That might be why some “Girls” writers take exception to their show being singled out for criticism. Here’s what writer Leslie Arfin tweeted in response to criticisms: “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” (“Precious,” the 2009 film about a mentally and sexually abused teenager, featured a predominantly black cast.)

Why shouldn’t Arfin and creator Lena Durham be able to re-create their own private girl-world on screen? What responsibility do show runners have to represent diversity? Does it even matter? How do our brains respond when people of color are invisible or stereotyped on TV?

This is where science can help. I co-edited a book called “Are We Born Racist?,” which features new insights from psychology and neuroscience about what happens in our nervous systems when we encounter people of different races. And we found that decades of studies say yes, the racial vision of “Girls” does matter. For example, a series of four 2009 studies found that people who watched shows that featured negative nonverbal behavior toward blacks became more prejudiced themselves, as measured by tests of implicit bias — this was especially true when viewers didn’t recognize the behavior as negative. It seems that TV can indeed subconsciously induce racism.

So how can show runners correct for that? The research is overwhelmingly clear: job one is to confront the fact that racial difference exists. The new science of racism reveals that our brains do indeed seem to react negatively to people of different races — exposure of just milliseconds to a black face can cause white folks’ amygdalae to light up with fear.

Colorblindness doesn’t work because we never stop spotting differences in our environment.  Our brains are designed to do that; that’s how we survived on the savannah 50,000 years ago, and it’s how we survive in the globalized urban jungles of the 21st century. It takes an effort of will to cover your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears and shout, “Nah nah nah I’m not listening,” when confronted with racial difference. And doing that is what psychologists call “non-survival behavior,” something that belongs in the same category as smoking cigarettes and riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

The antidote to subconscious bias is not political correctness — shoehorning in a quirky, spunky black BFF for the girls will just annoy black viewers, instead of making the world a better place. Rather, the best cure for what ails shows like “Girls” is a dose of thoughtfulness, self-awareness and courageous originality.

The good news is that our brains get used to difference; in most situations, exposure to people of different races reduces prejudice. That’s a good reason for TV and movies to at least make an effort to show our cities in all their diversity. But that’s not all. As researchers have developed new and creative ways to induce racial nightmares in brain scanners, they’ve found that the prefrontal cortex — that’s the newest, most human part of the brain, the one responsible for long-term planning and intentional thought — is able to tell the oldest, least human part of the brain, the amygdala, to calm down. In other words, people can outthink and unlearn subconscious prejudice.

Some folks seem to think, as my colleague, UC Berkeley psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton writes, that “unconscious biases reveal ‘the real you’ — how you really feel about X or Y group despite your best, superficial efforts to hide it.” Some interpret this idea to mean that saying whatever ugly thing enters our heads is simply being honest. We don’t want to suppress our true savage nature, do we? We don’t want to sweep it under the rug, do we?

No, we don’t. And we should also be honest about how racially homogenous our social networks tend to be — if the quirky, spunky frenemies in “Girls” are all white, that’s just realistic, I agree. But shows like “Girls” improve when they implicitly and explicitly recognize that there are people in the world who aren’t like the protagonists, and that sometimes we all say stupid things.  So instead of being defensive, as Arfin was in her tweet, what if we just took knee-jerk bias for granted — and then also took it for granted that people can grow and correct for prejudice? What if we just, you know… had faith in each other?

“The assumption that prejudice and egalitarianism is an all-or-none proposition (i.e., one is either prejudiced, or one is egalitarian) makes the possibility that one may think or do something stereotypical very threatening, precisely because it would reveal one’s true nature,” Mendoza-Denton argues. But when we consciously condemn racism, that act of the prefrontal cortex is just as authentic and meaningful as the unconscious impulses we find in the amygdala. In fact, I’d argue that intentionally rejecting racism reveals the very essence of our humanity.

The trick is, quite simply, to acknowledge race and racism, and to talk about it. Many white parents avoid the subject like the plague — in one notorious instance, parents pulled out children en masse from a study when they learned it would entail talking about race. But this strategy doesn’t produce colorblind citizens. It creates shows like “Girls,” “Seinfeld” and “Sex in the City.” It perpetuates a society that historically has pretended to be entirely Anglo-Saxon.

