Here is a second piece I wrote about Lena Dunham, published at Thought Catalog
Dunham’s parents made certain she was exposed to images any reasonable person would consider pornographic from a very young age, and that exposure is consistent with the alleged abuse of her younger, more vulnerable sister.
Enjoy!
judgybitch 
While I haven’t done enough research to evaluate the statistics you cited about a higher proportion of people with same-sex attractions reporting that they were sexually abused as children — I see it as very wrong to view same-sex attraction as possible evidence that a person has been abused. After all, more women than men report that they were sexually abused as children, but we (at least those of us who are rational) don’t see being female as evidence of having been a victim of abuse.
As a mother of an openly-gay teen, I do my best to remain tolerant of kids who tell my daughter things like “No one is born gay; you’re gay because of something that was done to you.” Having been raised conservative Christian myself, I like to allow other people the room to be stupid in some areas just as I was, and to be lifelong learners just as I am. my daughter is younger and therefore less tolerant, and I admit that this was one aspect of parenting that I’d never predicted — the fact that some people would assume that I’d abused my child or allowed some abuser access to her, simply because of a difference.
I personally see our personality and preferences as the product of complex interactions between our genetics and our early environment, and I think the main reason many LGBT advocates insist that sexual preference is solely shaped by genetics is that those who cite environmental factors as a cause of same-sex attraction are pretty much citing negative factors such as, you guessed it, child sexual abuse.
As far as the particular case you’re citing, based on the book excerpts I read from your post the other day, I’d say that some of it seems abusive. It’s probably been more than seven years since it happened, so it’s past the statute of limitations for most states in the U.S., I believe. I honestly don’t see why you’d feel a need to look for more evidence beyond the stuff that she herself wrote; that’s pretty incriminating in and of itself, and I think it’s been a real wakeup call for her to realize that a large number of use do view her behavior as abusive.
I guess it goes to show that some people’s “normal” is very different from the “normal” of the majority of people. She may be regretting that she wrote it now, but maybe it will ultimately open her up to a process of self-examination and help her become a better person.
It’s kind of like how the Steubenville boys were shocked that not everyone thought the photos they posted were hilariously funny. I realize the big difference is that, as the photos were posted soon after the event and not seven years after the fact, they ended up with a rape conviction. And of course, if they’d posted photos like that seven years after the fact, while it probably would have been too late to prosecute them for rape, the crime of taking and posting photos of that nature of someone without their knowledge would have been current, so they most likely would have gone to jail for that.
LikeLike
What I can’t understand is why are people like Lena held up as role models, as an example of what people should strive to be, what success should look like? Regardless of what Lena has done, she is obviously a broken and damaged woman. This social elevating of the most dysfunctional women possible, kind of baffles me. It’s feminist women who seem to rally around that, something that ironically is really demeaning to women. What’s the message here? Be proud of your brokenness and your ability to inflict it upon others?
LikeLike
i hope that Lena is wishing that she hadn’t made those admissions. At bottom, what is making me so mad about all this is that she is subject to so little criticism. When it comes to sexuality, women are angels and boys are devils. With Lena, it’s in my face..
LikeLike
Lena’s actions as described by herself are absolutely, IMO and in that of other experts I have encountered, a cause of sexual dysfunction. Childhood sexual abuse is often cited for a woman’s/wife’s frigidity and repulsion to sex.
I’d say too, that Dunham’s ‘rage spiral’ – Rage. Doesn’t that require management? – is absolutely indicative of her own feelings of guilt.
If she was a Canadian MP in the Liberal Party, she’d have been booted.
LikeLike
I think it’s important to remember that nature is neither egalitarian nor politically correct. It is not at all farfetched that being abused as a child would affect a person’s sexuality as an adult, and therefore likely even their sexual orientation. How anyone feels about it doesn’t impact whether it’s actually the case.
It’s kind of like when a lesbian might take issue with the statistics indicating children growing up without a father (even in two-mother households) tend not to do as well, or women who take issue with the well-evidenced claim that men tend to naturally have better visuo-spatial reasoning skills, predisposing them to make up the majority of scientists and mathematicians. It doesn’t mean that a woman who is already a scientist shouldn’t be a scientist; it merely means that, if we let the chips fall where they may, there will be more male scientists than female ones.
Or for a personal example, height correlates with IQ, so does that mean the fact that I’m really short is evidence that I’m stupid? Since I’m already an intellectually competent adult (or so I like to believe at least), what would be the point of having a chip on my shoulder over a variable that correlates with another variable, neither of which I have any control over?
LikeLike
As to tallness versus shortness, I realize that some people do see tallness as better — though as a tall woman, I used to always envy the tiny, petite girls growing up, and I’ve actually been attracted to many men who were shorter than me. However, I’ve never heard anyone express the same degree of negativity towards tall or short people as I’ve heard some express towards gays.
I think that the more we grow into a society where a person’s sexual orientation is accepted as freely as that person’s height or preference for coffee vs. tea, the more comfortable we will all be about the “chips falling where they may” when it comes to interpreting research findings.
