Quote of the Day:
A number of early reviews of “Not That Kind of Girl” have complained that Ms. Dunham is not deep enough or sincere enough. One reviewer, clearly a fan, actually complained that Dunham didn’t “share” enough. After I slogged through exactly 36 references to various specific human vaginas in this book, this critique struck me as just a bit off.
–Heather Wilhelm on Lena Dunham’s new autobiography
The heroic Heather Wilhelm has read actress Lena Dunham’s new book “Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She Has ‘Learned’” so that we won’t have too. It is a sad commentary on our society that so many people are reading the 28-year-old actress’ book that it currently ranks number 3 on Amazon.
I confess that I had never heard of Ms. Dunham, the star and writer of a show called “Girls” on HBO, before she cut a 2012 campaign advertisement for the Obama campaign titled “My First Time” and comparing voting for the first time to losing one’s virginity (“My first time voting was amazing…Before I was a girl and now I was woman…I voted for Barak Obama.”).
As might be expected for a woman who regards voting for President Obama in such a light, Dunham has, according to Wilhelm, written a book that features “worse sex scenes than an Ayn Rand novel, which I honestly did not think was possible.” Reportedly, there is lots of material on Ms. Dunham’s eating habits, complete with calorie counts.
Ms. Dunham—despite press coverage that hails her as a feminist icon—apparently is man-dependent, believing the right guy can fix her. The book is always “bouncing from awkward casual sexual encounter to horrible casual sexual encounter, desperately searching for love in all the wrong places.”
Interestingly, the feminists who are vocally claiming Ms. Dunham, won't likely fathom the ironies of her life:
[T]here’s the good news for the man-dependent Ms. Dunham: The feminist in-crowd won’t be blackballing her anytime soon. She’s got the “woe is me” act down cold.
“There are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter,” Dunham writes, describing the chapters of her book as “hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.”
If there is a sentence written in the history of the world that is less self-aware, please let me know.
The lefty Guardian is more sympathetic, but even that organ is forced to admit that “there are limitations to 'clit lit' and remorseless self-exposure.”