In fact, many, many studies find that children whose parents talk with them about race ultimately become less prejudiced. Talking is how we become conscious of subconscious biases — bias against anyone or anything, not just people of different races. All this science stuff sounds high-minded and earnest, doesn’t it? Is it even possible to apply these insights to a TV show without wrecking its entertainment value? Is it possible to depict racially insular and casually prejudiced white people in a way that doesn’t promote insularity and prejudice, as “Girls” does?

“Mad Men” does it (for gender as well as race). The non-quirky, non-spunky main characters are all white, but race haunts the show, in ways that are mostly lost on the chain-smoking ad executives it depicts. The difference between “Mad Men” and “Girls” is simply that “Mad Men” sees its characters with a combination of compassionate objectivity and ruthless historical perspective. That’s the result of artistic integrity, not political correctness.

Take this video, for example. It’s easy to chuckle at the character, Pete Campbell. But as you watch this clip, think about the nuances involved in this interaction — the ways Pete and Hollis struggle to communicate across profound differences in social power.

And by the way, HBO has done it before. “The Sopranos” was a show about Italian-American mobsters who must, as with any modern line of employment, work with people different from themselves. In this scene, we see the crew discussing some workplace diversity issues, wiseguy-style.

It’s raw, racist and honest. But it’s more than that. The writing is also smart, self-aware and grounded in the real world. This kind of writing does not see moral seriousness and entertainment as a trade-off, an either-or. It’s a both-and.

“Girls” is actually a pretty good show; it made me laugh, it made me sigh. But the bloggers are right to ask for it to be smarter and better. It’s something we should always be asking of ourselves.

What is surprising is that Kirke considers herself a painter, not an actress, and had to be coerced to get in front of the camera. Kirke received her BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of design (you can see some of her oil portraits here). She met Lena Dunham at St. Ann’s high school in Brooklyn Heights and agreed to help her out with “Tiny Furniture” after college. She is also the mother of a toddler. (Full-disclosure: I first met Jemima because I occasionally baby-sat her daughter.)

Kirke corresponded with Salon over email about her painting career, not identifying as a slacker, and slapping Lena Dunham too hard.

You did “Tiny Furniture” as a favor to your friend Lena Dunham. Did you have any idea that movie would change your life so dramatically? Would you have agreed to do it if you did?

Yes, sometimes I ask myself if I would’ve agreed to do it as there were unforeseen challenges. One being that it compromised the time I spend with my family and on my work. But I wouldn’t take it back, no. Who knows where I’d be otherwise?

In “Tiny Furniture” your character memorably first enters the frame by slapping Lena Dunham through a fire escape window. Whose idea was that?

That was Lena’s idea. It wasn’t a very hard slap. Not at first. But a few hours and many takes later I was hitting really hard. I wanted to go home.

Did Lena write your character Jessa for “Girls” with you in mind? Did you recognize yourself in the script? Was that strange for your friendship?

I was out of commission while she was writing the script. I had absolutely no intention of acting then or in the future and at the very least taking on any time-consuming projects. Lena knew this so she hadn’t planned on casting me, but at the last minute she asked me to do it. This whole experience has been an awkward place indeed for a friendship to survive. Though I’d say it’s made our bond stronger.

Your IMDB page says, “Jemima Kirke is a painter, actress and co-star of the coming HBO series “Girls.” There aren’t a lot of women on TV who define themselves as painters first. How do you manage to find time for your art off the set?

I don’t think there are any. That was one of the hesitations for me. Is it even possible that I can do this job and walk away? But, yes, it is hard but I make the time. I have to.

“Girls” is getting a lot of press about funny women and females as slackers. Which category do you fall into?

Ugh, who’s saying that? Confusion, fear and self-esteem issues can manifest themselves in many ways, but I think it’s a rather shallow point of view to see these women are merely slacking. I don’t identify with the “slacker” thing, no. By the way, I’m funniest when I’m not being funny. I’m better to laugh at than with, pretty much.

