Lena Dunhams NY Mag interview is a good read about a terrible person

Lena Dunham makes a coffee stop while running errands in West Hollywood

If you saw “Lena Dunham” trending on Twitter this morning, it’s not because she did something new which was terribly offensive. It’s more complicated than that. Lena agreed to a long-read profile for New York Magazine, about all of the drama that surrounds her and all of the drama she creates – you can read the full piece here. I managed to get through a big chunk of it before I gave up. It’s a thorough read of a terrible person. How can someone so self-aware and self-obsessed be so utterly clueless? I don’t know. I saw a good summary of this piece, which was basically like “this is maybe the best profile of Lena Dunham, and no one should write about her again for years.” Everything is on the table, from how often her pets die, to Lena’s controversial comments about a rape victim, to everything you never wanted to know about her hysterectomy. Some brief highlights:

She doesn’t neglect or kill off her pets: “You can say a lot of sh-t about me, but I am a very committed pet owner,” Dunham says. “Ask anybody who works with me on a pet level. Also,” she continues, addressing the Lamby controversy, “what animal-shelter guy is like, ‘I’m an electronic DJ, and I’m also looking to talk to Yahoo! Celebrity’? But dragging him through the court of public opinion like that doesn’t get me anywhere. It’s better just to kick back and be like, ‘Okay, sir, you can extend your career by telling people what a bad dog owner I was.’” She throws up her hands. “That was one where I was truly like, Welp! Ain’t life rich.”

Racism & apologies: Race is a chronic blind spot for her because she didn’t grow up with a lot of diversity in her New York City private school, she explains. An incomplete list of things Dunham has been asked to apologize for: the nondiverse casting on Girls; casting Donald Glover as a black Republican boyfriend the season after she got in trouble for having an all-white cast; saying in an interview, “No one would be calling me a racist if they knew how badly I wanted to fuck Drake”; declaring herself “thin for, like, Detroit”; writing a New Yorker essay called “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz”; constantly being naked; tweeting a photo of herself wearing a scarf around her head like a hijab; accusing a Spanish magazine of airbrushing her photos (it did not); comparing Bill Cosby to the Holocaust; giving Horvath a brown baby at the end of Girls (and casting a baby that was Puerto Rican and Haitian, not half-Pakistani, as the script dictated); comparing the reading of negative Jezebel coverage to getting beaten in the face by an abusive husband; accusing NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. of not wanting to sleep with her; saying she disliked India because of the visible poverty; apologizing but never learning.

She didn’t donate to Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “My job was to, like, make noise, because frankly Bernie was such a thing that I just felt like my voice as, like, a young hyperliberal person was helpful.”

On her terrible statement about Aurora Perrineau, who said she was raped by a ‘Girls’ executive producer: “I remember thinking, Well, people know that I’m an advocate for these issues, so if I say this, they’ll know I’m not coming from X or Y place.” She was “high as a f–king kite” from the surgery, but “I think I was just like, F–k everyone else. This is my tribe. Let’s keep it safe…. Some people reached out and were quietly like, ‘It’s great that you defend him,’” Dunham says, but mostly people in her life came to her in disbelief. Apatow warned her, “I don’t think this is what you meant to do. That’s not how, in this day and age especially — this isn’t how we talk about women.”

[From The Cut]

Lena tells NY Mag that she did call Perrineau to apologize, and Perrineau’s mom confirmed that the apology went better than expected, even though it happened months after Lena’s initial statement. What strikes me at that point in the piece is that… Lena doesn’t actually care. Lena doesn’t care about her controversies or her apologies. It’s all the same to her – saying something offensive is the same to her as apologizing for saying something offensive, because it’s all attention, and that’s what it’s all about for her. Anyway, I read most of this mess so you wouldn’t have to. I need Lena to stop being a thing for several years.

Smiling Lena Dunham makes a coffee stop in West Hollywood

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.

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