Lena Dunham and intersibling abuse
Let’s start out this way: I cannot stand Lena Dunham. Can’t stand her show, her attitude, her politics, you name it. And I haven’t read her book, and don’t have any intention of doing so.
Also, it goes without saying that I’m against child abuse, sexual or otherwise. But I’ll say it anyway, just to make it crystal clear.
However, I think the allegations that Dunham sexually abused her little sister, based on the evidence in her memoir, are somewhat over-the-top or at least misdirected.
First, the evidence of the abuse, from Kevin Williamson writing in National Review, based on Dunham’s new memoir:
Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina ”” “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation.
Here’s the definition of “child-on-child sexual abuse”:
The term has been defined as sexual activity between children that occurs “without consent, without equality, or as a result of coercion”. This includes when one of the children uses physical force, threats, trickery or emotional manipulation to elicit cooperation. Child-on-child sexual abuse is further differentiated from normative sexual play or anatomical curiosity and exploration (i.e. “playing doctor”) because child-on-child sexual abuse is an overt and deliberate action directed at sexual stimulation, including orgasm. In many instances, the initiator exploits the other child’s naé¯veté, and the victim is unaware of the nature of what is happening to them. When sexual abuse is perpetrated by one sibling upon another, it is known as “intersibling abuse”.
Using that definition, we can see that what Dunham did was borderline and could possibly be considered abuse but not necessarily. She did use trickery and/or coercion, for example, taking advantage of her sister’s naivete, but that seems to have been in order to kiss her on the lips. She did look at her vagina (or, as Althouse writes, probably more accurately her vulva), but the aim there seems to have been more curiosity than stimulation; that’s what puts it in the gray area. And it’s not at all clear that her sister was even aware of Dunham’s masturbation, although she was nearby (by the way, Dunham was seven and her sister was one at the time).
In contrast, let’s look at what’s considered normal childhood sexual play:
Preschool (0-5 Years)
Young children frequently use limited sexual language that centers around body parts and the differences children see in genders. They sometimes explore body parts of other children, usually in the form of play, such as playing doctor or house. Children may also touch their own body parts and may even rub up against something to get the same sensation. Children at this age usually can be redirected easily and do not show signs of distress when told to stop the behavior.School Age (6-11 Years)
The use of sexual words and sexual conversation is more common and frequent during these years. Experimenting with other children is also common and may take the form of “games” with same-age peers. This may include kissing, fondling, and “you show me, I’ll show you” types of behavior. Self-stimulation is also common at home or in private places but rarely happens in public. There are usually a great number of questions from children at this age about menstruation, pregnancy, and sexual behavior.
So we have a lot of curiosity and play at these ages. But one of the important ways to distinguish between play and abuse is difference in ages or coercion (some states even have a rule that children must have 5 years difference in ages for there to be sexual abuse).
So let’s say that what Dunham is describing is sexual abuse, although it’s somewhat unclear. However, as even Williamson acknowledges, the most important actors here would have been Dunham’s parents, who were guilty of setting the tone with a profound—and I mean profound—flaunting [correction: flouting] of sexual boundaries. From Williamson:
If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions ”” “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”
A seven-year-old child is very much under the influence of his/her parents. We don’t criminalize the behavior of a seven-year-old, nor punish them in the same way as an adult, because of this and because they simply don’t have the sort of maturity to make fully moral decisions and then to accept full responsibility for them. Think about the situation here: according to the passage above (which is based on Dunham’s book), there were photos all around the house of Dunham’s mother openly (and I mean that literally) displaying her genitalia. Why on earth would Dunham have thought it especially out of line to take a look at her own baby sister’s?
The child abusers here were the parents, although not in the technical, hard-core sense of rapists, but in the sense of a flagrant and deliberate flaunting [correction: flouting] of boundaries. In such an atmosphere, children often become both confused and hyper-sexualized. And I believe that’s what happened to Dunham.
I’m not disagreeing with you about the culpability of the parents. I’ve had the same thought myself. But I think it’s worth noting that, from what I’ve heard, the book seems to indicate that Lena continued to do things with/to her sister at least through her 17th year.
From the sound of things, the girl’s so screwed up that she probably thinks black is white. And the same seems to apply to her sister, who gave a very “why can’t you people be more accepting?” response to the information in the autobiography.
junior:
Through the 17th year would put it in a different category. Do you have a link for that? I hadn’t seen it.
I saw it noted elsewhere that while Dunham may have done those things at 7 and thought them normal, she’s now close to 30, writing about them for all the world to see, and defending them as normal. She should know better, now.
junior: The age 17 was apparently given in the original Truth Revolt piece but was later corrected:
According to the impeccable Daily Mail (UK):
“They also originally wrote that Dunham was 17 at the time of the incident, and later added a correction saying ‘This article has been modified to correct a typo in the book excerpt incorrectly listing Dunham’s age as seventeen’. “
Neo:
My God, what parents. I read the Mark Hemingway piece this morning and thought it was good, but wish I hadn’t followed the link he gave to photos of the father’s “art”.
