I wouldn’t have thought twice about most of these–the Downton Abbey gal’s, for instance, seems fine to me–but the first one is pretty awful even to my uncritical eye.

One thing I’ll always remember is her small but memorable and haunting part in the movie Serenity where (spoiler alert)

she gets devoured live, just off-camera, by mutant “Reavers”.

On her IMDb page, which I linked above, you can see her picture, in which she’s blonde. Usually she is, in my experience. This is how I remember her. What I want to know, though, is whether she had plastic surgery. Her mouth looks sorta odd and unnatural.

Dunham’s “thing” is to look as dumpy as possible. It’s intentional; I think she could look a lot better, although never really sensational. But “dumpy” is the niche she’s staked out. She’s got that territory covered.

I’m fascinated by Lena Dunham, in the same way I gawk at a car accident. She may well be bright and semi-talented, but she is practically the Platonic ideal of “plain and dumpy.” And she’s at the height of her potential attractiveness. Poor girl, it’s all downhill from here. Look at what happened to Anita Ekberg over the decades, and imagine what will happen to Dunham…. *shudder*

It reminds me of measles.

“One can’t help thinking, Daddy, what a colourless life a man is forced to lead, when one reflects that chiffon and Venetian point and hand embroidery and Irish crochet are to him mere empty words. Whereas a woman–whether she is interested in babies or microbes or husbands or poetry or servants or parallelograms or gardens or Plato or bridge [or politics or jelly beans or ballet or jello]–is fundamentally and always interested in clothes.”