that has inspired her the most:
> "Simply meeting Lena once changed my idea of what a successful woman in film is. She is warm and approachable and completely unarmed. She’s excitable and childlike, all the while running a set of hundreds of people and creating one of the most exciting and intelligent portrayals of young women on television. Lesson: powerful women do not have to act masculine or cold in order to get things done. Powerful women can be huggers who name their dog Lamby and make flower crowns in their free time."
>
>

## References

1. ↑ https://twitter.com/lenadunham/status/523026624468373506
2. ↑ https://www.vox.com/2014/11/8/7157065/dunham-child-abuse
3. ↑ http://time.com/3556513/lena-dunham-sexual-abuse-controversy/
4. ↑ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lena-dunham-molestation-joke\_n\_4935043
5. ↑ https://www.instagram.com/p/0lOwC\_C1NS/
6. ↑ https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-lena-dunhams-jewish-boyfriend-or-dog-quiz-tasteless-and-evokes-stereotypes
7. ↑ https://theundefeated.com/features/its-not-about-you-lena-dunham-it-never-was/
8. ↑ https://twitter.com/SankaraChe/status/771901422262554624?ref\_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E771901422262554624%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1\_&ref\_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheundefeated.com%2Ffeatures%2Fits-not-about-you-lena-dunham-it-never-was%2F
9. ↑ https://twitter.com/lenadunham/status/772138988224319488?ref\_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E772138988224319488%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1\_&ref\_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheundefeated.com%2Ffeatures%2Fits-not-about-you-lena-dunham-it-never-was%2F
10. ↑ https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-42621328
11. ↑ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/lena-dunham-apologizes-defending-girls-writer-murray-miller-accusations-sexual-assault-1059803/
12. ↑ https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/3319042/what-did-lena-dunham-say-to-aurora-perrineau-apology/
13. ↑ https://www.insider.com/lena-dunham-brad-pitt-kiss-reactions-double-standard-2019-8
14. ↑ https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/gallery/taylor-swift-the-10-women-who-changed-my-life