BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Negativity Bias, and Hasty Generalization, with Ambiguity (Equivocation) as the most egregious example at 40% saturation with 332 hits. Analysis detected 2,156 faulty-reasoning hits from 829 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 78.6% and a BS Rank of 86% (2,501 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 85.10% of the article peer group.
In the early 2010s, Lena Dunham was everywhere.
But the attention transformed the creator, star and writer of HBO’s Girls into a polarizing cultural figure.
Some viewed her as the voice of a generation.
Others believed she represented everything wrong with millennials.
Dunham pulled away from the spotlight for the last few years.
Now, she’s back with a memoir, Famesick, which describes her time working on Girls, as well as how the 2010s public backlash affected her.
Today on Commotion, Slate’s Scaachi Koul and Vulture’s Fran Hoepfner chat with host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about how Dunham became a target for criticism, and the way she now reflects on her past successes and failures.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity.
For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
Elamin: We're re-evaluating our relationships with people — particularly people that society destroyed, did not hesitate to destroy 10, 15 years ago.
And then we are beginning to see some of those folks in a different light now that we see documentaries about them; we see new considerations of these people.
Fran, do you think this book will make people see Lena in a new and different light, just based on the reaction so far to the way that the book has come out?
Fran: I'm so far seeing a lot of re-evaluation of the way in which she took the fall for a lot of millennial sins.
And, that it was easy to project a cringiness — sometimes very valid — onto her, sometimes a tone deafness that I think many people were very guilty of, but she was definitely the loudest and most guilty of at that time.
What I like about her writing is that sometimes she hedges and sometimes she contextualizes.
But even in that [New York Times] clip where she talks about being annoying, she's not really trying to hide who she is, and she knows that this is an inherent part of her personality.
And maybe it's just that there is more room now for a figure like her, who is as complicated and provocative and sometimes extremely annoying, to exist and continue to make work that maybe people will come to at different levels.
I have friends who have only seen her films and never seen Girls.
And I think the diversity of her work, hopefully going forward, will allow people to come in at different times, and perhaps be ignorant to all that was argued about 14 years ago.
Elamin: Scaachi, I want to do a quick compare-and-contrast here.
You just did a profile of Lindy West, who was also someone who has pushed feminism forward and produced work that really influenced culture, particularly online.
Then 10 years later, both Lena and Lindy are back with books.
Both of those books, in a way, interrogate their places in culture.
One is more successful than the other, for you.
You look at Lena's and go, “This is actually the way this should be done.”
Why do you think these books are landing differently for you?
Scaachi: I think Lindy's book, unfortunately, has a relationship structure that she's saying is the solution to a lot of her troubles.
And Lena's solution was, in fact, the absence of some of that.
Lena's book is so much about the co-dependency that she had through her work and through her personal life.
But I think the bigger piece is, it's not really about the product.
It's not about the book.
It's about the response to the response.
And so Lindy's response has been very external, it has been defensive and it has been kind of demanding that you see her side.
You cannot get an audience to do that if they don't want to do it.
The reason why Lena can do that now is because she did go away for some time.
She has already been beaten to death in the press.
And so there's really nothing left to say.
And so now, there is room.
Unfortunately, culturally, we feel like women have to be destroyed before we give them any chance to have any kind of redemption arc, or have any room to talk about what's happened….
The thing that I think is so successful about Lena's book too is that her marriage is, like, five pages.
It comes at the end, and I don't really care about him.
Happy for you, no need to hear any more about it….
What's more interesting is the interiority and what she is interrogating.
And I think with Lindy's, unfortunately, there's just so many different people involved that it becomes tough to look at it clearly.
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Panel produced by Jean Kim.
Analysis
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