Ah yes, this scene is the moment where Hannah, after rambling on about the "stuff that gets up in the sides of condoms" decides that she may actually want to have AIDS. Really. Her OB/GYN doctor succinctly tells her that she's being incredibly silly, and explains some of the current statistics surrounding women contracting HIV. Hannah proceeds to freak out some more, and the intrepid doctor comments, "You couldn't pay me enough to be 24 again." Immediately, I thought, "Yes, you could," and then, "you might have to pay me to continue to watch this really annoying program." Yep, Girls episode 2, "Vagina Panic," disappointed.
The lack of racial, class, and sexual diversity is a significant part of what's wrong with this show, and has been discussed intelligently in places such as The Hairpin, Jezebel and Racialicious. The show has also been commended by some for its apparent realism, and as I mentioned in an early post, I haven't seen my mid-twenties for a while now. Still, I do not find watching a sex scene where Hannah's sex partner orders her around repeatedly, using her like some kind of f*#@ toy, and spewing a plethora of pathetic fantasies in order to get off (you're a dirty little girl, you're eleven, you're a junkie and I found you on the street). Adam then throws in some Fifty Shades of Grey and informs her that she cannot come until he gives her permission. Hannah's friend Marnie tells her that she shouldn't let Adam treat her that way, because he's not her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Marnie's bored to death with her nice guy boyfriend, Charlie, and tries to convince him to be a dick to her.
I get it. These young hetero women are confused about sex and desire, and they are muddling through the dating and relationship minefield. Their world is full of really bad sex and uncertainty, but do all four of these young women have to be such flaming idiots? Even the one who has some kind of reasonable intelligence and sense of responsibility, Marnie, has some kind of bizarre epiphany at the OB/GYN office, and decides "I want to be a Mom. I've been put on this planet to be a mother." This declaration occurs out of the blue as a supposed reaction to Jessa's missed abortion appointment. Jessa avoids her abortion, even though everyone else shows up (Hannah, Marnie and Shoshana) for moral support. Instead, she has sex with some guy she picks up in a bar.
Jessa is the foreign accented, long-haired hottie, a pot-smoking bohemian crashing at her cousin Shoshona's flat. In an earlier discussion, Jessa grows angry at a self-help dating guide that makes assumptions about what "LADIES" want sexually. She points out that her desires don't fit neatly into some lady box. At the bar, she aggressively makes out with this guy, and demands that he stick his hands down her pants. When he does, he finds her bleeding. This discovery only increases her ardor, as she realizes that she's no longer pregnant. I love the fact that she's not mortified, but turned on by the blood.
The problem with Girls is the MILES OF STUPID before and after this one moment. After Jessa decries to Hannah the rigidity of dating rules toward young women, she declares that "dates are for lesbians," and that "she wants to have children from multiple fathers of different races." Not only does she slam the queer community, but she's so ignorant, she thinks that being a mother is like shopping at United Colors of Benetton. Furthermore, was Jessa actually ever pregnant, or was her period late? Did she take a pregnancy test, or is the abortion issue wiped out by a miscarriage? The show's supposedly a comedy, so maybe Dunham didn't want to get into the aftermath of Jessa having a successful procedure, but this deus ex machina is a cop-out.
The only other scene that I kind of liked was Shoshana's abashed admission that she's a virgin, and has never given anyone a blow job either. Marnie's response, based on her own narrow experience, is that sex is "really, really overrated," to which Shoshana replies "What?!?" in abject horror. This exchange is the best moment in the whole episode, and it is so fleeting. I quickly surmised that Zosia Mamet (who plays the lesbian Joyce on Mad Men) is actually quite talented, and that she's more than a narrow virgin caricature if she's given the dialogue to highlight her abilities. That's a big "if" since Dunham is the show's writer/director on these first two episodes, and she has the most screen time so far.
Which brings me to the truly mortifying scene on the show--the one that puts all other moments in high relief, it's so incredibly awful. I had to press pause on my TIVO and just yell OMG WTF! As a staunch gender sympathizer, I want things to work out for Hannah, even though I find her both dumb and unlikeable. Her "average girl" appearance is the only thing that endears me to her, and her passive, doltish sex scenes are even starting to qualify that small pleasure. In this scene, Hannah is at a job interview, and it's going smashingly well. She and her employer (at a publishing company?) are laughing and swapping jokes, clearly meeting on a personal level. I thought, "Finally, this show will broaden Hannah's circle beyond her three friends!" Yet Girls is about constant mortification and humiliation, so Hannah has to sabotage herself by sneaking in an un-funny date rape joke into the conversation. When she realizes that her "joke" did not land well, she tries to explain it, burying herself further. The look on her interviewer's face was, I'm certain, mirrored on viewers faces the world over. Disbelief combined with incredulity, with a dash of disgust.
So I've acquired more "get-off-my-lawn" curmudgeon points this week by not digging the "realism" of Girls. Hannah's one moment of possible triumph and success is demolished by her opening her mouth and uttering something stupid, which she does again, and again, and again. As a feminist who encourages women her age to articulate their desires, imagine their possibilities, and fight for their dreams, Hannah's representation just pisses me off. A television show is doing an immense disservice to women if it makes viewers just want a female character to shut the f*#@ up. Weekly mortification and female humiliation does not give me pleasure; if it did, I'd watch a lot more "reality" television. As someone who believes that popular cultural creators should be held responsible for the types of representations they disseminate, the fact that Lena Dunham is a woman in an enormously male-dominated industry just does not feel like enough reason to let her crappy representations slide.
The bumbling female character is a mainstay of the rom-com genre, so this type of representation is well tread ground, but watching four of these characters every week is borderline excruciating. (Unsurprisingly, I'm not a fan of the rom-com, but studying the genre is important for understanding cultural constructions of normative femininity). I understand awkward, and experience that state pretty regularly, but I recommend Issa Rae's Awkward Black Girl series as a series of vignettes far more funny and relateable.
