Let the Woman Speak: Why Silencing Lena Dunham Is a Mistake

Following is the obligatory summary of the recent Lena Dunham scandal:

Dunham wrote a nonfiction book (Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”) in which she humorously confesses to looking at her baby sister’s vagina when she was seven and finding that her sister had hidden pebbles in it. In recounting the incident and her fascination with her sister’s body at the time, she writes, “basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.” Citing this incident and others Dunham mentions (giving her sister candy to kiss her on the lips and masturbating next to her in bed), conservative writers Kevin D. Williamson of National Review and Ben Shapiro’s Truth Revolt, among others, accused Dunham of sexually abusing her sister.

Dunham immediately defended herself against these allegations (as did her sister), on Twitter and beyond. She wrote things like, “Usually this is stuff I can ignore but don’t demean sufferers, don’t twist my words, back the fuck up bros.” Since then she has apologized for using insensitive language in her book and her attorney has issued a cease and desist letter to Truth Revolt.

I am firmly in the “Lena Dunham did not sexually abuse her sister” camp. I agree with a number of writers who are also in this camp, such as Mary Elizabeth Williams, who wrote the following in Salon.com:

When my girls were little, they happily took baths together and played dress-up together, and they did the same with their young friends — perhaps because no idiot from a right-wing publication had ever informed them that anything they were doing could be twisted into an accusation of abuse. And having spent a lot of time around both girls and boys over the past several years, I can tell you that children are naturally fascinated about the human body. They watch; they observe. To attempt to shame an adult for her childlike curiosity isn’t just mean; it betrays an obvious ignorance of the innocent yet often naked, messy reality of childhood and family.

And Jia Tolentino, who wrote the following in Jezebel:

I always think we should trust what people, and particularly women, say about their life experience. If they say they were harmed, we should believe them; if they, like Grace Dunham, say they were not, what do we gain by pushing victimhood on them when they don’t want it?

And Kristin Iversen, who wrote the following in bkmag.com:

There are a lot of ways that Dunham could have sanitized her memoir, just as there are a lot of ways in which Dunham could make Hannah on Girls a more “likable” protagonist. But what we would all be losing if Dunham chose to do that is an essential truth that the lives people — and specifically women — lead are not all sanitized, and that we do not need to be likable or always do the right things in order to be worth listening to.

It’s not surprising that conservative writers attacked Dunham. Misogyny is their bread and butter. But what was disheartening was that a number of liberal writers attacked her too — for laughing at and dismissing sexual abuse in a culture where white feminists can do no wrong. Samantha Allen summarized this criticism for The Daily Beast, quoting pop-culture blogger Luvvie Ajayi (@Luvvie):

A Black woman could not have written what Lena did. She would not have the space to argue context. She would not have anyone championing her. She would certainly not be given some benefit of the doubt about childhood exploration because Black people’s innocence is often denied, even when we’re 7.

Ajayi is right. It wouldn’t be surprising if a black woman or gay black man were arrested for telling a story like this. Our world is sickeningly racist and, while stories told by white men are celebrated and awarded, stories by women of color are, at best, ignored.

But there are people farther up the societal Totem pole than Dunham and farther down it than Ajayi (the disadvantaged pissing contest knows no limits — someone could easily attack Ajayi for being a relatively privileged American girl with the freedom to blog her mind just as Ajayi attacks Dunham for being a relatively privileged white girl who is “above critique”), and silencing a more powerful voice does not make room for the less powerful voices. It might seem like that because the only airtime marginalized communities get on mainstream media is when they criticize the dominant white culture, but that is a problem with mainstream media, not with women like Dunham who are brave enough to tell their stories.

If Louie C.K. had told a story about himself and his little brother — let’s say he reenacted it on his show — he was seven years old, his brother was one, and Louie, grimacing, lifted his naked baby brother’s nuts only to find pebbles hidden under them, the mom bursts in and shrieks and Louie jumps and runs out of the room — would anyone scream “child molester” or would we all chuckle at another charmingly humiliating Louie antic?

I’m confident that we’d give a 40-something white man the space and the freedom to tell his story and the respect to either laugh at it or shrug it off. He would never be attacked with as much vitriol as critics have aimed at Dunham. I dare say no one would touch him. Dunham, on the other hand, is low enough on that societal Totem pole, because of age and gender (and body type) alone, to be criticized by everyone.

When Dylan Farrow accused Woody Allen of sexually abusing her earlier this year (unlike Dunham’s incident in which both she and her sister deny that there was any wrongdoing, Farrow is clear in her account of Allen as an abuser), all I could find from Ajayi was the tweet: “Woody Allen is a living testament to the way our society fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse.” She didn’t bash Allen with nearly as much gusto as she reserved for Dunham. Nor did most of Dunham’s critics.

Women are constantly silenced when trying to tell their stories, and the less societally powerful the woman, the more she is discouraged from speaking. That has got to stop. But tearing down the more powerful women so that none of us are heard at all will only result in all of us being afraid to speak.