Many have lauded the comedic bravery of Lena Dunham’s breakout HBO creation Girls. From the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awarded Dunham’s debut TV series with a Golden Globe for Best Television Series—Comedy or Musical, to that hipster texting gun-to-panda emojis in reference to Sunday’s second season premiere, the consensus seems to be that Girls hits the urban 20-something female experience square on the head.
In many ways, Girls has been groundbreaking. In embracing the off-the-wall vulgarity of the millennial lexicon, the show spews out line after line of tweetable fodder primed for the social media age. In displaying overweight, imperfect bodies in the nude, Dunham has defied status quo standards of Hollywood beauty. And through her compelling and diverse array of lead characters, Dunham has created a “Which one are you?” dynamic not seen since Sex and the City—or perhaps Jersey Shore.
But in the background of Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna’s no-show abortions, questions about the stuff that gets up around the sides of condoms, and crack-induced rampages, the male characters of Girls occupy an underutilized and frankly pathetic artistic space in the show.
They are largely static and continue to be so in the second season opener. Dunham exploits the helpless dynamic of the show’s male characters as foils to their female counterparts. Hannah’s assertively noncommittal sexuality, Shoshanna’s obstinate rejection of Ray, or Audrey’s trampling over Charlie’s ego paint a broader thematic picture: women are strong, while men are weak.
With character after character, Dunham portrays men as the weaker and more dependent sex. Hannah’s father (who Elijah suggests might be closeted, and therefore a coward) succumbs to pity while her mom remains strong in her convictions to cut Hannah off from her family’s funds. Adam finally breaks down his emotional walls and admits his love to Hannah only to be thrown aside and suffer from a debilitating car accident: the physical weakness coinciding with emotional incapacity for anything more than casual sex. And do I really need to say anything about Charlie, whose smothering affection for Marnie in the first season leads her to compare his touch to that of a creepy uncle?
The point of all this is clear: to defy the convention of men as strong and women as victims. With Girls, Dunham has flipped the entire white knight paradigm on its head. In the premiere, we see Hannah rushing to Adam’s bedside to make him food and hold up his bedpan and dealing with Elijah’s pitifully drunk boyfriend George after a defeated Elijah cries out for help.
Don’t mistake me, Dunham is to be applauded for creating strong female characters that defy convention and take control of their lives and sexualities. The problem with season two thus far, though, is that such female empowerment is achieved only by disempowering men. Watching Hannah’s new boy toy Sandy utter “I love you” only to be ignored and then betrayed when Hannah sleeps with Adam may amplify Hannah’s power, but it does so at someone else’s expense. To use a playground example, making fun of others doesn’t make you any better. Similarly, women don’t inherently become strong by making men weak.
That being said, men through the ages have sought power through misogynistic characterizations of weak women. But to turn around and do the reverse to men is not helpful either. It’s cheap, and not that useful for women, particularly those who live in a world where all men don’t fit into Dunham’s Bambi-esque characterization (read: everyone).
It does not have to be this way. Film and television from 2012 are chock full of contrary examples. Look to Jessica Chastain’s compelling performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thrity, Clare Danes’s erratic yet puissant intuition in Homeland, or Pixar’s foyer into female leads in Brave to find examples of female characters that exert autonomy and triumph in worlds in which men, too, are strong and assertive.
With Girls, Dunham has the opportunity to create a show that is, in her character’s words, “the voice of my generation, or at least the voice of a generation.” Lacking strong male characters, as well, though, Dunham’s generation is only half complete. Perhaps it’s what men deserve for all the years of blatant misogyny, but Girls has always been about giving us more than we expected.
