Salon.com > Girls

TV’s tortured virgins

Thu, 03 May 2012 20:45:00 +0000

Ever since “90210’s” Donna Martin held on to hers for seven seasons, adult virginity -- the state of having it and the act of losing it -- has been a recurring plot point on TV dramas, and not just ones set in high school. The rules that apply to virginity in characters of a certain age are more or less the same ones that apply to Chekhov’s famous gun: If it appears in the first season, it will probably go off by the third, or the fourth, or the seventh, just as it did for Donna Martin. There are currently three fictional adults — or two adults and a self-identified “Girl” — grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows. (Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.)

Your brain on white people

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:00:00 +0000

It simply isn’t true that there are no folks of color in the new HBO series "Girls," in which young, attractive white women try to find their way in the post-9/11 Big Apple. For example, in the last minute of the very first episode, a homeless black guy talks to our quirky, spunky heroine, Hannah. “Why don’t you smile?” he says to her. “Does your heart hurt? Oh, girl, when I look at you, I just want to say Hellloooo, New York!”

Hello, New York, indeed. This isn’t the first time TV pushed millions of immigrants and people of color to the margins of one of the most diverse cities in the world. Hello, Woody Allen! Hello, "Seinfeld"! Hello, "Friends" and "Sex and the City"! If "Girls" can’t make it there, it can’t make it anywhere. Of course, the rest of TV has been overwhelmingly white, too. Ever since "Father Knows Best" and "Wagon Train," the medium has long presented a whitewashed version of the way we live.

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.)

“Girls’” reluctant star

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:00:00 +0000

It shouldn’t be surprising that Jemima Kirke, the scene-stealing actress from Lena Dunham’s indie hit “Tiny Furniture,” has gone on to become one of the scene-stealing stars of Dunham’s upcoming HBO series “Girls,” which premieres this Sunday to dazzling critical acclaim. On-screen, Kirke comes across as carefree and glamorous, the kind of friend with a cool-girl vibe that can lead to a lot of fun trouble. In both "Tiny Furniture" and “Girls,” Kirke plays characters who are similar to real-life Kirke: well-traveled, funny, super-stylish and British (the accent, in case you were wondering, is real). Like the other stars of "Girls," Kirke's parents are famous: Her father is Simon Kirke, the drummer from Bad Company, and her mother is interior designer/muse Lorraine Kirke.

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.)

“Girls” lives up to the hype

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:00:00 +0000

HBO’s “Girls,” a new comedy about four affluent, early 20-something friends boldly and haplessly talking, tweeting and screwing their way through starter jobs, clueless dudes and New York City’s outer boroughs, is easy to love and even easier to worry about. The many articles already written about the zeitgeist-crashing series, created by and starring the 25-year-old Lena Dunham, reflect this, falling into two overlapping categories, give or take a few outliers: the rave review— of which, to be clear, this will be one— and the concerned cultural report, in which the type of frank, awkward sex that the girls in “Girls” are having is deemed bleak, depressing, prudish or in some other way alarming. While the raves dole out the love and the cultural reports the apprehension, the latter may be the more flattering: Those are the pieces that proceed as if “Girls” were not fiction at all, but a sort of factual report about female sexuality dispatched from the front lines of gentrified Brooklyn. (It’s funny, if “Girls” were a reality show we’d be debating what about it was fake and staged. Because it’s fiction, we’re debating not even what about it is real, but what the realness means. Or is that “funny”?)

Dunham: “Girls” sex scares men

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000

HBO’s “Girls,” a new comedy about four 20-something girlfriends living, working and having sex in New York City, premieres this Sunday night. Despite this description, “Girls” is much grittier and more naturalistic than “Sex and the City.” It's less a frothy, glossy, orgasmic take on Manhattan than the reflection of the particular sensibility of Lena Dunham, “Girls'” 25-year-old star and creator. That sensibility has already given “Girls” a spot in the zeitgeist: It's being written and discussed as the latest window onto the sometimes awkward, sometimes hilarious, sometimes awkwardly hilarious realities of being a young woman now.

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?

Girl, uninterrupted

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

Of the many questions formed while reading Caitlin Flanagan’s “Girl Land,” most pressing is why it was written at all. One convincing answer comes not from its pages – which are filled with gauzy pronouncements on female adolescence, the occasional literary or even historical close reading, and no particular argument or thesis -- but from an interview on Vogue’s website. In it, Flanagan says, “I didn’t write this book from the perspective of being a parent; I wrote it from the perspective of my girlhood being so intense for me.”

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.