Sarah Vine: 'Being a potty-mouthed show-off doesn't make you a feminist heroine'

Lena Dunham holds her memoir, Not That Kind Of Girl. Photo / AP

Opinion

Last week, Jennifer Saunders - veteran comic actress and writer - sat across from an American girl with green hair and interviewed her for BBC's Newsnight.

I say "interviewed"; she wasn't exactly Jeremy Paxman. In fact, Saunders rather resembled her Ab Fab character Edina in her breathless desire to flatter and impress the green-haired girl.

In her enthusiasm, she even confided that she'd "smoked a couple of spliffs, probably had two or three lines of coke". It was like watching the cleverest girl at school trying to bluff her way into the cool gang: embarrassing and more than a little cringeworthy.

All the more so since Saunders, 56, has more talent and experience in her little finger than the over-confident, outspoken 28-year-old who was sitting opposite her. It should have been her doing the fawning over Saunders, not the other way round.

Unless you are a keen student of American pop culture, chances are you've never heard of Lena Dunham (that's the name of the green-haired girl, by the way). By the time you finish reading this, you may well wish you never had.

Nevertheless, she's someone who matters. Perhaps not in the way that she thinks - as a post-feminist icon for a generation of young women - but as part of a cultural phenomenon that cannot be ignored.

First, a little background. Dunham is the eldest daughter of two New York-based experimental artists. She is also the creator, star and writer of the HBO TV series Girls which has been described as a Sex And The City for the Facebook generation.

She has won numerous accolades for the creation and portrayal of the show's main character, Hannah, an aspiring writer who works in a coffee shop, hangs out with her friends, has lots of ill-advised sexual encounters, and is generally navigating her 20s "one mistake at a time".

The show, now entering its fourth series, has won a Golden Globe award for best comedy, and been lionised by critics who use terms like "raw", "audacious" and
searingly honest". What they mean is that it contains lots of nudity and sex and all-round flaky twentysomething behaviour, and that Dunham's general attitude to life is a no-holds-barred one - especially when it comes to anatomy.

For that, not to put too fine a point on it, appears to be one of Dunham's main preoccupations in life.

In the interview with Saunders, for example, she talks about being offered a Band-Aid to cover her back passage during a sex-scene for Girls. Her brown eyes widen as she says the words, as though in horror; but she clearly relishes the element of shock her pronouncement provokes.

And well she might. Being shocking is her stock in trade. It's part of her brand. It's also what's got her in the headlines last week, as she arrived in the UK to promote her new book, Not That Kind Of Girl.

It's already topped the bestseller charts in America and is flying off the shelves here (when I go to get my copy, the woman in the bookshop says it's been doing a roaring trade, mostly with teenage girls). Her publishers paid over US$3 million for the American rights alone, and judging by the reaction to the book, they've got their money's worth.

Let's face it, there's nothing like a good controversy to boost sales. And as controversies go, this one's a humdinger. For Lena has been accused of sexually molesting her younger sister, Grace.

The accusations, levied at her from various sections of the media, as well as on Twitter, are based on a passage in the book in which she described examining the child's nether regions when she herself was seven and her sister just one or two years old.

I'll spare you the details; suffice to say the passage in question is very explicit, not to say creepy, and it's not the only one.

Initially, Dunham came out fighting, accusing her critics of being politically motivated and describing the allegations as "really f***ing upsetting and disgusting". Then she calmed down and issued an apology, before cancelling several legs of her book tour.

Interestingly, the subject was not mentioned in the Newsnight interview - which is a shame, because Lena Dunham does have some tough questions to answer. Not so much in relation to the so-called molestation of her sister: anyone who reads the passages in the context of the entire book, which I have done, will instantly realise that the suggestion of abuse is absurd. But very definitely around her status as the current official voice of modern young women.

We've had a few of these in recent times. The columnist Caitlin Moran, whose book How To Be A Woman, with its visceral account of childbirth and motherhood, was a runaway success; and the journalist Bryony Gordon, who recently chronicled her misspent youth - including drink, drugs, a threesome and an affair with a married man - in The Wrong Knickers.

