Lena Dunham is television’s It Girl of the moment. She is also probably the most public sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease in recent memory. The 26-year-old actress and director skyrocketed to fame last year with the success of her HBO show “Girls” and has been a mainstay at award shows and on magazine covers since then.
Tucked away towards the end of Rolling Stone’s recent cover story on Dunham is a lengthy passage on the spiritual mini-tour of India the star took with her mother (artist Laurie Simmons) late last year. From the article:
“I had this dumb, Western idea,” says Dunham. “Like, I’m going to go to India and it’s gonna be so transcendent that I’m not gonna be afraid of death anymore, and I’m going to lay down so many of my Western anxieties and embrace a new kind of knowingness and bring it back to the U.S.”
….
At age nine, Dunham had started following her mother’s practice of Transcendental Meditation- she stopped for many years, until she picked it up again with the help of a teacher [Judd] Apatow had met. It helps with her fear of death, which she describes as “a very primal, ‘I will be alone and unheard and everyone will be together somewhere else’ kind of feeling.” Somehow, she thought a trip to the birthplace of Buddhism would complete her journey.
Emphasis mine. The article doesn’t say it outright, but you can’t blame Dunham for wanting to go somewhere completely different after bursting onto the American public consciousness (and enduring what must have seemed like relentless criticism) the way that she and her artistic creation did. After all, it’s not unheard of for older, more established stars to flee to a different continent to find peace (see Chapelle, Dave.)
Of course, there have been countless travel narratives by Americans that have gone to India seeking spiritual enlightenment. Oftentimes in these stories there is an awkward moment when the devotee is forced to contrast the beauty and intensity of her faith (and it’s almost always a she) with the graphic reality of life in India. In her best seller “Eat, Pray, Love” Elizabeth Gilbert solved this problem by barely mentioning Indians or India at all. “Outside the walls of the Ashram, it is all dust and poverty,” was Gilbert’s only real description of the country.
Dunham, however, doesn’t gloss things over as she speaks to Rolling Stone at her “favorite Soho macrobiotic restaurant.” And because this is Lena Dunham in interview mode, things get awkward and semi-offensive pretty quickly.
Instead, it was overwhelming on every level, an “onslaught of pure humanity” that was a big challenge to her OCD-driven germ phobia. She ended up leaving early. “We do a really good job in this country of basically sealing off sick people and sealing off toilets and sealing off everything that lets us know we’re animals. And in India not only do they not do that, there’s no interest in doing that.”
Gah!!! Lena, Lena, Lena. I can’t even begin to express how frustrating and wrong that last sentence is. There’s so much interest in fixing all of those things. A quick Internet search comes up with these examples and I’m sure our readers can add countless others to the list.
But there’s more. We also learn that during her trip she sympathized more with “the stray dogs she saw than the poverty-stricken people.” This despite the fact that she thought those same people had “the most beautiful culture.” (As an aside, I can’t be the only one that naturally thinks of signs like this one whenever Indian people are being unfairly compared to dogs. And it also feels like she maybe didn’t learn from the uproar caused by that infamous burqa tweet she sent out last summer.)
Perhaps there’s hope for Dunham yet. The article concludes with her still “processing India; she’s still processing everything. There’s so much left to write, so much to learn, and the clock’s ticking.” Maybe one day as she settles into brunch at that very same macrobiotic restaurant she’ll realize that nobody in India or Brooklyn or anywhere else wants to live surrounded by disease, bacteria, or dirt. Rather, it’s just that progress can be agonizingly slow.
Thing is, I could go to upstate New York and find people who don’t mind living in dirt. Sometimes the degree of cleanliness is a cultural thing, and for someone who is OCD and accustomed to tolerating our very, very clean and tidy society (note: OCD people only tolerate it here! They’re still grossed out by half the things they see), a trip to somewhere with a lot of poor people with no experience living in a high-cleanliness area can bring a dire culture shock.
