lila engel

2012-11-08

additionally re: girls

it’s a huge bummer that so many smart female writers REFUSE to acknowledge their privilege on this issue. as if admitting the playing field isn’t level will take away their success. i like a lot of caitlin moran’s points- a friend gave me her book and i liked about 75% of it. she is unfortunately a bit prone to bootstrappy borderline victim-blaming rhetoric and has dubious views on sex work- basically ALL of the opinions i found objectionable on her end were a result of her white, educated, heteronormative privilege. in summarizing my take on her book to a friend i said “i’d like to have drinks with her but i wouldn’t like her to represent my cause.”

see also: how sad sad sad i am about emily nussbaum’s love of “girls”- i have always had so much love for her reviews and taste, and a good friend of mine is very close to her and i really truly enjoyed the times we interacted. she’s goofy and usually “gets it” and it feels like a betrayal that she doesn’t get it now. then again she went to oberlin if you know what i mean.

sigh.

→

Berry’s Salon piece offered Moran the chance to explain herself with regards to the Girls tweet, but her response was, once again, a clanger. She told Berry: “If a woman of color was allowed to make show as funny and honest and daring as Dunham’s — wandering around slightly overweight, naked, spreckled with acne, and talking about abortion, I’d be pitching a fucking massive feature on that to the Times, too. And I wouldn’t ask that writer why there were no white characters in it, just like I didn’t ask Dunham why there were no people of color in ‘Girls.’ I think it’s as dumb as asking ABBA, ‘Why aren’t one of you black?’”

What’s rather breathtaking about this is that Moran appears - at least if we take her use of “allowed” as intentional - to be aware that the likelihood of a woman of colour ending up in the same position of power as Dunham is, by current Hollywood standards, slim to nil.

If it’s surprising and exciting for a young white woman to be an HBO showrunner, it would be almost inconceivable for a young Black or Latina woman to do the same. So why be such a dick about it?

I don’t buy explanations like Laurie Penny’s New Statesman piece, which ran, “In a climate like this, no woman writer can tell her own story without immediately being expected also to tell everyone else’s”, because I do think that as feminist writers, we have a responsibility to broaden the diversity of characters and experiences on screens. It’s just not that much to ask; after all, we can’t expect much of the existing old (white male) guard.

Additionally, limp defenses of Dunham’s work along the lines of “but she’s just writing what she knows, it’s okay not to have any black friends” betray a deeply depressing idea of how writing works. Were writers really to only “write what they know”, chances are every single film released would be about a 35-year-old white guy with a MacBook Pro.

— My thoughts on Caitlin Moran’s Twitter scandal, feminist responsibility, and “feminist figureheads” in general. (via clambistrooooooo)

(via themodernistwitch)

Source: dailylife.com.au