"all adventurous women do"

white femininity raw and unplugged in lena dunham's girls

In 2012, I sat down with my sister and my best friend to watch the pilot episode of HBO’s Girls. In the pilot, we meet Hannah Horvath, an insufferable white girl two years post-grad, portrayed by the show’s creator, writer, and lead actress, Lena Dunham. We learn that Dunham’s character is getting cut off by her parents and will need to support herself. Hannah is indignant, “I am so close to the life I want, to the life you want for me, and you want to just end that right now?” she tells her parents. Later in the episode, she goes to her fuck buddy’s house, the soon-to-be celebrated actor Adam Driver, and they have cringy, quasi-kinky sex. In another scene, Hannah and her roommate and best friend, Marnie, played by Allison Williams, take a bath together.

My sister, best friend, and I sat and looked on, horrified. When the show ended, we abruptly shut it off. We recoiled. We hated it. We decided, at the time, that white girls were crazy, and we did not need to watch this show.

We found company in online critiques of the show—this was the era when the “think piece” essay was starting to gain traction as a piece of potential viral media, particularly in the area of pop culture and representation. Blogs from academics and cultural critics like Crunk Feminist Collective (heyday 2010-2015), and other women of color online, were critiquing the lack of representation for women of color and it inspired me to begin to reorient myself to film, TV, and media. I wanted to see my life reflected on screen because I wanted to understand myself and feel affirmed. So when Girls came along, and was being lauded as the best, “most relatable,” feminist show ever…I wasn’t buying it. How could it be the “best feminist show ever” when it only told stories about (straight) white women? In 2012, I felt edgy, and radical, and I never felt the need to question my decision to boycott Girls until this past year, when I started to notice the tides turning.

this photo was EVERYWHERE in 2012

A few months ago, I was scrolling TikTok when I was served a video of someone rewatching Girls. The caption went something like, “Growth is realizing that Girls was ahead of its time.” A few weeks later, I was offered another video, this time a 3-minute clip where Hannah, pants-less and barefoot, runs into her ex-boyfriend Adam on the street in Brooklyn. I had no idea the context, but I was curious. The caption read, “Cinematic history.” And again, another clip appeared: Hannah posts a Tweet, “All adventurous women do.” She dances to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” in her room. The commenters declared it the most insightful and compelling scene of television of all time.

And so I caved. Last month I began my Girls watching journey. I was surprised when I laughed, genuinely and frequently, when I texted my friends furious with the characters, and cried when they experienced true loss.

What I realized was this: 1) Because I’ve been on my own journey coming to terms with my own race, gender and sexuality, I was not ready until 2024 to watch Girls and take it in for what it is, a portrait of particular kinds of women, rather than as a personal affront, and 2) Lena Dunham is one of the few white woman in Hollywood who has managed to produce an incisive portrait of white femininity as a racialized and gendered construct.

Girls depicts privileged white women who are so self-involved, it doesn’t occur to them that other people have needs, and yet they cling to each other. Through their friendship, we see that often times in your early 20s you are friends with people because of proximity, because you need someone to know you when you don’t know yourself. They do not love each other well, and it’s hard to watch.

In an interview with Rolling Stone after the final season, Dunham shared that, “People never gave us the benefit of the doubt that the show was actually a self-aware commentary on privileged white womanhood. When a guy plays an antihero, nobody’s like, ‘I think Bryan Cranston’s really promoting drug use.'” Part of the issue with Girls’ reception was where we were (or at least where I was) with feminism in 2012. When people heard something was “feminist,” it was assumed to be equated with “good.” So if something was “feminist” it had to be only positive, an only empowering. So how could you have a feminist anti-hero? It didn’t add up. Because it’s true that Dunham’s character was annoying. She wasn’t a great friend and she was a selfish person. In the pilot, she steals the $20 bill her parents leave for housekeeping in their hotel room.

