Emerged adulthood

Lena Dunham's New Yorker essay about how puppies are nice was what finally permitted me to articulate what it is about Dunham's persona that grates. And no, it wasn't that I too think puppies are nice, and yet the New Yorker didn't ask meeee to write about it. Nor even that her face is there looking at you every time you open the magazine's app, for reasons I don't entirely understand. (She made a video explaining it? and one must be alerted to its existence every week?) Nor is it that she comes from privilege* (she is, as we all know, next in line for the British throne), nor that she doesn't resemble a "Friends"-era Jennifer Aniston.

No, it's something much more simple than that. It's that the Dunham persona is a child. A child in whom we must celebrate any glimmer of adult competence. The essay ends with Dunham saying, of her new dog, "He is mine, and I am old enough to have him," adding of herself, her boyfriend, and her sister, "We are all adults here." And this seems consistent with the tone of other Dunham alter egos elsewhere in her oeuvre. The reason for the Marnie character.

Now. Dunham is 26 years old, nearly 27 (thank you, internet, for such trivia). That is not emerging adulthood. That is emerged adulthood. It's adulthood even for those who aren't as well-established in their careers as Dunham famously is. Why should we be surprised that a grown woman has a boyfriend, or is able to care for a dog? Why, more generally, should we be surprised that Dunham isn't a child anymore, any more than we're surprised when anyone else comes of age and then some? 

It's because of an aw-shucks persona of sorts, this idea that Dunham and the alter egos are such messes, such eternal bratty children, that we should be impressed when they reveal themselves capable of tying their shoes. And this is grating for several reasons. We who are about her age have felt like adults for a good long while. Moreover, we suspect that Dunham has as well. We suspect that the self-presentation as an overgrown (age! not a body-snark!) petulant teen is calculated, with two aims: first, to make Dunham seem like a child prodigy ala Tavi Gevinson (who was legitimately famous at, what, twelve?), and second, to tap into cultural anxieties about adult children living in the proverbial basement. 

Re: the first, this is a bit like scrappiness oneupmanship - all achievements are more impressive if done by someone from a poor background, or if done by a child. If Dunham is a pseudo-child, and we're impressed that she tied her own shoes, we need to be positively awed that she's on HBO and in the New Yorker. The hype about Dunham being so young to be that successful needs to last as long as possible. Re: the second, the possibility that you or your adult child (depending your age) will never quite make it to self-sufficient adulthood is really the concern of the moment. Dunham embodies that, all the while having her act together far more than most definitive adults decades into adulthood. So some of the eye-rolls the Dunham phenomenon inspires might not be resentment over her being successful at a young age (or the expected gender/privilege/looks angle), but rather annoyance over her persona's reliance on eternal youth. 

*Dunham is not helping matters, referring to her Tribeca-loft upbringing as follows: "We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway."