Analysis Of The HBO Show Girls

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“Ok. First of all that wasn’t sex. You came in my thigh crease.” Sex? Ejaculation? Where could this quote be coming from? Certainly not a wholesome family comedy on ABC. It’s from the HBO show Girls, which provides real insight into the lives of millennials and deals with the typical coming of age story in a refreshing way. The show follows four very different girls (duh), Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna, in their early twenties trying to navigate life in New York City. Hannah is played by the show’s writer and creator, Lena Dunham. The show is now on its fifth season, and has sparked many controversies over the past four years. While some say there’s too much foul language, sex, and nudity, I say that by the show taking a pro-sex and …show more content…

Can you name another show in recent memory that brings to light, and shows us female masturbation? (YES, female masturbation!) Girls masturbate, believe it or not, and it’s something that’s now just getting brought up in our popular culture. Yet, male masturbation even has its place on our wholesome network channels. Girls did for female masturbation what Sex and the City did for anal sex in the 90s. It showed that something seen as “taboo” in our society, in fact, is very common and not something to feel dirty or ashamed about. But somehow, this show has received an immense amount of slack for showing one of the characters, Marnie, masturbating. After a non-sexual encounter with an artist that gets her going, she retreats to a public restroom to masturbate. Articles about this scene, and the show in general, feature the phrases, “cringe worthy”, “scandalous”, and “we’ve seen too much lady parts”. Yet, it’s common place to see boys get praised by their fathers in popular TV and film in the classic, “Dad walks in on son in front of computer with lots of tissues” scene. So, why is there this double standard? In their article, “HBO 's Girls: gender, generation, and quality television”, Sean Fuller and Catherine Driscoll claim, “While Breaking Bad is consistently praised for this complex characterization, Girls is criticized for imperfectly representing girls and their diversity, or for offering poor …show more content…

To me, and many others out there on the internet, it’s exhilarating to see Dunham, who does not fit into the mold of conventional beauty, be naked all the time. Although not everyone is on board for Dunham baring so much of her body. Howard Stern said of Dunham, “It’s a little fat girl who looks like Jonah Hill and keeps taking her clothes off and it kind of feels like a rape…it’s like I don’t want to see that”, Stern also added that he was “brave” for watching her (Krantz). Rachel Krantz concludes her article, “Enough About Lena Dunham 's Ass!” by saying, “And maybe it’s not the cellulite we find terrifying when we look at Dunham’s ass, but the fact that there she is, in TV world, looking just like us.” At least I know that’s why I love watching this show. I see a woman on TV whose body looks more like mine than any other woman I’ve seen. In Madison Clark’s undergraduate honors thesis, “Finding a Place in the History of Feminist Television: Sexuality in HBO 's "Girls” she states, “the series has set a new precedence for the depiction of female sexuality by choosing to include scenes that offer a contradiction to the well-known omission of unflattering sexual positions or the aftermath of intercourse” (24). In addition to Dunham’s Hannah being naked a good portion of the time, she’s not always naked in flattering positions as Clark states. When

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