Of course India would benefit from having greater resources and facilities for sanitary control or just plain aesthetics… people with our standard of living know that. People who have lived all their lives at a lower standard of living usually don’t think much about it. They’re happy! They’re alive! They have a slightly increased rate of dying from infections/pathogens, but unless water supplies are fully tainted or food is hard to come by, they are ok with what’s going on. We’re the fussy ones who can’t handle a little dirt, trying to tell them what to do with their time and their money.
We don’t need to morally validate people by claiming they feel the need to live at the same standard that we do. They feel mostly fine they way they are. They’re not wrong. And we’re not helping unless we’re assisting in overall global economic development and extending opportunities, not just forcing other people to be insecure about their way of life.
(The comment about feeling more sorry for the stray dogs falls along the same lines, though was a lot more insensitive to human value. Still, around the world people don’t culturally feel much sympathy for stray animals, but here in wealthy areas of the US you’ll find a lot of PETA-card-carrying members who’d sooner throw themselves in front of a bus than let an orphaned cat go hungry. Some of it is basic empathy, but to the extent we take it, it’s yet another manifestation of our privilege and living standards)
Wow, a colossal load of stupid right there. Don’t confuse living in dirt as being the same as living in poverty. And don’t think that people who live in poverty somehow get used to it and enjoy it. Your first-world ignorance is beyond astounding.
No, living in dirt is not the same as living in poverty. I never said otherwise. You can be very rich and live a very dirty lifestyle, ala Grey Gardens. Or you can be very poor and yet extremely well-kempt.
No one wants to be poor but some people are very happy DESPITE not having the same living standards or cultural mores about strict cleanliness that people in the US do. They simply live on modest means. Our assumption that all of these people need to be considered as suffering in poverty is demeaning and presumptuous. Our ideas about India, in particular, along these lines is very upsetting to people who are from there. Yes, the poor areas need help – emergency supplies and shelter, and long-term economic relief. But not everyone in India is poor and desperate.
And then Lena Dunham was like, “I’ll see your orientalist romanticization and raise you colonialist disgust.”
WE HAVE TO CELEBRATE OUR DIFFERENCES!
I agree with you, the video is directed to the idiots who don’t.
I really try hard to like Lena Dunham. I admire that she took full advantage of opportunities given to her and worked hard to make her success happen.
But when she says shit like this, it just sets me back to disliking her immensely. While I respect that everyone has their own opinions on India and travels, I wish people would put some thought into it and express them in a respectful manner rather than mouth-vomiting the words out.
Particularly when they’re giving an interview to Rolling Stone.
*end rant*
so what would have been respectful in substantive terms? i can see the point of the critique, but often i feel that if you are white and commenting on a non-white society you’re going to be criticized no matter what you say from some angle. best strategy might be silence and separation…but does anyone want that?
Maybe instead of attributing the lack of sanitation to systemic inequality rather than “them” and saying “they do not do that [sanitation]”?
Maybe trying to understand that systemic inequality leads to many places lacking the kind of sanitation that’s considered expected in the US rather than attributing it to Indians not wanting it?
Maybe white people shouldn’t spout off their ignorance so much then. At least do some research first.
Many people who come to India have similar reactions, including 2nd Gen Indians (aka ABCDs). India is overwhelming, its dirty, its crowded, its an assault on your senses. I’ve felt that if you ever have gone numb in an industrialized country and want to feel alive again, go to India. As far as poor people and animals go, many Indians are far kinder towards pets and strays than they are to the poor squatting next to them. Lena has the same upper class problems with poverty and dirt that middle and upper class Indians have.
A review of “Girls”: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/girls/
Jesus, you never miss an opportunity to self-promote.
Yeah people in the left hate him for that.
Damn that Lena always being so honest and reacting to what she saw instead of processing her words in progressivespeak
Her concept of spirituality and India, didn’t work out. Not much more to the story, so no need to hate on her.
There’s nothing that can make me like that woman. Nothing.
the shit that irks the hell out of me about you and your ilk is that you don’t actually care about what’s going on with people in the global south, you just are concerned with saying the right shit when you talk about it. Like what the hell have you ever done to better the lives of people in poverty other than shame people for mildly slipping up when talking about something…its so smug and transparent and takes no actual investment at all. I hate people sooooo much