The Crisis of Gender Representation: Why Is There So Much Press About HBO’s "Girls"?

 

Lena Dunham’s new HBO show, Girls, has only aired three episodes and is already the most Tweeted-about show ever. It has been criticized all over the internet for failing to represent twentysomething women accurately, for glorifying privilege, and for being whitewashed.

To review: In a recent Jezebel article, Madeleine Davies laments, “The show felt oddly alienating, managing to be both too broad and too niche all at the same time.”

Jenna Worthman of The Hairpin writes, “Girls was supposed to be for the people, by the people. It is for people like me… who were hungry for something relatable, something real.” She shamefully admits she likes the show because “It Gets. So. Many. Things. Right” but adds, “I just wish I saw a little more of myself on screen.”

John Cook of Gawker just does not like Girls, opening his first recap with, “Girls is a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are.” He also points out that the only person of color in the pilot is "a magical jolly homeless black man."

While some of these critiques of privilege, unrelatablility, and the show’s white monopoly hold strong value, the question is: Why is Girls talked about as if it were a failed manifesto for Generation Y women?

Given the multiple arguments that Girls is problematic because it claims to be a voice of a young, urban generation and instead is crippled from doing so because of its privilege and whiteness, why aren’t critics pointing to other shows with primarily affluent young white characters living in New York City? If this is the criterion for judgment, why not point fingers at How I Met Your Mother, Seinfeld or Friends as problematic representations of race and class? Why is Girls so unrelatable based on its portrayal of privilege and whiteness while these other shows manage to be relatable?

Could it be that this is a crisis of gender representation?

To borrow from literary theorist Edward Said, the “crisis of representation” refers to the anxiety over representing changing objects and entities, from race to genre to time period. Every representation inevitably fails to represent the whole because singular experiences always vary. In the case of Girls, could the large-scale criticism be informed by an anxiety of representing contemporary young women?

This is not a new phenomenon for shows about women. When Sex and The City came out, there was widespread criticism of the show’s representation of thirtysomething women as bourgeois and unrealistic (Carrie’s apartment has been extensively analyzed by real estate agents and it has been determined that, no, neither the fictional $2,800 rent nor the real $9,650,000 price tag are within her journalist price range). What is unique about the criticism of class and race in SATC and Girls is that such analysis has not been popularly applied to characters in Seinfeld or other coed shows.

The show, like nearly every other television show, is about a specific group. Why, then, is there so much pressure on Girls to represent young women on the whole?

More importantly, why is there so much anxiety over representations of women on predominantly female shows?