Another image: What is Lena Dunham selling?

I don't know if anyone else found it odd that no one else found it odd that only weeks after Hanna Rosin's book suggesting that men were struggling, washed up, basically over, we had a whole lot of hand wringing over a study that men supposedly still get paid more than women do for equal work. Rosin is going to hate us for being feeble and the authors of the study on income inequality want to hate us for using our seemingly unvanquished power to rig the game in our favour.

You see things like that and the temptation is to quote Fitzgerald:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

But notice the next, rarely quoted line from Fitzgerald:

One should, for example, be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

And this is the opposite of the feminist enterprise these days which seems determined to maintain hopelessness so that women will forever need help from feminists and the government.

Which brings me to Lena Dunham. Yes, I know, everyone else has had a shot at this. But I want to call your attention not to the larger political issues but to some odd contradictions within the video and within everything Dunham does. Look at this image and think of the words she says at this moment in her infamous video:

She starts off,

"It should be a guy with beautiful..."

And then there is a pause as she tries to think of what to say next. She fails but then suddenly starts anew with,

"Someone who really cares about and understands women."

That's bad enough to be from a Harlequin Romance novel. The whole thing is constructed to convey uncertainty and even helplessness.

This is contradictory on so many levels it's just weird. Just a couple of examples here:

1. Dunham is  famous (well in some circles anyway) as the creator of a show that portrays girls like her as very experienced sexually and yet the ad encourages young women to think of themselves as hesitant virgins. You may say, "It's tongue in cheek," but it isn't tongue in cheek about sex. You'd have to be insecure about yourself sexually for this ad to speak to you.
2. The ad is supposedly feminist in tone and yet treats women as tender little flowers who need a male hero to lead and protect them.

And why can't she meet our eyes? Over and over again in the video, she says something meant to be forceful and then immediately looks away. People typically look down and away like that when they are uncertain about how you'll respond to what they are saying. For example, when they are lying or when they think you're going to reject what they are about to ask or propose.

Remember, the viewer is the virgin that Lena is pandering Obama to and yet she is acting as if she is the victim!

If you went to college, you know the Lena Dunham type. Good looking, upper middle class, always had it good and yet deeply insecure. She is deeply inconsistent in her moral reactions: you will see her put up with disrespectful and even debasing treatment from her lover only to turn around and rip into her best girlfriend for what should have been an easily overlooked trifle. She is both passive and aggressive. She doesn't think of herself as a liar because the person she lies to most often is herself but her every expression suggests shy dupicity:

The tattoos are a big problem. One you could write off as a momentary indiscretion, a bad judgment she could grow out of, but she has almost a full shoulder of them showing and I believe there are more when she takes off her shirt. She is a train wreck waiting to happen.

Joe Frazier told an interesting story about when Ali worked his famous rope-a-dope strategy on him. It was late in the fight and Frazier was way ahead on points but had worn himself out scoring them. He landed one punch fairly squarely on Ali and Ali said, "Is that all of you got Joe?"

Frazier, telling the story, said, "And I thought, well yes, that is all I've got."

A woman like Dunham has used all her strength scoring points against an opponent entirely of her own imagining. When Dunham finishes talking, no matter what she is talking about, Ali's question hangs in the air: "Is that all you've got Lena?" Only there is no one there to ask it.

It hardly needs to be asked though. Look at her face, she knows that is all she has. Twenty-six years old, pretty, born into a life of privilege and this is all she has got.

And that is what she is selling. You wanna buy?