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Has Lena Dunham changed? Have we?

How the Girls showrunner became a symbol of cancel culture’s excesses.

Lena Dunham, the subject of a thousand 2010s think pieces about whether or not she is problematic, has re-emerged from behind the curtain with her new memoir, Famesick. But this time around, the think pieces look different. Some of them are mea culpas addressed to Dunham.

“We owe Lena Dunham an apology,” declared Rachel Simon in a story for MS Now. The apology came with a caveat: “Dunham is, and always has been, a flawed figure. But she never deserved our hatred, nor the expectations placed on her to get everything right.”

“I was wrong about Lena Dunham,” proclaimed Sonia Soraiya at Slate. Soraiya argues that Dunham’s nervy, uncomfortable magnum opus Girls “activated” her own self-loathing, and that she and other critics of the era took it out on Dunham.

“I was one of Lena Dunham’s haters. I want to say I’m sorry,” wrote Dave Schilling at The Guardian. Dunham’s memoir, in which she writes vividly about how her early fame destroyed her mental and physical health, had Schilling rethinking the way he used to write about her. “Rarely did I think about the adverse effects of society turning her into a Wicker Man-style totem for us to set on fire,” he wrote. “To a lot of us, she stopped being a person and transformed into a symbol. I can’t think of anything more unfair.”

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In Famesick, Dunham writes that the intensity of the public conversation about her when Girls premiered in 2012 exacerbated her chronic illness, which would be eventually diagnosed as endometriosis plus Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. The combination of the stress of fame and the stress of chronic illness drove her into an opioid addiction and self-destructive behavior, which would further fuel the discourse about her.

Even in the 2010s, at the height of Dunham’s fame, it was fairly evident that a number of the outcries over Dunham’s public presence were overblown. Now, with the distance of 15 years, and Girls reclaimed as a piece of important art, some of those controversies appear remarkably stupid. We should not have been so cruel to her, the consensus is developing, and we would not have been, had she arisen at any other historical moment.

With Dunham’s redemption cycle, we’re performing a sped-up version of the discourse cycle that saw the public reexamining the misogynistic witch hunts of Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, et al. in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s become clear, with the distance of 20 years, that the gossip press of the 2000s was driven primarily by misogyny, occasionally dressed up as concern trolling. Now, the oft-unspoken villain is cancel culture, the slew of social media shaming and chiding that became such a virulent force at the same time that Dunham was coming up in the 2010s. Apologizing to Dunham becomes a way of apologizing for and repudiating cancel culture, making the case that we are no longer in the cancel culture moment.

But 2010s cancel culture was a different beast than 2000s purity culture. The tactics of social media dogpiling and calls for deplatforming were sometimes misdirected at, say, recipe writers who misspoke in an interview, but they also helped push forward the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter. Defenders of cancel culture used to say that it was less about canceling the sinful than it was about holding the powerful to account for their misdeeds — but it wasn’t always clear who was powerful enough to be worth targeting, and which misdeeds were all that bad.

Dunham, as the showrunner of a conversation-driving television show, had a fair amount of power, as well as a knack for saying the wrong things in public. The questions before us now are: Was anything she said in public bad enough to justify the treatment she received? And, by extension, just how destructive was cancel culture, really?

Lena Dunham has heard all of your criticisms of Girls. She just doesn’t care.

Cancel culture emerged from a specific moment in history that would be difficult to replicate. First, social media democratized discourse; suddenly elites were vulnerable to criticism by regular people in the public square. It also divided people into teams and made everyone angry all the time.

This was also the era of blogs — Gawker........

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