Whether funny (Moran) or tragic (Gordon), these kinds of confessional writings hold a huge appeal for women of all ages, an appeal that the male of the species, with his inbuilt tendency to under-share, often struggles to understand.

But while they may engage and entertain, the idea that these very personal accounts are somehow 'the new feminism' is deeply misguided. And never more so than in Lena Dunham's case.

Because Not That Kind Of Girl is not a great work of feminist fiction. It's just one privileged young woman's account of life from her very narrow - and very white, liberal and middle-class - point of view. And, for all the self-deprecating caveats scattered throughout, it's basically little more than a protracted exercise in showing off.

Crucially, it no more constitutes great literature than Tracey Emin's Tent (Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995) equals great art. Both are self-obsessed, introspective memoirs dressed up as social commentary and laced with sex and shock value.

Far from promoting the cause of feminism - which, at its heart, is the pursuit of equality and respect for all women - these vomiting-into-the-void, self-indulgent antics actually box women in more than ever before, narrow the parameters of what it means to be female, and replace outward-looking intellectual ambition with mere introversion.

Put Lena next to a real feminist - Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old from Pakistan, for example, who took a bullet in the head to defend her right to an education - and she is revealed for what she is: a well-connected kid who got herself a TV show and a vastly lucrative book deal.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that; but it doesn't make her Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering author who was championing the rights of women more than 200 years ago.

I'm the last person to begrudge another woman her success. Dunham's book neither shocks nor enthralls me - I'm too old and too jaded for that - but it is well-written and perfectly enjoyable in its way.

But that this very narrow kind of experience should be peddled, by Newsnight or elsewhere, as some kind of blueprint for a new generation of young women is not only wrong, it's a travesty.

Emmeline Pankhurst would be spinning in her grave if she realised that this was what all her efforts had come to: some silly green-haired girl warbling about female empowerment and bleating on about how hard it was to find a boy to take her virginity.

Read the book, and you will realise that Lena is wearing her badge of feminism like the latest hairstyle. She brings nothing new to the party, either. Everything she describes in the book - from unrequited love, to ineffectual sexual fumblings, to battling her weight, to getting her period - is just part of the universal experience of being female.

With one exception. Not of experience, but of expression. Because Lena belongs to a generation of over-sharers, to a world that measures success not in concrete terms, but by the number of likes or followers they can garner online.

The problem with this kind of popularity, though, is that it is based on an ever-decreasing cycle of attention-seeking. The more outlandish the antics, the more spectators you acquire, eagerly waiting to see what craziness you'll get up to next.

That's why people like Lena end up writing about their little sisters' private parts: they need to reveal the ever-darker recesses of their psyche in order to feed the drooling monster of the internet, and boost what they understand to be the source of their success - which in the end is nothing more than an illusion.

It doesn't have to be like this. Women don't have to reveal all, both physically and mentally, in order to communicate the deeper truths of their experience. In the same way that the most frightening ghost stories are the ones that only hint at the menace - as opposed to graphically describing the gore - eloquence and elegance are far better tools of expression for today's young women than the forensic dissection of one's naval. Just read authors who can really use the power of words to express the nature of womanhood, such as Margaret Atwood or Susie Orbach.

It is perhaps no surprise that, given her background (her mother's main body of work consists of nude self-portraits, her father explores genitalia in his paintings), Lena Dunham should have grown up to be such an icon for a generation of over-sharers.

But Not That Kind Of Girl is, ultimately, nothing more than a literary sugar rush. Moreish and tempting for those who've got a taste for such stuff - but nutritionally worthless and, in the long run, extremely bad for one's health.

Grace Dent: There's a huge taboo over children's sexuality

Personally, I think Dunham's niche has always been eye-watering intimacy. Her characters in Girls must be constantly pissing, scheduling abortions or crab removals, changing tampons, lying in the bath naked with their best girlfriends, or squeezing out a public poo.

Read on...

- Daily Mail