Lena Dunham's latest apology is too little, too late – and shows her white feminism up for what it is
Writer and actor Lena Dunham, known for creating the hit TV show Girls, is no stranger to controversy. She is also a well-practiced apologiser – Dunham is known for accessing her “wokeness” days, months or even years too late.
The most recent example of this troubling tendency is her onstage and in-print apology to Aurora Perrineau. Last year, Perrineau accused the Girls writer Murray Miller of raping her when she was 17 years old. Miller denied the accusations and Dunham, along with her co-showrunner Jenni Konner, issued a statement saying “our insider knowledge of Murray's situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 per cent of assault cases that are misreported each year”.
Today, in a piece she has penned as the guest editor letter for The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment issue, Dunham has written, “I didn't have the ‘insider information’ I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all.”
Of course, we’re all capable of moral messiness, and Dunham’s apology is better than silence. But her complete denial of another woman’s rape accusation and, by her own admission, total disregard for the truth, is more serious than your average celebrity gaffe or misstep.
Dunham blames her transgression from the feminist path on internalised misogyny (an insidious force that works in complicated ways). In her piece, Dunham writes, “I had actually internalised the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what.”
In her speech at The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment event Dunham, who had brought Aurora’s mother, Brittany Perrineau, onstage to stand and speak alongside her, claimed, “I learned the ways in which my own heart and mind had been colonised by patriarchy”.
Her choice of words is interesting. The racial connotations of “colonised” resonate in an uncomfortable way. Because, while Dunham claims to have been infected with the male agenda, as people once claimed to be possessed by the devil, she fails to address there is another potential oppressive imbalance at play – one which she has never, despite her figurative choice of words, been a victim of.
In apologising for being a male mouthpiece, Dunham is shifting our attention away from the role played by her own prejudice. The line of her argument goes: “I can’t believe that, as a woman who’s been sexually assaulted, I did this to another woman who has been sexually assaulted.” But there is key, often unspoken, difference between Dunham and Perrineau – and that difference is skin colour.
I believe that by failing to explicitly address that it may have been white privilege, as well as patriarchal values, which influenced her denial of Perrineau’s accusations, in my mind Dunham’s apology falls short.
There is something sinister about the fact that this has now become Dunham’s story of growth and evolution, rather than Perrineau’s story of mistreatment. Perhaps Perrineau didn’t want to write an op-ed, or go onstage at a ceremony (maybe she, understandably, didn’t want to relive her trauma), but it still feels wrong that her harrowing experience has become Dunham’s platform.
Black women are too frequently treated like a tool for the education and growth of white and non-black women. They have to endure the ignorance and unkindness, and then are expected to be grateful for an apology that often has more to do with public image than genuine contrition.
Dunham was once hailed as “the voice of a generation”, and, obviously, that’s a very great burden for anyone to bear. Her mistakes are magnified tenfold. Perhaps our error lies in expecting Dunham to speak for anyone other than herself, and in placing her on a feminist pedestal that she was almost guaranteed to topple off from.
Dunham has every right to develop as a person, to learn from her mistakes, and to try to find moral clarity in a world distorted by fame and privilege. But she needs to acknowledge the fact that, while she may be only a passive preserver of the male agenda, she has also been an active participant in racial oppression.