What’s it like to see your image on the side of a bus? Since you’re a painter, how do you feel about the painted mural of the “Girls” cast in Williamsburg, Brooklyn?

It’s not something I can quite grasp the hugeness of. So I don’t feel anything when I see those things. Though I have to say it was startling to see myself in Us magazine for some reason. Maybe it was having my image in such close proximity to Jessica Simpson and the cast of “The Bachelor.”

How did you personally deal with that awkward in-between stage after college/early 20s that “Girls” focuses on?

Drugs.

You’re a mom. How did you manage long nights on the set with a baby? Are you thinking about having another child?

I was sad on the nights I wasn’t with my kid. Those were the hardest. Some nights I would get home, take off my shirt, take her out of her crib, still asleep, and rock her close to me with our skin touching. I would say, “I’m so sorry I haven’t seen you all day.” The truth is she was so young she could probably give a shit. But I missed her.

Your parents are semi-famous. Did growing up with notable parental figures change how you were raised?

They definitely were not famous enough for it to affect my childhood one way or the other.

You’ve repeatedly said you’re not a “real” actress. Was it intimidating to be on set with Judd Apatow and an entire crew of professionals? How did you handle it?

I had to repeatedly remind myself that there is a reason why they chose me. And it was not because of a particular skill I have for acting necessarily, but something else: an energy, a presence, a character, etc. I had to trust in their vision and in my ability.

You’re signed for Season 2. Does that make you feel like a “real” actress?

In signing up for a pilot you are signing up for six years with HBO, just by default. So I was fucked from the get-go.

I have to confess that I have enjoyed both the raves and condescending hand-wringing, not because I find the show to be a sexual doomsayer, but because it alleviates my own set of anxieties to have “Girls” taken so seriously. I’ve been worried about “Girls” too. My concern was that “Girls” speaks so specifically and accurately to the experience of me and my census buddies — and to be clear, that’s urban white girls with safety nets; have at us in the comments — that people would either write it off as navel-gazing, snark at the innate privilege undergirding the whole thing, or find it unrelatable. “Girls” is smart, bracing , funny, accurately absurd, confessional yet self-aware, but it is also undeniably about four white chicks with, relatively speaking, no worries in the world. And so, as just such a white chick, I have spent the last few weeks, to paraphrase a question oft asked by bubbes and zeydes, nervously wondering of the show and its high profile, “Is it good for the girls?” So far so good.

About these girls: The ringleader is Dunham’s Hannah Horvath, an aspiring memoirist— she’s finished four chapters, only has five and an entire life to live left to go— who has been living off her parents since college, but, just as the series begins, is abruptly cut off. Fast-talking, tattooed and good-natured, Hannah is a messy compilation of only seemingly contradictory traits. She ambitiously claims under the influence of opium that she might be “the voice of her generation. Or the voice of a generation,” but ruins job interviews with ill-timed rape jokes, does not have the energy to eat cupcakes in the shower while standing up, and often arrives late. She’s neurotic enough to spend an entire episode wondering about the stuff that “gets up around the sides of condoms,” but is also easygoing and affable, even in situations where being easygoing and affable are not necessarily warranted, as when one’s sexual partner is being vague about whether he is using a condom at all. Watching Hannah can be excruciating, embarrassing and cringe-worthy, but as Hannah says to her gynecologist during a checkup, “It hurts, but the way it’s supposed to.”

Hannah lives with her best friend Marnie (Brian Williams daughter Allison; all four of the actresses on “Girls” have famous parents), already a more mature, put together and adult force than her friends. She has a sweet, doting boyfriend who, as Hannah succinctly puts it, has a metaphorical vagina. Marnie has no interest in having sex with him. (For all the distress “Girls” has stirred up about the sexual lives of young women, I don’t see how the concerned parties can watch it and feel great about the sex lives of “Boys” either.) The foursome is rounded out by the debonair, sophisticated, well-traveled and flaky Jessa (Jemima Kirke, whose crack timing makes her the series’ comedic standout) and the virginal, chirpy Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet, the weak link of the bunch), who, as the least worldly member of the crew, is obsessed with “Sex and the City,” which, in the pilot anyway, is meant as a sort of character burn. Shoshanna describes herself as “definitely a Carrie at heart, but sometimes Samantha comes out. And when I’m at school, I try hard to put on my Miranda hat,” when, of course, she is a total Charlotte, which  Dunham and the writers of “Girls” — admitted “SATC” watchers — must know. It’s a deft little jab at the aspirational fantasy components of “SATC” (that “Girls” intentionally lacks), which encouraged the show’s audience members to imagine themselves as that which they are not.

