The millionth thing you've read about Lena Dunham and privilege

The new "Sex and the City," in case you missed that.

Lena Dunham explains it all. Not as in explains it all to us - that too - but her mere existence now represents an entire conversation about class, young-people-today, body-image, etc., etc. There's Dunham, looking at us as we read on Jezebel about how we can read in The Nation about the difference between broke and poor. I promise I have thoughts on this as well (and the short version is, it's gotten very popular these days to define as "broke" a great many people who are poor), but for the mean time, Lena Dunham. Or a Dunham alter ego? It hardly matters - her immediately recognizable face announces Privilege, summons fury, yes, but a very particular kind of fury, namely YPIS. Someone on Twitter called "the Frenemy" put it best: "Lena Dunham only won because her dad is a Golden Globe."

So what is she, then? A decadent anti-hero? A George Costanza for our times, who represents the worst in all of us, our worst fears? (That a wide-ranging commentariat has seen us naked and isn't impressed, and that we come across as entitled.) Given that the near-entirety of mainstream show business is white people with family connections, we might also ask why someone whose connections aren't even in show business, and who, while white, lacks the specific kind of whiteness-privileged possessed by Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Kate Hudson, and whichever other famous-daughters-of-famous-people, namely fitting the most conventional beauty standards possible... why such an individual inspires such YPIS. Is the problem that Dunham presents herself as ordinary? Is it somehow offensive to audiences that she doesn't acknowledge her native-New-Yorker privilege by getting her hair done at Bergdorf's? Why is she, of all performer-creators, the one asked and asked again to step aside on behalf of someone more deserving?

I might take this even further, and consider how critiques of systematic unfairness often end up punishing relatively powerful intermediaries rather than those in the positions of greatest power. This happens with NYC schools - however valid both questions may be to investigate, it's much easier to ask why elite public schools are predominantly (lower-?) middle-class and Asian than to ask why private schools serve wealthy white families. Similarly, someone like Dunham, whose status is more precarious, who frankly wasn't born into stardom, just posher circumstances than most, is easier to pick on than someone like Kate Hudson. (Paltrow, with her lifestyle-empress aspirations, is another matter.) And yes, I do get the sense that people consider it unfair that a young woman got so successful so fast for reasons other than her physical desirability. (Not that she's undesirable, just that her talent/self-promotional ability seems more the issue.) There's this sense that there's a natural order of things - of course rich white kids go to the actual fanciest schools, and of course the pretty daughters of movie stars are box-office sensations. These things we just accept. But when someone shakes things up from the middle, or upper-middle, there we can unleash whichever populist outrage.

The above are most decidedly not my fully-formed thoughts on this. But if my musings inspire musings of your own, comment away.