“Add it to the ‘conservatives can’t understand satire or really art in general’ pile.”

Lena Dunham says she isn’t stunned by the rise of alt-right rhetoric—as a result of she heard it coming from Girls critics over a decade in the past.

Featured Video

Lena Dunham hyperlinks conservative backlash to the rise of the alt-right

In a current interview on the Girls Rewatch podcast, Lena Dunham admitted she couldn’t relate to the individuals who have been stunned when far-right vitriol began being spewed increasingly more in public areas over current years.

“There were so many people who, when the voices of—whatever we want to call it—really alt-right, or MAGA, or conservative voices, Proud Boys or whatever started to rise, and people were like, ‘I’m so shocked by the way people are talking,’” she recalled.

“I was like, ‘I’m not.’ Those voices existed in the comment section. I was experiencing those voices in 2012 in the way that there were so many angry, seemingly men and some women dissecting the show in these incredibly conservative terms.”

At the time, Girls sparked polarizing conversations for its depiction of messy 20-something ladies in Brooklyn. Critics raised legitimate issues concerning the present’s lack of variety and its slender depiction of privilege. Others merely discovered the characters annoying and unlikeable. 

Dunham made some extent to specify that there’s a distinction between these forms of criticisms and those that she feels have been early warning indicators of the way in which our society has regressed.

“There was a big contingent of conservative people really looking at it as evidence of a sort of moral decrepitude and also making big judgments about our physical bodies, our sexualities,” she continued. “So it was really interesting to realize what a surprise that was to some people.”

The 2012 reception to Girls

When Girls premiered in 2012, it was seen by some as form of a millennial, mumblecore-adjacent reply to Sex and the City—rougher across the edges and extra actual, even when simply in idea.

The extra consideration and reward it obtained, the extra criticism got here alongside it. As talked about, a whole lot of that was based mostly in issues surrounding lack of variety, privilege, and navel-gazing. In sure methods, the truth that there was an viewers even conscious of these issues (proper or unsuitable) felt like progress.

But there was an undercurrent of one thing extra sinister in a number of the backlash, as Dunham advised when she talked about the conservative lens by which some seen this progressive (for its time) present. Other occasions, it was rather more overt, as individuals focused Dunham herself with body-shaming and open misogyny that crossed the road from precise criticism to pure spite.

(It’s value noting that whereas Dunham is a controversial determine outdoors of the present, a whole lot of the controversy that stems from her precise phrases and actions began after Girls was off the air, or at the very least a few years into its run.)

Modern responses really nonetheless show her level

With the X algorithm prioritizing blue checks, there is no such thing as a scarcity of individuals responding to Dunham’s interview clip with the identical brazen phobias and vitriol that she mentioned clued her in to how comfy individuals have been changing into with spreading hate over a decade in the past.

Other individuals dismissed the purpose she was attempting to make outright due to her personal private controversies or due to the legitimate criticisms individuals manufactured from Girls on the time. 

But some appreciated what she was placing on the market.

Regardless of anybody’s private emotions about Dunham or Girls, her feedback on the conservative backlash within the period throughout which the present aired supply a bleak perspective concerning the course society was already heading.

The web is chaotic—however we’ll break it down for you in a single each day electronic mail. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr e-newsletter right here.