Lena Dunham: Rape Envy in the New Magical Slut Psychology
Helen Gurley Brown, America’s first national magical slut, is trending again thanks to Lena Dunham.
We have heard about the magical negro. He or she is the black character whose extraordinary sagacity rescues hapless white people from themselves. But sex consciousness is more foundational than race consciousness. For the past sixty years American society has been revolutionized not by magical black people, but by a far more powerful sexual superhero – the national magical slut. It is the teachings and examples of the male and female promiscuity gurus that fundamentally transformed American society.
Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown were the founding parents of vast entertainment and publishing enterprises devoted to promoting a procession of magical sluts, and America has never been the same. Prior to them there were many actors and writers who had “it.” But Hefner and Gurley Brown were cultural pioneers, whose unambiguous purposes were to destroy the Judeo-Christian moral code, to separate the privilege of sex from sanctified marriage, and to normalize a view of human beings as all sexual all the time.
Lena Dunham is the new standard-bearer of this enormously lucrative magical slut tradition. But she also represents a transition in the franchise from a purely sexual platform to an emphasis on sex politics, especially the sexual victimization narrative. Her recent rape hoax, in my opinion, featured in her book, is a libel wrapped in a lie surrounded by a myth. In reality, there has been a recent dramatic decrease in campus rapes, and there is no credible evidence that Lena Dunham was ever raped by Barry.
Lena Dunham’s deception can be psychoanalyzed as resulting from unconscious rape envy. Dunham’s magical slut narrative is a transition from pure mindless salaciousness to the feminist politics of victimology. Today’s all-American magical slut, especially one with literary pretensions, must divide her attention between the nonexistent persecution of LGBTQ nationals and a false narrative about a worsening rape crisis against heterosexual women. By falsely claiming to be a rape victim herself, Dunham joins a cherished victim category, she helps neutralize the problem of being “privileged,” and she appropriates virtue that she lacks.
In her introduction to Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham pays homage to Gurley Brown: “But despite her demented theories, which jibe not even a little bit with my distinctly feminist upbringing, I appreciate the way Helen shares her own embarrassing, acne-ridden history in an attempt to say, Look, happiness and satisfaction can happen to anyone.” Dunham thereby differentiates herself politically from a founding figure of women’s sexual liberation. Gurley Brown was about sex; Dunham is about sex politics.
Lena Dunham was groomed for her chance to be a big-bucks magical slut from the day she was born. She was raised in Manhattan precincts that offer the most concentrated atmosphere of eroto-centric politics a young girl can inhale. The paintings of her father, Carroll Dunham, are an oeuvre of orifices, shocking even to the degenerate sensibilities of the urban art world. They have been praised by art critic David Pagel in the Los Angeles Times as “[v]ulgar beyond belief... It's easy to see why many people find them offensive, demeaning and disgusting, as well as mean-spirited, malicious and horrific. They are all that and more.” Dunham also credits her mother, Laurie Simmons, with an indefatigable permissiveness towards her daughter.
But nudity and promiscuity are not enough gravitas for a national slut in 2014. There must be social service, which in Dunham’s case is political advocacy for the left wing’s imaginary victim classes. Lena Dunham obsessively supports her sister’s lesbian activism. But she could not resist the sine qua non credential of an autobiographically driven literary trollop: imagining herself as a rape victim.
In the Chapter “Girls and Jerks,” Lena writes that she was at a party of Oberlin students and had taken alcohol, Xanax, and cocaine when she met the creepy campus Republican, Barry. Dunham leaves the party with Barry, and they walk to a nearby parking lot, where she is cogent enough to request that Barry look away as she pulls down her pants to “pee.” Allegedly, Barry takes this opportunity to jam his fingers into the genitals of his new acquaintance “like he’s trying to plug me up, I’m not sure whether I can’t stop it or I don’t want to.” Then she brings Barry to her apartment for sex. During intercourse, Dunham chooses to start moaning with pleasure and tells Barry the Republican how much she is enjoying herself. She subsequently explains that this was to gain a sense of empowerment during sex.
Nine years later, she sells this nonsense as a rape to Random House, who happily buy it for all the anticipated cha-ching. A major magical slut can make many fortunes for entertainment and publishing interests. In her 10/01/14 interview with Howard Stern, one of the most lucrative obscenity franchises ever, after the two warmly reminisce about Fartman, Dunham explains the special sacrifice to her constituency she made by identifying herself as a rape victim: “We’re living in a moment where, you know, campus assault is an epidemic. The amount [sic] of young women who don’t feel safe on their own campuses and are violated by people they don’t know and don’t… and blame themselves because they’re indulging in typical college behaviors like drinking or so so many of these young women are speaking out it gave me the strength to talk about something that I’d been through that had been very challenging to make peace with.”
Freud said anatomy is destiny. He theorized that the anatomical differences between men and women cause unconscious anxiety in both sexes. In women, this is conjectured to be unconscious envy for what they do not have, in men an unresolvable anxiety for what they may lose (snip, snip). For Lena Dunham, politics is destiny, religion, and art. Her world is also dualistic, divided into victims (women, gays, people of color) and victimizers. The worst victimizer of all is the ranging beast Barry the Republican. Lena Dunham unconsciously envies the experience of being raped because it enables her to transcend that duality and join the admired group of victims.
Being a rape victim also purloins virtue, which exists only in Dunham’s imagination, in my opinion. Or maybe a cigar is just a cigar, and she told a pack of lies to sell books. She is, after all, that kind of a girl.