In the past couple of weeks, I have had more conversations about “Girls” than just about anything else. All of these discussions have included long dissections of what in the show feels real, not so real, realer and realest. (Realest and sweetest in a landslide: coming home late at night to find your best friend dancing around the apartment to Robyn and joining in.) “Girls” invites this sort of parsing. It is such an acutely observed series, grounded so deeply in a particular social milieu — post-collegiate life in New York City among kids who implicitly consider their job to be finding, and making, themselves — that, relative to most comedies, it plays like anthropology. Most sitcoms have had their specificity market tested out and their cultural affiliations scrubbed away. Not “Girls,” which has the atmospheric authenticity — the ill-fitting clothes, messy sheets, unimposing Brooklyn streets, throwaway observations that have been saved up for years, the late-night tweeting — we’ve come to associate with highbrow dramas or documentaries and the single-minded focus on a subculture usually relegated to lowbrow reality shows.

But “Girls” is much more than a filmed live journal entry. Yes, it’s accurate and realistic, but what elevates the show and makes it great — makes it a show I would recommend to anyone, not just people who can identify with its subjects — is the extent to which it is also a broad, wonderfully crafted, laugh-out-loud television program. “Girls” has punch lines. “Girls” takes plausible observations, relationships and events and amps them up, a little past the point of plausibility, but keeps applying realistic dialogue and character motivation to make it go down believably. The much discussed dirty talk scene, in which Hannah’s not-quite boyfriend aggressively encourages her to take on the role of a tweenage prostitute, is the sort of horrifyingly icky and hilarious conversation that could probably only happen between two actors. A chat about the pros and cons of doggy-style sex ends with the goofy kicker, “Well, maybe a woman wants to feel like she has udders.” A provocative sexual come-on inspires one of the women to run off to the bathroom for a gonzo emergency masturbation session. This is not quite like life, but it all feels immensely lifelike.

“Girls” does have one glaring, inexcusable flaw: race. “Girls” is confoundingly white. There are hardly any people of color in the first three episodes, and the two that appear have short, perfunctory roles. (Hannah interns with an Asian girl who knows Photoshop; her gynecologist is not white.) This whiteness is not particularly realistic — this is New York City, and it’s easy to imagine Hannah and her crew being more diverse, without sacrificing any verisimilitude — but if Dunham and her writers had made any mention of the whiteness at all, it could be understood as a loaded and knowing acknowledgment of the tendency to self-segregate. They don’t. (In fact, the one mention comes when Shoshanna tells Hannah about a TV show she is watching, and quotes Jerry Springer as saying an African-American woman spending $1,000 on her hair every month is “unbe-weave-able.”) In the episodes I’ve seen, “Girls’” racial politics seem remedial, all that whiteness a reflection of obliviousness, not self-awareness.

This is in marked contrast to how “Girls” deals with class, another knotty issue for the show. “Girls” is about a group of economically privileged women with no college debt who, if worse comes to worst, can always move home. These lucky financial circumstances may be alienating to many Americans, and Dunham and her writers seem to have thought about this. Unlike Dunham’s semi-autobiographical character in “Tiny Furniture,” who lives with her parents in their giant Tribeca loft, Hannah has lost her income. Though “Girls” remains a show about the affluent, it at least seems aware of other financial realities and to have made an effort to appeal to people who are less well off than Dunham and her colleagues.

