Member Since: 2/6/2012
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Lena Dunham accused of being a "faux sexual assault survivor
Quote:
The real problem with Dunham’s appearance is that she’s a faux survivor. Her media-acclaimed tale of being raped by a fellow student at Oberlin equates regretted bad sex with rape and promotes a narrative harmful to both men and women — including real victims.
Dunham’s chronicling of her sex life in Not That Kind of Girl includes an incident from her college years involving a “mustachioed campus Republican” named Barry (not his real name, she specified later, after a threat of legal action from an actual Barry who had been a Republican at Oberlin). At first, she describes it as a comical drunken encounter that she ended after noticing the condom hanging off her roommate’s potted tree. Then, in the next chapter, comes the shocking twist: Dunham says that the first narrative was a lie and the incident was really a rape about which she was in denial for a long time.
The second, “true” account goes like this. Dunham runs into Barry at a party and ends up taking him home. She thinks he’s “creepy” — and a Republican! — but she’s lonely, drunk, and high, and she even rebuffs a male friend who tries to stop her. At her place, she and Barry end up on the floor, “doing all the things grown-ups do” and attempting intercourse — though Barry is, well, not quite up to it. At some point, in her “haze of warm beer, Xanax bits, and poorly administered cocaine,” Lena notices that the condom is on the floor and tells Barry to put it back on, which he does. After some more sexual activity and another attempt at intercourse, she sees the condom on the potted tree and throws Barry out.
The next day, Dunham records this in her “intimacy database” as a “terribly aggressive” sexual encounter (she is sore for days afterward). Then, a friend in whom she confides tells her she was raped. Dunham laughs it off. But later on, with help from some of the writers on her show, Girls, she comes to believe that it was indeed rape.
We can all agree that an unconscious or barely conscious person cannot consent to sex. But how exactly was Dunham’s experience with Barry nonconsensual? She admits that she was a fully active participant and even verbalized her desire for sexual activity. (She explains this away as trying to pretend to herself that she was doing this by choice.) She admits that when she chose to end the encounter by telling Barry to leave, he complied. Yes, she was drunk and high — but by her own account, Barry was so drunk that the next day he couldn’t remember with whom he had been. So why is he more responsible than she is? What makes it rape?
“At no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough,” writes Dunham. Yet, even after the rough handling, she actively continued the physical intimacy and gave Barry verbal encouragement. She also says she didn’t consent to sex without a condom. But even if Barry deliberately took it off rather than lose it in the midst of a drunken fumble, does that make him a rapist or just a jerk? Can a man cry rape if a woman lies about birth control?
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Source: Lena Dunham is a Faux Sexual Assault Survivor: http://heatst.com/culture-wars/lena-...ault-survivor/
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