Lena Dunham

(With help from anerdyfeminist, mexicanprincessbrienne, strange-cares, and alyceislostinwonderland)

• That tiny little thing where her entire damn TV show has no POC in it
• POC cast in Girls play only “the help”, random people:
• Sidné Anderson as “Jamaican Nanny”
• Jermel Howard as “Young Black Guy”
• Moe Hindi as “Roosevelt Hotel Bellhop”
• Jo Yang as “Tibetan Nanny”
• The time she added a black actor (Donald Glover, who is very problematic in his own right and will be getting a post soon) for a couple episodes, during which she accused his character of fetishizing her as a white woman, and declaring that she “doesn’t see race” and “doesn’t see him as black”. Pro tip: erasing people’s identities and experiences is still racist.
• About the lack of POC on Girls: “We really tried to be aware and bring in characters whose job it was to go “Hashtag white people problems, guys.” You know, because it’s the job of POC to go “hashtag white people problems” all the damn time.
• This Islamophobic tweet

• The super Orientalist essay she wrote about a visit to Japan. Choice quotes include: 

• “She weighs about seventy-three pounds and has hands like paper cranes”
• “I can’t imagine a passionate affair with a native man”

• “Yellowish Fever: I know I said I could never imagine a Japanese affair, but I’ve changed my mind. Kazu, the art handler hanging my mom’s show, is gorgeous like the strong, sexy, dreadlocked Mongol in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (causing my sister to email the instruction: “Yeah, girl. crouch that tiger, hide that dragon. P.S. That’s a Chinese movie”)”

• “Japanese people look so young — fourteen year olds in ill-fitting suits. What kind of business could they all be doing? When they cross the street it looks like a music video, or the cover of Abbey Road. They are so orderly and leave a foot of space between themselves and the next office escapee.”
• “The White Man Cometh: Being the only Caucasian in a room, you almost feel invisible because you are so visible. When you’re in Mexico or someplace, at least they want your paper dollars. But here, we are uncouth, smelly, hairy. We have swine-flu. Our currency is inferior and our history is short. Yet the Japanese also love Sid Vicious, cowboys, birthday cakes, bagels.”
• “Her former colleague (a word she pronounces cawl-eee-gew) had an affair with Kazu, art handler crush, and it was a great dishonor, not only for that woman’s husband but for everyone who knew either cheater”
• “Sometimes, when you’ve been in Japan for ten days, you start to get a little funny… You will start bowing to people who hold open a door or sell you a honeydew yogurt or inform you that there are fish flakes on some crackers you’re not sure you want. You will flash a peace sign and assume a pigeon toed stance whenever someone aims a camera at you.”
• “Remember that L’s sound like R’s and vice versa”
• “Tada asks my age. I say “23, last week.” He’s excited. “HOPPY BIRSDAY!””
• “A random guy in a French maid’s apron says, “You so sexy, RENA.””
• “I had this dumb, Western idea. Like, I’m going to go to India and it’s gonna be so transcendent that I’m not gonna be afraid of death anymore, and I’m going to lay down so many of my Western anxieties and embrace a new kind of knowingness and bring it back to the U.S.”
• “We do a really good job in this country of basically sealing off sick people and sealing off toilets and sealing off everything that lets us know we’re animals. And in India not only do they not do that, there’s no interest in doing that.”
• During her trip to India, she said she sympathized more with “the stray dogs she saw than the poverty-stricken people.”
• “I hated India. I know you are not allowed to hate India. But I did. I wasn’t happy. And I felt crazy. I am a hypochondriac. I saw too many puppies that I thought needed me. So many moms and I got in a big fight and I left India. Early.”
• On the cost of her apartment: “It was this cheesy thing where they listed the prices people bought homes for. And its said something like Nicole Richie, 5.3 million dollars, Lena Dunham 430,000 dollars. It was my proudest New York Real Estate moment.” Are we supposed to be impressed that she spent ~only~ half a million dollars? 
• How Girls constantly includes scenes of rape or sexual assault, and then depicts them as totally fine and no big deal
• “The world’s getting more and more full. Our generation is not just white girls. It’s guys. Women of color. Gay people.” Well that about sums it up. Those are all the existing types of people.  There are NO others. And none of those categories overlap, either.
• The huge amount of nepotism on that show, which makes her assertion that the all-white casting was “a complete accident” seem very unlikely
• “I’m not super thin, but I’m thin, for like, Detroit” which is almost definitely racist, and classist as a bare minimum.
• “The vet was a young, sweet man. Definitely Jewish, which is something I care about only in times of crisis”
  
• “I want to date a male flight attendant. Everyone I’ve slept with is gay anyway”
  
• “She was always doing cleanses, yet she still had an inner tube of flesh around her middle—something that I wouldn’t begrudge if her son hadn’t once told me that he thought Nancy and I had ‘the same genre of body’.”
  
• “Jonah didn’t have a very specific style beyond dressing vaguely like a middle-aged lesbian”
• About a girl she knew and bullied as a child: “Cassie was a very fat girl we knew who we had nicknamed fat Cassie because she also wasn’t that nice.”
• This fuckin tweet

• “Sometimes, I think about Japan and I’m like, did I create this country in my mind?” in the new trailer for Girls season 5