The same can’t be said of race, and that’s hugely disappointing, more disappointing than it would be in a lesser show. “Girls” is fairly explicitly about representation, about showing a group of women in a new, loving, plausible, generous, nuanced, weird, freaky and fundamentally serious way. The experience of watching “Girls” has been unexpectedly moving for me: I’m older than the main characters, but it has been powerful to watch a TV show that feels so much like it is actually about me and some of the people I know, and to have us treated with such a clear-eyed, occasionally skewering, but always respectful light touch. It’s a rare pleasure, and it seems such a hideous misstep that “Girls” wouldn’t be more inclusive of all the women, of whatever color, who could so easily have had that experience of it. “Girls” is too good to make a mistake this bad. Next season, may all of its most embarrassing errors be scripted.

Dunham spoke to Salon about being “the voice of her generation,” why some men may find all the bad sex the characters are having so worrisome, and the ongoing appeal of cupcakes.

Frank Bruni recently wrote a piece for the New York Times about “Girls,” called “The Bleaker Sex,” in which he lamented the circumstances of young women’s sex lives, as portrayed in your show. What did you think of the piece?

I’m a fan of his and I love speaking to him. He’s just a smart, literate dude. But the piece was really interesting to me because it was a little challenging to be put in the position of having to speak for the sexual reality of a lot of women. I’ve never said that was something I was comfortable doing. In fact, I’ve spent most of my sexual career feeling like everything I was doing was alien and not representative of the populace, so if people relate to it, great, it makes me feel less lonely and it’s wonderful. But the idea of being asked to speak to the state of the union of young sexual encounters … I just would [need to] go out and get more experience before I could do that. I was given a role I never said I could handle.

But this — you being emblematic of women of a certain age — is going to happen all the time now. Are you ready for that?

That was sort of the joke of the “I think I might be the voice of my generation” line in the pilot. This character of Hannah, who is her own specific, isolated, entitled weirdo, thinking that she can somehow speak for everybody was so funny to me, so the idea that anybody’s taking that idea seriously is also funny.

But didn’t you think that line, “I think I might be the voice of my generation … or a voice of a generation” would resonate on different levels? As a joke for the character, but also as a well-couched statement of your intentions?

At the time, I was like, “This character’s on drugs, what would be the thing she would say to convince her parents that she deserves the most exorbitant allowance of all time?” And then Jenni Konner, the other executive producer, came up with the idea of [adding the line] “or a voice of a generation.” She was feeding me lines and it was making me giggle so hard. But I know enough about media and I’m enough of a consumer of media that I should have realized that that would be the sound bite that people would hang on to. And I am prepared for the idea that I’ll be asked to address what this show means about the state of women and the state of feminism. And I’m comfortable saying my opinions. I mean, I’m not scared of opinions; I’m not trying to be nonpartisan. But I also am very prepared for a lot of girls to be like, “That is not my sexual experience, that is not my reality.” I’m sure there are girls who are like, “I have a sweet boyfriend and he really knows how to fuck and we’re having a great time, why don’t you back off?” And I’m ready for that too.

Bruni also seemed worried about you, and about women your age, and about how they are having sex now. Hannah’s boyfriend treats her mostly like an object and an inconvenience (during one sex scene, he tells her to play “the quiet game” and refuses to say if he’s wearing a condom), and in one episode, a character is treated to some very aggressive dirty talk. Has concern been a common reaction to the show’s sex scenes? 

I’ve found that men — just in the little bit of research I’ve done — find the sexual thing in the show more sobering than women do. And this is kind of a leap, but I think it’s because guys are like, “Have I ever made a girl feel that way? And is it rape?” Literally, I think that is what comes into their brains. I know that sounds like a dramatization, but don’t you kind of think guys think, “That’s not the sex I had, girls I had sex with were happy as fuck.” It was interesting reading about him sort of worrying that girls in general were allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. I will tell you, I’ve had loving sexual experiences, and anxiety-producing ones, probably slightly more anxiety-producing ones at this point. But none of them have ever made me feel like I was being forced into situations outside of my field of choice. If you notice my mincey language, it’s just that I’m still shedding the fact that I went to Oberlin College and if you slightly mangled your women’s/gender studies pronouns, you’d be sent to some Guantanamo for liberal arts students. So I still have this fear of my professor like jumping out of the walls and beating me with a giant Gayatri Chakravorty book or something.