And Mr. Dunham the artist is both rich and famous (as an artist)?
Imagine hanging one of his “masterpieces” over the old mantel…
Here is the Truth Revolt article I saw; their third quote from the book is where she implies that she was as old as 17, or at least a teen old enough to read Anne Sexton. I didn’t worry too much about the seven-year-old stuff either. But imagine if this were a teenage boy bragging. (A certain amount of remorse, though, could have mitigated even that.) I just wish she hadn’t sounded so proud of herself about the whole thing.
http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/lena-dunham-threatens-sue-truth-revolt-quoting-her
Now that I posted, I saw the new comments above. So is the third quote the one that was changed? I don’t think she was reading Anne Sexton at age 7. I’m so confused…:)
Here are two quotes from the book that put Dunham at an older age:
and
Suellen Holland:
Truth Revolt issued that correction about the age only for the vagina incident, not the later Anne Sexton stuff.
Ah, wouldn’t that be “flouting of sexual boundaries”? Yes, I know, I’m obsessive.
Dunham must be worried that she’s stepped onto a third rail — she’s issued an “apology” statement via Time:
Yeah, sorry if I wasn’t clear. The “pebbles in younger sister’s genitals” incident was when Lena Dunham was age 7, iirc (and her sister was age 1). This is the incident that Lena keeps focusing on, no doubt in part because her age means she can wave it off as “silly things kids do”. But the book makes it clear that other things were still happening, without going into the same level of detail as to what those things where.
I think I read a comment somewhere yesterday that mentioned a pic of Lena at age 12 with her sister, and the latter was dressed up as a “Hell’s Angels Sex Slave”. The commenter was wondering how exactly 12 year old Lena even knew what that was.
The whole thing is creepy, not only the incidents, but the way in which Dunham describes them. She seems to take pleasure in how she manipulated and at times, sexualized her sister when they were children and apparently continues to do so as an adult in the way she appropriates her sister’s private life for “art.” For example, there’s an NYT article in which Lena and Grace disagree about how quickly Lena “outed” her to their parents after Grace confided in her about being a lesbian:
Grace rolled her eyes. “Without getting into specifics,” she said, “most of our fights have revolved around my feeling like Lena took her approach to her own personal life and made my personal life her property.”
“Basically, it’s like I can’t keep any of my own secrets,” Dunham said. “And I consider Grace to be an extension of me, and therefore I couldn’t handle the fact that she’s a very private person with her own value system and her own aesthetic and that we do different things.”
And then there’s this: https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/529313381170577408
Is it abuse? Who knows at this point. It’s not normal, and her reaction seems to indicate that she’s still not aware of that, or that she even really cares.
I am sick of Hollywood and the media foisting this privileged, damaged woman on us as if she’s representative of her generation or women in general.
Lizzy:
That comes under the heading of “boundary issues.” Like what I criticized about the parents.
Another term is “enmeshment,” although that’s usually reserved for a cross-generational lack of boundaries.
Surellin:
Fixed!
They flouted boundaries, but they flaunted something else (lack of boundaries, I guess, plus genitalia).
Ann:
Neither of those quotes you gave at 2:17 is evidence of sexual abuse, although both are boundary violations.
There is no indication (as I wrote before) that her sister was aware of or watching as Lena slipped her hand into her underwear. That’s Lena’s OWN underwear, not her sister’s.
Kissing is another boundary violation more than sexual abuse. The “sexual predator” analogy refers to the bribery and cajoling, not the acts.
Whether or not it’s abuse in some clinical or legal sense–which I tend to agree that it’s not–it is indeed very creepy, as Lizzy says. What’s maybe most striking to me is that she wrote this stuff–in a book, which she wants people to buy–but thinks the expressions of disgust from some people who read it are somehow out of bounds, sending her into a “rage spiral,” no less.
Consider: if this were a memoir from a man (or I guess I should say 28-year-old boy), would not a confession such as this be met with the most ferocious condemnation from feminists? He would probably be permanently stigmatized.
The [social] experiment must go on…
I also read someone say just imagine the reaction of the feminist left if this had been written by Bristol Palin.
Whether or not it’s abuse, can I just say that I have had it with deviant behavior being paraded as normal, and traditional behavior being demonized?
The only reason we’re discussing this is because Dunham wrote it in a book (a continuation of her self-absorption as art) and no one at her publishers thought is concerning. And I suppose they wouldn’t after watching Dunham’s movie and HBO show. She has been celebrated by Hollywood and the media for several years for just this sort of provocative behavior. Similar to the artist who creates “art” by canning their own excrement, our culture now celebrates these weird, not particularly talented people. And we’re the jerks for happening to notice. It’s gotten so tiresome.
