Lena Dunham Reflects on Her Body Being an ‘Object of Scorn’ as She Marks the 13th Anniversary of Girls
- Lena Dunham marked the 13th anniversary of Girls with a lengthy post on Instagram reflecting on how the series shaped her body image
- The show’s star and series creator noted that the comments on her body were difficult to process, but ultimately made her stronger
- “I no longer believed that being thinner, taller, or tanner would save me,” Dunham wrote
Lena Dunham is looking back on her time on Girls with appreciation and gratitude — even as she recalls it being a difficult time in her personal life due to the heightened scrutiny surrounding her body.
In honor of the show celebrating its 13th anniversary this month — the program premiered on HBO on April 15, 2012 — the actress and series creator, 38, reflected on some of the difficulties that came with starring on the show in a lengthy Instagram post shared on Wednesday, April 30.
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Girls followed Hannah Horvath (Dunham), an aspiring writer trying to make it in New York City alongside her three friends. The show ran between 2012 and 2017, and was nominated for 19 Emmys over the course of six seasons (two of which it won).
Adam Driver, Alex Karpovsky, Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, Andrew Rannells and Allison Williams also starred in the comedy-drama, which has seen a resurgence in popularity on social media in recent years.
“April will always be when life changed — in ways both magical (I’m still here! With you! Making things!) and confounding,” Dunham said in the post, noting that she was just 25 when the HBO series premiered and felt like she could handle life, but was really “a fawn, shaky on my legs, uncertain on the icy forest floor.”
Though the success of the show was worth celebrating, the Girls creator added, “the feedback that came at me — at least the feedback I could hear — was about all the ways that young body was unacceptable.”
The backlash that Dunham received while on Girls gave her a series of conflicting emotions that ultimately led to her accepting her physical appearance.
“It was a nightmare because it confirmed everything I thought I knew, affirmed all the 7th grade ghosts living in my head,” she continued. “But it also forced me to accept, swiftly and gratefully, the ways in which to live in a body is to dance constantly with our collective fear and disgust at fallibility, mortality and imperfection.”
After learning to accept herself amid “aging, illness, scrapes and scars” — and a rough battle with endometriosis — Dunham says that the mean comments “haven’t rattled me like they could have. This body had already been an object of scorn and so the rest of the road smoothed out before me.”
She continued, “I no longer believed that being thinner, taller, or tanner would save me. No hair mask or control top briefs were coming to fight on my behalf. I was alerted to the fact that the only shield we have is our voice, our art, our dreams, our relationships.”
Dunham concluded the post by wishing her 25-year-old self on Girls a “happy anniversary” and adding that she is proud of that young woman despite her being a “weird and all knowing idiot.”
While the director now has a healthier relationship with her body, the treatment she received from the general public while filming Girls led to her opting out of starring in her semi-autobiographical comedy series, Too Much.
“I was not willing to have another experience like what I’d experienced around Girls at this point in my life,” Dunham said in a July 2024 interview with The New Yorker about the show, which sees a 30-something American woman (Megan Stalter) falling for a British musician (Will Sharpe) after relocating to London.
“Physically, I was just not up for having my body dissected again,” she explained. “It was a hard choice, not to cast Meg — because I knew I wanted Meg — but to admit that to myself.”
The director has also opened up about what it’s been like seeing Girls experience a resurgence after the pandemic. She gushed over the new Gen Z viewership and said she was “so touched and honored that young people this cool and on their s— are responding to the show” in a June 2024 interview with E! News.
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Dunham added, “I never made the show imagining that it would be seen at all, much less seen in 10 years. I’m just so grateful that it still resonates with people.”
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