You just mentioned a minute ago the girl with the sweet boyfriend who knows how to fuck, who is not at all a character on your show. One of the characters has a very sweet boyfriend, but she’s not attracted to him. The attractiveness of machismo, and the unattractiveness of a lack of machismo comes up a lot in the first three episodes.

It’s like the Jordan Catalano, Brian Krakow thing. Ben and Noel. I mean there’s no woman who hasn’t been torn between these poles. There is always that idea of the one you should be with, and the one you want to be with. And we didn’t give that problem to one girl, we gave it to a pair of best friends and sort of saw them duke it out. I think in a more traditional TV setup Hannah would be torn between a Charlie [the nice guy] and an Adam [the not so nice guy], but the way we did it, each best friend represented a different polarity and then they are each explaining to the other why their experience is both more and less desirable.

There’s also a scene in one of the episodes where a guy says to one of the characters,  “The first time I fuck you I might scare you a little, because I’m a man, and I know how to do things,” and it’s supposed to be a huge turn-on.

Somebody actually said that line to me, only afterward he was like, “That’s the thing my friend who works at Vice magazine taught me.” And I was like, the best way to negate the hot thing you just said is to end it with, that’s the thing my friend at Vice magazine told me.

Was it working before he said that?

No, it never really worked. I don’t think he was really willing to put his money where his mouth was. I’ve been watching that show “Bent,” and I just love the main guy in it. He’s a guy who comes over and is like, “When you’re ready for me, it’s gonna be crazy.” I’ve never had a situation in real life where that’s been effective, but in my movie life, it’s very effective. Real life – it’s grotesque. But if somebody says like, I’m paraphrasing, like, “We’re gonna screw and you’re gonna like it,” that is so much more attractive in theory than in practice.

Unless you really wanted to have sex with them.

Yeah. [laughing] I have not yet had that experience.

Is there anything that Hannah does that you wouldn’t do?

Totally. I think that Hannah’s total inability to really articulate her needs is something we’ve all felt, but that I hope I’m a little farther away from than she is. I’ve been, at points, a person who can’t get anywhere on time, and can’t get out of bed, who’s sort of flopping through the city. But that hasn’t been me in a little while and I hope that’s not me again. And there’s a scene later in the season where Hannah tries to seduce someone in a way that’s super inappropriate and clearly unwanted, and I like to think that my gauge of the people around me is a little better. But there’s also stuff I admire about Hannah, a certain naiveté or unflappability that I always like in a heroine.

She never gets angry. Like, when the guy she’s sleeping with calls her a dumpling, she smiles right through it.

I think there’s a part of her that thinks that’s what she deserves. Not to make her sound like a little abused animal, but I think there’s a part of her that thinks, “Well, it’s good that I’ve got mentors to set me straight.” I think that what Hannah doesn’t realize is that she’s probably building up a massive reserve of anger she’s not getting in touch with, and in six months she’s going to lose her shit with somebody because she wasn’t able to say, “It really hurt me when you called me ‘toddler tummy.’” I think she thinks one of her big, most important qualities is her affability. I’ve felt that way before, if I tell someone I’m angry, there’ll be no reason to love me.

How is it writing dialogue about your body, or reading now how people are writing about your body?

Some people are nice. Some people are like, “I love it, she’s fat.” I’m prepared for it. Every time there’s an adjective that’s not the word “obese” I feel fine. The dream is that we get to a point where people can write about the sex without talking about the shape of the bodies having it. But we’re not even close to there. And if I can open up the dialogue on this topic I’m perfectly pleased.

How do you guys write the sex scenes for the show?

I know that sex is in itself a political act, and that can’t be denied. But when we write them it’s not like we’re trying to lampoon the way women are doing things now. We’re really in that scene with those characters thinking about what that interaction means to them. The ones that are in the first three episodes I was sort of embarrassed about the minute I finished them. They came forth from my brain and there we are. I bring it to the writers’ room and then we pitch like, what is the weirdest dirty talk that Adam could offer up? And Adam [Driver] was so down to improvise. It’s fun for him to come up with the most disgusting things that could come out of a man’s mouth. There are some S/M moments, if we want to call them that, but I think they’re so much goofier. No one is informed enough to be doing anything close to S/M. The role-playing is so poorly done and badly constructed. It’s such a meta take on role-playing that he’s doing. And then my A.D. came in when we were shooting the scene at the top of the second episode and he was like, “It smells like a men’s locker room in here.” It was so hot, we’d been naked for so long.