Several years ago, before Dunham’s TV show “Girls” (which I’ve never seen) hit HBO, I watched her film “Tiny Furniture.” In the film, she cast herself and her family as the actors in a somewhat-autobiographical, probably somewhat fictionalized tale of herself as a new Oberlin grad freshly returned home to live in NYC with her sophisticated, arty, affluent parents and sister, and with no job nor any idea what to do with herself other than have sad-sack sexual hookups with people she didn’t like and who didn’t like her — once in a culvert or something in a city street — out of what seemed to be an irresistible compulsion to make herself unhappy through sex. I’d never heard of her (and now, after everything that came later, wish I never HAD heard of her) but at the time, I found the film thought-provoking. I spent some thought puzzling over what could have made an apparently-bright, privileged young person so hyper-interested in sex and yet so unhappy about it, so enmeshed with her parents and sister and yet so unhappy about THAT, so self-absorbed and yet so unhappy about herself, and so cluelessly lost in the world. (The mother in the film treated the Lena character quite neglectfully, FWIW; barely seemed to notice when she arrived home from college, nor to care what she did with herself afterward.)
Ms. Dunham is no longer lost in the world, I guess, but as for how she became so hypersexualized, enmeshed, self-absorbed and unhappy, the potential reasons are becoming clear.
Lizzy –
It’s entirely possible that her publishers didn’t even bother to read the book. After all, they probably weren’t concerned with anything other than the fact that they had LENA DUNHAM’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY!!1! to publish.
In fact, I’ve seen it suggested that Kevin Williamson at NRO was quite possibly the first person to actually read the thing, given the initial lack of reaction to it. And ironically, he read it as an afterthought. His writing schedule needed filling, and the book was sitting down toward the bottom of the “to do” list at NRO. Otherwise he wouldn’t have cracked it open.
Of course, the opposite (and creepy) take on the lack of reaction from the publishers is that they were aware of what was in it, and thought that it wasn’t out of the ordinary…
From a Rolling Stone profile piece on Dunham in 2013:
and a quote from her mom:
and one more from Dunham:
These folks live in an alternate universe. Or they just make stuff up for the sake of “art”.
Seems the book actually had an editor — Andy Ward, an executive editor at Random House. He may have read it, since Dunham said this when she received her $3.5 million advance:
What? No clinical psych’s visiting the topic? No more of that old nature vs. nurture debate these days on “certain topics”?
When I first read about this, I filed it under the “merely creepy” category.
Until reading that her sister Grace grew up to become a devotee of the common practice of the inhabitants of the Isle of Lesbos.
In considering that these are merely the things Lena Dunham cops to in her memoirs, I wonder exactly how much guilt Ms. Dunham was trying to expatiate here. Unburden, much?
And then there’s the addition of the “Well, it’s your imagination; it didn’t really happen” smoking gun, if you will.
What the hell.
I’ve now moved it from the “merely creepy” to the “tainted by the smell of evil” category.
The [politically incorrect] screen play almost writes itself.
This is deeply disturbing. Not. Amused.
Ann:
As I said, Lena and her sister appear to have been raised in a highly sexualized environment. That environment may have been rationalized by her parents as being part of their art, but it tends to confuse a child with a lot of sexualized content he/she isn’t ready for.
I wonder whether the therapy Lena had as a child was individual child therapy rather than family therapy. My guess would be it was, although I don’t know. A family therapist might (accent on the “might”) have had a better chance of picking up on the boundary issues.
Like a Kennedy skiing into a tree.
No real reason to care if you take the meaning of their life on their own terms.
DNW:
I fail to get your analogy.
Neoneocon –
A commenter elsewhere stated that the therapy started because Lena wasn’t doing her homework.
Keep in mind that I’ve no idea of the source for that, or the accuracy.
Lizzy – “can I just say that I have had it with deviant behavior being paraded as normal”.
Preach it sister!
I’m in the minority here and don’t feel like going into an extended defense of her film TINY FURNITURE or the first two seasons of GIRLS (which I watched as a unit on DVD) but I greatly enjoyed both.
I might compare her work to HAPPINESS and STORYTELLING by Todd Solondz, insofar as you’re watching basically unpleasant characters who learn nothing from their travails.
This material constantly makes the viewer uncomfortable and this means that none of what amuses arrives without barbs.
Larry David might be another point of reference.
Whereas Woody Allen in his films of the 70s moved into the somewhat repellent fantasy of him possessing (and breaking the heart of) the 16 year old Mariel Hemingway in the unversally lauded MANHATTAN to this point at least — whatever she does outside the frame of her fiction — within her show Dunham’s pudgy, not-too-bright, needy character fails again and again, over and over, and cannot compete with the young model-types she may have as friends, not on that level, and this engenders sympathy for a character who’s not really too sympathetic.
Those who focus on her looks and go ad hominem as their first response play right into her game. It’s like criticizing the self-portraits of Jenny Saville because they don’t look like centerfolds.
The off-screen persona only detracts from the art, but the “cult of personality” is all the MSM wants and you can’t avoid them these days.