It was also hard for me to watch Girls until now because I was uncomfortable with Dunham’s portrayal of sex and her body. Dunham is naked a lot. And she has a lot of sex with questionable dudes, and she enjoys it. The way I’ve been describing Dunham’s show recently is “aggressively heterosexual” because it is extremely straight-sex-forward. And that’s fine and great! But I could not access that part of myself because I was queer, and didn’t know, and was pretty repressed. So to see Hannah seeking pleasure with and from her body was scary and difficult for me because I secretly believed something was wrong with me for not liking men, and to watch Hannah get railed and having fun felt like a personal affront because I couldn’t access those experiences. And again, if I was a feminist, but not like her, what did that mean for me?

dunham and driver, hannah and adam

That brings me to my belief that Dunham crafted a critique of straight white womanhood. In our contemporary political context, we typically use the terms “intersectionality” or “race” to think about women of color or people of color respectively. But in the past few years, there’s been a subtle but critical shift where folks are starting to understand “whiteness” as a race, and as socially constructed and maintained, and that all people have intersectional identities. So to consider straight, upper-class white womanhood is to grapple with one formulation of an intersectional identity.

Throughout the series, Dunham shows us, in Hannah, a kind of white woman in her 20s who believes she is a “different kind of white girl” because she lives in New York City, a diverse, liberal city. In one episode, Hannah returns to her home in Michigan to spend time with her parents, and she ends up going on a date with a nice pharmacist who she went to high school with. They go to a house party where another former high school classmate performs a dance routine; this dancer is about to move to LA to pursue her dreams. The dance routine in question is pretty mid. After the party, Hannah prepares to bash the dancer with the cute pharmacist. Hannah says something to the effect of, “Someone has to tell her she’s not that good. She’s about to go to LA, someone should stop her.” The cute pharmacist is a little put off by Hannah’s negativity. In his silence, Hannah’s elitism is left bare and on display. In this context, she is not cultured or edgy, just mean.

Later, while they’re hooking up, Hannah tries to initiate dirty talk with the pharmacist in bed, as she has done with her New York City boyfriend. We sit uncomfortably in Hannah’s failure as the pharmacist asks her if they can “just have sex.” But Hannah cannot “liberate” herself out of being a white woman. Even if she is “cultured” or “sexually free,” Hannah is always a white girl from the suburbs in Michigan, and that is okay. In other words, aspects of Hannah’s identity that are cultural currency in New York have no use-value in the Michigan suburbs, and therefore are facets of Hannah’s identity, but do not fundamentally change her. This is a hard pill to swallow for many white women: that race and gender are ongoing, even when we do our best to deconstruct them.

One of my favorite things about Dunham’s construction of Hannah is how “fake deep” she is, which captures that moment of the internet in the 2010s when Twitter was first taking off, and everyone started to feel like their random thoughts were important. This only amplified the belief that many white people have—because this is how they are socialized—that their opinions inherently matter. In one episode, fueled by a sense of injustice after learning that her ex-boyfriend from college has come out as gay, Hannah sits on her bed contemplating a Tweet. She types and deletes a few options: “You lose some, you lose some,” then “My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy.” Delete, delete. Then, as the lyrical folk-indie music changes to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” she types: “All adventurous women do.” She posts it, and we see the status go live, “One second ago.”

all adventurous women do what????

I agree with the criticism about Girls that it is not relatable for all women, all the time. The idea of Hannah Horvath’s unequivocal “relatability” eclipses the differences between women because of intersectional identities like class, ability, sexuality, and race. And at the same time, Girls is often relatable because it captures the kind of self-interest that is developmentally appropriate in your early 20s. That being said, Girls amplifies this self-interest because they are straight, white, upper-class white women.

This was the era of feminism before Beyonce came out as a feminist, the era of Lean In feminism, and the beginning of “Girl Boss” feminism when white women in the mainstream projected the idea that you were the master of your own destiny, and you shouldn’t care what your impact on other people was, as long as you prioritized yourself. “All adventurous women do” echoes the nonsensical mantras that emerged in this era as white feminists attempted to justify taking up space.

And take up space they do. Their feelings are raw, and they feel them as they come, which is punctuated by Hannah posting “one second ago.” White women were taught in this era of feminism that they shouldn’t compromise or accommodate their feelings for anyone, or any man—even a man who is gay, and grappling with his sexuality.

The women in Girls take up all the oxygen in their relationships, so much so that they burn each other out on their friendship, and ultimately part ways in the final season. It’s sad and dissatisfying that their friendship falls apart, but I think this grief signals an important lesson from the show. It does matter how we treat each other, even and especially during our journeys of self-discovery. And if you treat others as if they are disposable, and if you move through the world feeling entitled to any experience you want, the moment that you want it, you will end up at a loss.

So no, I do not personally relate that much to the women in Girls. But I find them believable, and I find them thought-provoking, and I’m glad that I can see them again on my screen. So cheers to evolving in feminism, and cheers to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.” After all, all adventurous women do.