How do you feel about the “Sex and the City” comparisons?

I feel like that show’s hugely influential, obviously, to the characters we’re playing and to us, and I think we’re on the same network, it’s for women, it’s the same city. But I kind of hope that once people see the show they’ll feel what the natural differences are, just cause it’s tonally and phase-of-life so different.

“SATC” is also, like “Girls,” often about odd or awkward sexual encounters, the major difference being the “SATC” women always get off anyway.

I realized we don’t have enough orgasms in our show. We’ll have to work on the second season.  The thing about “Sex and the City” is that it covered every sexual base that exists. I mean there’s nothing we can talk about in our writer’s room that “Sex and the City” hasn’t done a version of. We can only hope to do our version of it because they’ve blazed a sexual trail across New York and beyond.

Also like on “SATC,” you guys do eat cupcakes. At one point, Hannah eats one in the shower.

I’ve eaten half a loaf of bread hanging out in the shower. This is just a tidier, more visual way to do that. And why would you not —  if you woke up late — want to enjoy your cupcake while you shower and are too lazy to stand? Don’t you think those would be the girls who would be into cupcakes? I mean, girls, at 24, what’s an exciting food these days? They’re cute, they’re trendy, they recall home economics class while also having  a Riot Grrrl aspect. It just seems like the food of the moment.

Flanagan works as a critic, was once a teacher and counselor at an elite private school, and is the mother of two boys, but somehow nothing has matched the intensity of that girlhood; it forms the only authentically compelling material here. Roll your eyes all you want, and I did, at declarations like “one of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that a boy does not fetishize the tokens of his childhood.” (Flanagan appears to have missed the past couple of decades in popular culture.) But then comes the quiet horror of Flanagan’s unerringly detailed recounting of an attempted rape she experienced at 16, and what it taught her about power and control and shame.

But this is not a memoir, or it rarely is, and it’s not clear why. After all, a memoir might conveniently free Flanagan from one of her fiercest hostilities — her resistance to empirical data or any evidence at all. (Or, as I learned when she twisted quotes from an interview I conducted far out of context, her refusal to allow facts to interfere with her point.)

Flanagan mocks, for example, the suggestion on a Planned Parenthood site that abstinence-only education is linked to the rise of previously exotic forms of sexual activity (read: oral and anal) for teens who want to stay “virgins.” She concedes the existence of a Columbia University study that found that abstinence pledgers were far more likely to have those forms of sex, but sniffs, “I would hardly count Columbia as the go-to source for information on the hearts and minds of evangelical teenagers.” Yes, what do those wine-sniffing Upper West Side liberals know — except that the study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, actually drew on longitudinal data of 12,000 teenagers. This is rich coming from an author whose most decisively cited sources include “a friend who attended a leadership conference for girls” and “every woman I’ve known.”

Katie Roiphe may have (accurately) panned Flanagan’s book in Slate, and Flanagan may have just disdained Roiphe’s love of Joan Didion in the Atlantic, but the two have some things in common — and it’s not just the ire of less speculative feminists. Both were raised in privileged liberal enclaves that they simultaneously seem to loathe and be incapable of seeing beyond. They skewer these earnest precincts in occasionally devastating detail, successfully positioning themselves as sage truth-tellers more attuned to the red-blooded America, but they never get very far afield. In “Girl Land,” Flanagan is especially guilty of draining her coordinates of specificity, when she may as well own that this is really about Cambridge, Berkeley or the North Shore of Long Island at a very particular time. Or that it’s about her own parents, particularly her mother, with whom she is continuously upset for failing to protect her from the cruelties of the world.

Much like Roiphe’s partisans, Flanagan’s defenders — I have never met a female one, or as Flanagan herself might put it, “every woman I’ve ever known” is infuriated by her — cite her prose styling as an end to itself. That strikes me as a low bar. If these admirers truly believe that they are saying something brave and contrarian about women and girls, I suggest they spend more time outside the places Flanagan and Roiphe can’t seem to leave.

