Rebecca Kamm: How to lose your voting virginity

11:30 AM Friday Nov 2, 2012

Lena Dunham is a 26-year-old director, actor and writer, and the creator of HBO's hit series Girls. Which you NEED to get hold of somehow if you haven't already, because it's completely addictive and wonderful.

She'll be an author soon, too, after an intense bidding war between publishers resulted in a book deal from Random House that makes my head spin. (I thought publishers were in financial crisis? Maybe that's why?) Tentatively titled Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned, it "will cover topics like work, friendship, travel, sex, love, and mortality," according to the New York Times.

But Dunham's wry hipster tones have most recently been channeled into an ad for Barack Obama, which debuted last week on the official BarackObamadotcom YouTube channel. Called 'Lena Dunham: Your First Time', she speaks to first-time female voters about losing their voting virginity and making their "first time" count.

"Your first time shouldn't be with just anybody," advises Dunham. "You want to do it with a great guy. It should be with a guy with beautiful ... somebody who really cares about and understands women."

"My first time was with @BarackObama - I highly recommend you do the same," Dunham tweeted when the video went up. And later: "The video may be light but the message is serious: vote for women's rights."

Anyway, because sex is fundamentally wrong, conservatives have hit the roof. "How could a president with two, young blossoming daughters release an ad as disgusting as this," tweeted John Notle, Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. (Side note: I really think it's time grown men were banned from describing young women as "blossoming".)

Republican columnist Ben Shapiro was equally as repulsed: "It's an astoundingly tasteless ad comparing voting for the first time to losing your virginity," he spluttered. "Obama has young daughters. But that didn't stop him from releasing this commercial. Because this is what Obama thinks of your daughters."

Eric Erickson, CNN contributor and editor-in-chief of Red State, declared the video "further proof we live in a fallen world destined for hell fire."

And batty Fox News contributor Monica Crowley tweeted: "Average Obama work day: sleep in, work out, blow off intel briefings, smoke, lie, swear, go to Vegas, lie again, & deflower 1st time voters."

Funnily enough, conservatives seem to have forgotten the words of their very own, most treasured President, Ronald Reagan, who made a similar sex/voting comparison in 1980: "I know what it's like to pull the Republican lever for the first time because I used to be a Democrat myself, and I can tell you it only hurts for a minute and then it feels just great."

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