There is a standard way of writing about Lena Dunham. A kind of expected throat-clearing, in which it is solemnly acknowledged that the ur-millennial American auteur/actress is problematic, before addressing whatever it is Dunham has just created, and admitting, grudgingly, that it is not in fact garbage, and maybe even… good.

I refuse to do this. But this takes no great effort on my part, because my take on Lena Dunham is basically the reverse: I am deeply Team LD as a person, and as a matter of principle, but neither superfan nor completist where her work is concerned. Dunham’s role in the culture has long (as in, very long) interested me more than her output itself. I adored her (dark) 2010 movie Tiny Furniture but never finished all seasons of Girls. I’ve read some of her New Yorker pieces (still not the one about her leaving New York) but somehow resisted the urge to take her 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl—of the unforgettable $3.7 million USD advance—from the Little Free Libraries where it now resides.

But as a cultural lightning rod figure, there I can’t look away. She was the 2010s’ punching bag. Why was everyone mad at Lena Dunham from 2012 until she was forgotten circa 2018? The “Controversies” section of her Wikipedia page—indeed, that there even is such a section—will bring you up to speed, as will countless explainers. But the short version is, there was no good reason. The word “problematic” fits, in that anything more specific, where you had to pinpoint an unambiguous misdeed, proves a challenge.

The right hated her for being a liberal feminist, the left for being insufficiently intersectional in her feminism. The young and ambitious envied her successes, and rather than saying as much, phrased things in terms of systemic injustice or nepotism, as though the reason Dunham had gotten the breaks that they had not was because the world is unfair (and yes, the world is unfair!) and not because Dunham was almost certainly harder-working, more driven, and more talented than they were.

Lena Dunham was guilty of oversharing, of putting her foot in her mouth. Guilty, above all, of having put herself onscreen as a protagonist in her own creations despite not looking the way women in such roles generally will. One can pick apart each “controversy” but as I recall, the bulk of social media posts critical of Dunham were not about her diversity in casting or odd passages in her memoir, but rather about the fact that she is ordinary-looking. By which I mean, she is not someone who would be cast as The Girl based on her looks. I am not saying this to be catty (I’m not, either!) but rather because this is materially relevant to the response she received, particularly whenever she would cast herself as the love interest of a conventionally good-looking man.

Is anti-Dunham-ism a form of antisemitism? That might be a stretch, but it relates to her brand of specific cultural Jewishness (urban, cosmopolitan, “too much,” and unapologetically parochial in certain respects). I definitely think it played into the drumbeat of overstatements about her so-called “privilege.” (She’s the child of artists who are successful enough I take it but not household names or gazillionaires.) She does not come across as a Real American in the Sarah Palin sense. Well neither does my Manhattan-raised, Toronto-residing, non-driver self, so she gets to be relatable-ish for at least one fellow millennial, if not for,........

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