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For all her nakedness and crass talk, Hannah is at heart traditional in one sense: She wants a boyfriend. And she's willing to subject herself to the weird and degrading sexual preferences of Adam, her simian kind-of boyfriend in season one, in hopes that the hookups will turn Adam into a monogamous partner. Her "breakup" speech to him is telling: "I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, and thinks I am the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with only me." In the world of Girls, this is a tall order to fill.
It's apparently a tall order to fill in the world of Lena Dunham, too. Speaking with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni last year, the daughter of acclaimed NYC artists bemoaned the "empowered" sexual expectations placed upon her female peers: "I heard so many of my friends saying, 'Why can't I have sex and feel nothing?' It was amazing: that this was the new goal."
"It's painful when sex, which is supposed to be the most intimate form of communication, is the least intimate form of communication," she told Gross. In the middle of season two, Hannah spends two days with a 42-year-old doctor in his lovely brownstone, tasting the comforts of monogamy and economic security. At the end of their time together, Hannah makes an astonishing admission, almost despite herself: "What I didn't realize is that I was lonely in such a deep, deep way. I want what everyone wants, to be happy."
This is a crucial turn in the series, and a crucial admission for the church to hear from an influential voice in our culture. For all the vast economic and cultural changes that have rewritten the script of womanhood, there is one truth we can't shake: We are made for relationship. In fact, we cannot fully exist without relationship. We discover our truest selves only in connection to others, in the bonds of friendship, family, marriage, and civic and faith communities. Hannah struggles to "become who I am" in part because so many of her relationships are broken: By the middle of season two, she has dumped Adam, has driven two close friends to move out of their apartment, and is reduced to trying to make out with the former crack addict who lives in the apartment below hers. She is lonely by her own making, but lonely nonetheless.
Hannah is decidedly not the archetype for every young American woman. (Dunham winks at this in the pilot episode with this line: "Mom and Dad, I don't want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice … of a generation.") But she is one significant archetype, and with two Golden Globes under her belt and a third season coming, her voice will become more pronounced and influential. Are our churches places where women like Dunham can know and be known? Where their ambitions and dreams are encouraged, not squelched or made to fit into old scripts of womanhood that don't speak to them? Where a story is told and retold that speaks to their deepest desires and orients them toward wholeness and self-giving instead of self-gazing?
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Sarah Shaver
you can chew over post-modern philosophy and all that, but here's some reality. i have been happily married since my early 20's, unlike some of my still single friends. we are now in our late 40's and several friends has either abandoned Christ or stopped going to church. they feel they are disregarded by "modern" Evangelical churches which are centered on families and the elderly. my best friend has said that divorced people are treated better than single ones at her church! she has also openly wondered why we abandon single women while Jesus obviously chose key single women for important roles in His ministry. why, indeed. if we are not celebrating our young (and not so young) single people in the Evangelical church, welcoming them and making a place for them at the table, why do we think Ms. Dunham and her admirers will give us a second glance?
J Thomas
Smith, unfortunately the church at large has no bearing on the quality of education that the general American populace holds. The church has effectively been banned from schools and public places and can only get their foot in the door in rural places away from media attention. It is not the church's fault that Americans are increasingly ignorant about Christianity. It's ours for allowing the progressives to isolate us publicly, mock us, and teach our children that Jesus is but a myth to be ignored. But Mohammad...oh no, Mohammad is worthy of receiving time in the classroom. This is our modern paradigm. Wake up, folks.
K. Smith
I saw the first few episodes of Girls, and I'd definitely recommend it to young women - as a what not to do! It's a great example of what mistakes to avoid. As for the church not offering anything to this generation because of the progressive media, that's true, but we as the church need to market the church better by avoiding politics and by preaching the gospel more.
FORE FCB1899JEEP
"After two years of "Girls" it is still unclear what Dunham has to say about life, beyond the unsurprising revelation that it is difficult and confusing to be young. And her decision to tell her characters' stories almost exclusively through their sexual lives is the opposite of revolutionary; young women have been reduced to the sum of their parts and partners since time began." Mary Macnamara
J Thomas
Lena Dunham and "Girls" well represent the philosophical aimlessness and the consequences that postmodernism has delivered to western women. It can be a purposeless existence driven by some kind of narcissistic existentialism. When you ask what the church has to offer the hedonist Dunham, I'd be inclined to say that it offers absolutely nothing to her. Its safe confines and relationships offer this generation very little because they don't understand the church. They literally are ignorant to what it is and what its purpose is. They do not receive an education on the church except through the excessively critical lens of progressive media outlets. While the church offers her and her uneducated generation very little, the Gospel is still the same. It's still shockingly and humiliatingly beautiful. It still shatters the core and replaces it with hope and joy. Just as with all of us sinners, Ms. Dunham needs to meet the Lord.