Author, producer and actor Lena Dunham is fabulously successful and extraordinarily talented. Her HBO show Girls is, by all accounts, a sensation. People want to know what drives a person like Dunham. They want her recipe for success. They want her secrets. Dunham obliged with Not That Kind of Girl, a sharp funny collection of essays. In the book she describes how as a 7-year-old she sated her curiosity about her 1-year-old sister’s privates. Dunham writes: “One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long island playing blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the better of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina.”
Conservative columnists didn’t care much for Dunham’s candor, calling the incident disturbing and saying Dunham molested her sister. Dunham responded on Twitter with a self-described “rage spiral” saying she was telling a story about being a “weird 7 year old.” When does weird become creepy–or abusive–is the question being raised. Clearly neither Lena Dunham, her publishers, nor the lawyers that certainly vetted the multimillion dollar book thought she had done anything wrong. She was simply honest–transparent in today’s parlance–but what she puts out there is subject to interpretation. That’s the way it goes and that pisses Lena Dunham off! (As she admits.) Important to remember that unlike in most cases like this, there is no dispute about what happened. Dunham wrote about this herself. Dunham cancelled her recent book-related events in Germany and Belgium–no word why. Dunham’s sister is, according to Lena, laughing about it all. Probably reminds her of the second episode of Girls back in 2012. It was called Vagina Panic.
I told a story about being a weird 7 year old. I bet you have some too, old men, that I’d rather not hear. And yes, this is a rage spiral.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) November 1, 2014