The New Neo

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.