Lena Dunham slams media for “rabidly sexist” coverage of Hillary Clinton
"Girls" creator Lena Dunham slams the press for its "unfair" and "gendered" portrayal of Hillary Clinton
Topics: Hillary Clinton, Lena Dunham, Sexism, News, Politics News
“Girls” creator Lena Dunham spoke out against what she described as “rabidly sexist” media coverage of the former secretary of state’s presidential campaign on Sunday. Dunham, a Clinton supporter and campaign surrogate, told Variety that media coverage of Clinton was in need of a “full reexamination.”
“The way that Hillary Clinton’s been talked about in the media is so gendered and rabidly sexist in every single portrayal,” Dunham said. “Whether it’s the attacks on her personal life or the adjectives that are used to describe her clothing, we have to do a full reexamination.”
Dunham, who stumped for Clinton at a campaign event in Iowa earlier this month, described a possible remedy: “I literally want to make a list that we hand to media outlets that says, ‘These are the words you can’t use when describing a female candidate: shrill, inaccessible, difficult, frumpy, plastic.’”
“I am so frustrated with the dialogue around Hillary among my peers,” Dunham told The Guardian in a separate interview. “It feels so gendered, even from women, so harshly sexist. We never throw claims of too establishment or too stiff or even too selfish at male politicians. It’s unfair in the deepest sense.”
Dunham’s comments about sexist media coverage of Clinton certainly carry some weight — the Washington Post’s coverage of Clinton’s cleavage comes to mind — but her assertion that male politicians are never labeled “too establishment or too stiff or even too selfish” is simply untrue. In this GOP primary season alone we’ve seen male candidates called all three.