As for the place Flanagan calls Girl Land, it is full of “romance” — Flanagan’s favorite word, as in “the emotional life of a little girl is drenched with romance.” Its borders are arbitrarily designated by Flanagan’s nostalgia, with chapter titles giving equal weight to “menstruation” and “proms.” The book includes a hopscotch through other people’s social histories and examinations of era-specific icons like Patty Hearst and “Go Ask Alice.” (Flanagan is upset, for the record, that “The Diary of Anne Frank” is shelved in the Holocaust section).

There is romance in Girl Land, Flanagan repeatedly reminds us, but there are also looming dangers, like sexual violence and objectification. But Flanagan is too lacking in empathy and too interested in imposing the contours of her own life and her own conservative counter-rebellion to shed much light on them. (For meatier stuff on girls who are not Caitlin Flanagan, you might instead read Peggy Orenstein on the rise in the marketing of “pink” culture, or Rachel Simmons on girls’ friendships and bullying, or Jaclyn Friedman on developing an authentic sexuality in a world that wants to commoditize and homogenize it.)

Flanagan seems troubled by how the culture reduces female sexuality as being acted upon or being looked at by men, a reality to which girls are often rudely introduced, and yet she is uninterested in doing anything about it except keeping girls from this supposedly immutable truth for as long as possible. For all of the vague talk of sexual awakening in “Girl Land,” it takes a hundred pages for female desire to get any real airing. She sounds pitying when girls are shamed for being sexual (though she tends to cast these as misguided bids for affection) but proposes reviving the same old-fashioned strictures that enforce that shame: “Society has let its girls down,” Flanagan insists, by denying that “female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It is in the nature of who we are.” Just take her word for it.

Despite dipping into histories of how being a girl in America has changed over the past century or so, Flanagan has a retrograde vision of the safe home, guarded by a male protector, that seems utterly ignorant of how lives are more often lived. The most bafflingly terrible portion of the book is a series of tips at the end on how to preserve the endangered Girl Land. Tip No. 3 is “Get her father involved in her dating life,” because that renders adolescent girls “far less likely to be targets of the kinds of boys who become emotionally, physically or sexually abusive.” Really? What if her father, or equivalent thereof, is also any of those things, a sad truth of many girls’ (and boys’) lives?

As for that “dating life,” it’s worth mentioning that non-heterosexuals do not exist in this book, though they do more than ever in the real Girl Land. Flanagan also has curiously little to say about the boys that might visit Girl Land; her two sons are barely mentioned. Perhaps she wants to maintain their privacy, and yet it’s impossible not to wonder why she cares so little about how the way societies raise sons might affect the lives of girls. Boys in Flanagan’s imagination are usually crude creatures, free of emotional complexity or sexual shame, waiting to despoil Girl Land. There is the lightly intriguing parenthetical, in the discussion of moral panics (to her credit, Flanagan is healthily skeptical of the teen oral-sex “epidemic,” calling out the creepy prurience of the adult freakout). She says that “the demonization of boys oversimplifies the problem and spares on the arguably sadder truth.” Apparently, the “sadder truth” is the actual virility of teenage boys (which, gross) but this is a missed opportunity for an avowed expatriate of Girl Land to think critically about the lives of boys.

Another helpful tip that should already be notorious is for parents to type “porn” into Google to prepare themselves for what terrors lie ahead for girls. Flanagan won’t forgive the Internet for allegedly destroying dreamy, interior-focused diaries (which get their own chapter here) and she has already warned about “the endless hard-core and even fetish pornography” available online. Yes, that’s right, the Internet also features sexual subcultures! Statistically speaking, this may be something the parents of girls already know firsthand.

One of Flanagan’s proposed solutions is to refuse girls Internet connections in their rooms, as if this would somehow keep the world out. But then, this is an essential problem with what tacked-on argument the book does contain. Correctly identifying a culture that is often suffused with terrible and constricting messages for girls, Flanagan’s proposed remedy is to protect them in their presumed vulnerability, instead of trying to equip them with the tools to be strong.