Lena Dunham is a successful, creative actress and business woman, body-confidence champion and feminist wunderkind. She also rubs people up the wrong way.
Some of what she comes out with should really be kept inside her Brooklyn loft and only said out loud when zero cameras are around. Impossible, I know, when you're a global icon who likes your opinions - all of your opinions - to be heard.
I don't know her, but I know she likes to stir the pot - and I'm a fan. I don't agree with everything she says, but I realise she represents a fairly typical, liberal, educated, white, privileged American 30-year-old woman. Who happens to have created her own, hugely successful show aged 23. #nofilter
When you're allowed to express yourself through the medium of film and tv in your early twenties, there is always going to be an element of self-absorption. You're at the age when the world still revolves around you, even if you think you're open and inclusive. While most humans grow up and out of it, celebrities live in a suspended reality where the moment they become famous, that's where their personality stays. However, Lena Dunham is aware enough and smart enough to know that her specific type of fame can influence and change not only the opinions of her peers but certain realms of society.
One thing she has always been totally unapologetic about is her body and image. In a post to Instagram, written to promote her and her Girls' co-stars' Glamour cover, she says, "Throughout my teens I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was fucking funny looking. Potbelly, rabbit teeth, knock knees - I could never seem to get it right and it haunted my every move. I posed as the sassy confident one, secretly horrified and hurt by careless comments and hostility. Let's get something straight: I didn't hate what I looked like - I hated the culture that was telling me to hate it."
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Who can relate? Me, for one. Most people, I'd say.
The Girls' Glamour cover is stunning, sassy and totally un-Photoshopped. Lena Dunham didn't have to wear cellulite-baring hotpants, but she wanted to, so she did. And she looks great. The Girls' are blessed with a Marc Jacobs wardrobe and professional hair and makeup, but still, they look relatively normal. Very pretty, but normal.
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Almost every photo published in magazines - and celebs' social media accounts - has been altered in one way or another. We notice the Photoshop 'fails', but we still neglect to realise that the images we see of admittedly beautiful women are not reality. That Lena bares her cellulite is one thing - hey, women have cellulite - but that she and the other girls look like themselves. Whatever size your thighs are, however, big your nose, there's nothing wrong with being you.