Currently, some people seem all too ready to look for evidence to back up their negative theories about a group they’re uncomfortable with. I have a hard time believing that many of these commentators are just “letting the chips fall where they may” — and indeed, given the unavoidably subjective nature of each and every human being (myself included), I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to fully trust ANYONE to randomly “let the chips fall where they may.” And that’s not so scary when debating stuff like do you prefer coffee or tea, but it’s very scary when debating stuff that strongly affects the people I love.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html
LikeLike
without getting into whether or not Lena is a sexual predator I have to ask what rational human being would want to tell the world about what she did? I just cant see a sane or level headed person reviewing those disturbing past events and then deciding that the rest of the world should know. If you look at some of her responses she actually seems surprised that this story has blown up the way it has which is nothing short of bizarre.
LikeLike
The first media reporting on this all managed to do just what the two outlets you mentioned did: Report the least damaging allegations in the best light possible and mention as much as possible the “conservative/right wing ” nature of the author. It was a coordinated effort to defend her, but the commenters were pretty uniform in their disgust.
LikeLike
Just because it serves a group of people’s interest to portray homosexuality as partly a result of child abuse does not mean that it isn’t so. It isn’t logical to reject a theory because its proponents may have ugly motives. An odious truth is still a truth, just as a beneficent lie is still a lie.
And, it can also happen that if you find the idea of something ‘negative’ contributing to sexual orientation, you may find yourself automatically labeling anybody who supports this hypothesis as homophobic without even considering that, maybe, they are simply motivated by the evidence, then at best you will make them resentful of your side, as worst, drive them into the arms of your opponents. The politicization of research is a two-way street. And I don’t think society will ever ‘grow’ out of these tendencies, since people unavoidable become emotionally invested in their political views and their views of what is considered socially acceptable, and this prevents them from being truly rational or dispassionate.
Incidentally, I live on a college campus, where homosexuality is quite accepted and there’s no shortage of rockbands. It is, however, no open-minded utopia. Expressing any view in contradiction with the standard liberal democratic identity politics narrative, however meekly, is likely to cost one friends or even grades. Doing research on things like race, gender, sexual orientation can be quite dangerous unless one already plans on coming to the orthodox conclusions. In fact, at Harvard, a student was censured by the university for mentioning that she considered it a possibility that there cognitive differences between ethnicities in a private email, not in a class, but in an email with a friend. Whether you agree with the opinion, the censorship is grotesque. Universities, once bastions of open discussion, have more thought-policing than almost any other type of community, and expressing any opinion that might be found ‘insensitive’ (likely including the opinion that child abuse affects sexual orientation) can be career-ending if the ‘right’ person complains. So that’s what I’m more worried about at the moment.
LikeLike
I’m not in favor of censoring or silencing ANYONE. So long as I can say my piece and be heard, everyone else can say theirs, too.
LikeLike
The message is that Lena Dunham is “different” from most other women, and is not ashamed of that, so she works as a poster child for feminism because she isn’t being constrained by “societal norms”, which feminists see as the greatest evil of all.
I am patiently waiting for feminism to applaud the next female serial killer as a “strong woman who rejected the norms of society and went out on her own to blaze new trails for feminism and femininity everywhere.”
This is very common among the more progressive-minded folk – that rejecting the way things are, for no other reason than to reject the way things are, is a noble goal and a purpose in and of itself, even if doing so accomplishes fuck-all and even if doing so rejects traditional, in place morality in a not-so-gray-area manner.
For instance, the same people that fucking die inside every time a gun is used to commit a violent act against white people, are pretty goddamned silent about condemning more “ethnic” types of violence, such as Islamic terrorism and urban gang violence, since supporting diversity and ethnicity against what they call the “status quo” (which was, in their opinion, all white, all the time) is more important than opposing violence.
LikeLike
That’s a good comment. I’m afraid you’re probably right. Perhaps there’s a shift coming or a backlash, hinted at by last week’s election? The faceless Julia with all her dysfunction and government dependance, kind of lost out to a couple of more traditional women. And Lena is currently taking a mental health break, proving her bold and unashamed declarations to be somewhat skin deep.
LikeLike
No shift coming, just the typical back-and-forth we’ve been seeing for the last 60 years, where we get tired of one party and vote in the other until we’re tired of them. I figure in 8 years the donks will be back in, if not before.
As for Lena’s mental health break, it is pretty typical for people to claim that they aren’t afraid of their greatest fear, and even flaunt it, in an attempt to inoculate themselves from it’s eventual materialization in their lives. This usually fails.
The person who claims that they care the least about what other people think about them, is likely the one who cares the most.
Lena was no exception.
i saw through that quite some time ago. There is no more fragile and weak being on Earth than the one who claims to be strongest. Lena is mentally unstable, and allowing her to flant that instability as a sign of strength was either monumental stupidity on the part of her handlers, or the darkest, most evil conniving you can imagine.
We need our Britney Spears style melt-downs every so often. It makes for good TV, don’t you know?
Fuck… I need to go have a drink.
LikeLike
Look at the environment in which she was raised. Her mother posted pornographic pictures of herself all over the house for her kids to look at. Her Dad painted stylized vulvas.
She probably had no idea that this would blow up, because she’s been raised in an environment where bold, in-your-face sexuality, and even sexual OBSESSION, is completely normal.
She was just exploring her sexuality, which can never be a bad thing, right?
/sarcasm
LikeLike