Why The Left Can’t Handle Lena Dunham
By Kelly Thomas | December 22, 2016, 8:23 EST
Unless you haven’t been paying attention, you know what Lena Dunham said about abortion.
Dunham, whose main claim to fame is the rather sad social commentary sitcom Girls, told an interviewer on the “Woman of the Hour” podcast Tuesday that she was once approached by a young girl doing a project on women who have had abortions. Dunham said she told the girl she’d never had an abortion. It was (perhaps) a refreshing moment of honesty for Dunham, who in the past has had few qualms in laying claim to traumatic experiences, including accounts that were later found to be largely fabricated – I refer to the bizarre tales of sexual assault in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.
However, instead of simply stopping the vignette there, Dunham went so far as to say that though she had not had an abortion, she wished she had.
“And I realized then that even I was carrying within myself stigma around this issue.” Dunham said, adding: “Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.”
Well. The floodgates opened. But this time, it was not conservatives who gasped in horror and dismay. Frankly, we’re used to Lena. The poor young woman makes a living out of making crude shock-and-awe statements. It’s hard to take her pedestrian attempts seriously anymore. When facing the attack on conservative values brought on by the past eight years of an Obama presidency, one woman of modest ability wearing a fallopian-tube sweater and ranting about “the patriarchy” is just not a priority.
No, this time, it was Dunham’s beloved liberals who were left aghast and agape. She had committed the one sin for which there is no forgiveness on the Left. She displayed. …privilege.
Dear God, say it isn’t so, bemoaned the social justice warriors as they picked up their stones to dispatch Dunham — not for casually wishing she had murdered an innocent life, but for “trivializing” or “glorifying” abortion from her perch as an affluent white woman.
Erin Gloria Ryan, the editor of the Daily Beast, wrote: “[Abortion] is one of the most safe and common medical procedures…What we don’t need are actresses with messiah complexes issuing ignorant and irresponsible comments about wishing they’d had one of their own, suggesting that having an abortion is a coveted status.”
Ooops. Did you catch that? That little bit of hypocrisy? It’s subtle, but it’s there.
The brutal paradox of this whole fiasco, which would almost be humorous if it were not for its tragic realities, is that the Left is crucifying Dunham for doing the very thing they’ve been trying to accomplish for decades: she glorified abortion. She treated it as a badge of honor. She voiced her wish to be able to stand in solidarity with other women who had undergone such a procedure.
The champions of abortion in this country have worked tirelessly to make abortion not only normal, but a point of pride. Wendy Davis started her campaign #Shoutyourabortion, using the tagline “abortion is freedom.” Planned Parenthood sold “I had an abortion” paraphernalia. Salon made a “best abortion in TV” list, complete with a song titled “Get Dat Fetus Kill Dat Fetus” which they lauded as a great workout jam.
Is it any wonder, then, that Lena spoke as she did? She simply brought the Left’s view of abortion to fruition, and boy did it make them squirm.
Years of couching abortion in terms of “freedom” and “choice” and reducing it to a simple “procedure,” all the while praising the women who have them as fierce warriors, has produced Lena Dunham. And suddenly, they don’t like what they see; but in order to put a stop to the kind of language Dunham used, they’ll have to admit that there may be more to abortion than what they’ve been telling themselves.
Let’s see if they figure it out.
Kelly Thomas graduated from Georgetown University in 2015 and received her M.A. in Terrorism, Security, and Society from King’s College London. Read her past articles here.
