2. Lena Dunham, Girls, and the Contradictions of Fourth Wave Feminism

APRIL KALOGEROPOULOS HOUSEHOLDER

2. LENA DUNHAM, GIRLS, AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF FOURTH WAVE FEMINISM

One of the foundational theories of feminism argues that imagery in media and popular culture often degrades and objectifies women, creating unrealistic social expectations which can hurt relationships between men and women, limit women’s relationships with one another, and even distort women’s relationships to their own bodies. Magazine advertisements feature young, skinny, white models who uphold unattainable standards of beauty; music videos show sexy, nearly-naked backup dancers whose sole purpose is to prop up male performers; reality television pits women against each other as they fight for the attention of male suitors; pornography dehumanizes women by fragmenting their bodies into fetishized parts, rather than depicting them as whole beings. But contemporary feminist movements such as #MeToo, #TimesUp, and the Women’s March, approach media as a site for critique, as well as a powerful tool for organization and activism. For young feminists who have grown up with feminism “in the water” (Baumgardner & Richards, 2000) and with media at their fingertips, definitions of women’s “empowerment” and “autonomy” may be radically different from those of previous generations. As feminism has filtered into mainstream consciousness, Millennials have come of age in a time when feminist theories have been absorbed by pop culture in a way that makes Beyoncé’s lyrics almost indistinguishable from the writings of Simone de Beauvoir. As Ariel Levy (2005) observes, “Many of the conflicts between the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution and within the women’s movement itself were left unresolved thirty years ago. What we are seeing today is the residue of that confusion” (p. 74). Eighteen year-old college Freshman “Belle Knox,” a Women’s Studies major at Duke University and self-made “porn star,” made headlines in 2014 when it was revealed that she paid for her first year of college by making internet porn in her dorm room. In an interview with xojane.com (2014), she framed her choices within a feminist discourse about women’s sexual autonomy and self-expression:

“We play around with roles and identities while we are working out issues that are long buried in our subconscious. I’m an ambitious young woman. I’m a student at Duke. I’m a slut who needs to be punished. Feminism means I can take ownership of what I enjoy sexually and that sexuality does not have to determine anything else about me. Because feminism is not a one size fits all movement.” For young women, the contradictions of feminism in the twenty-first century are confusing, to say the least. As Levy asks, why is this the new feminism, and not what it looks like: the old objectification (p. 81)? Why does contemporary feminism appear so conflicted on the question of how to represent women, and how is this reflected in our media and popular culture? This essay investigates how the contradictions of the feminist movement are honestly explored in the HBO series GIRLS (2012–2017), and offers a perspective on the current state of feminism in relation to representations of gender in the contemporary media landscape. Specifically, it explores how GIRLS embodies a feminism in which issues of body image, sex, and women’s solidarity remain unresolved, signaling the need for continued and nuanced theories on the themes explored in the show. In the pilot episode of GIRLS, while trying to convince her parents not to cut her off financially while she struggles to find a job as a writer, Lena Dunham’s protagonist, Hannah, tells her parents that she thinks she may be the voice of her generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation. What does this generation’s feminism look like? What compromises is the show willing to make in order to raise this question? And, how does the show embody the unresolved conflicts of the feminist movement?

THE WAVES OF FEMINISM The “waves” model has been used as a shorthand structuring device to organize feminist history and to track the “progress” of feminist interventions into social, political, and economic change for women. Typically, the first wave is conceived of as addressing nineteenth and twentieth century social and political inequalities for women in North America and the U.K., starting with the struggle for women’s full citizenship and the right to vote. The second wave is the era of “women’s liberation” (1960s–1980s), and sought social transformation through a critique of patriarchy and the ethos of “the personal is the political.” During this time, Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women and published The Feminine Mystique, exposing the limits of suburban motherhood and the domestic slavery of