Lena Dunham Naked One Last Time

It’s impossible to get completely accurate numbers on viewers for HBO shows since it’s internally accounted among their paid subscribers. Let’s call Girls their lowest rated multi-season series since that’s the common assertion and HBO has never refuted the relatively low numbers. You’d never know by the howlingly affectionate media coverage provided by bloggers ranging from 23-28 year old single white women living in Manhattan. It’s like user ratings on PornHub. You’re playing to a very favorable self-selected population.

Girls ran their series finale last night, with a scene Lena Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner claim was envisioned two years earlier. Lena Dunham’s character breastfeeding a baby. If they’d mentioned this aloud two years ago, we might’ve had time to prepare. Like sitting in the front seat versus the backseat on a windy mountain road.

In case you’ve not been tuning in, Dunham’s character’s decision to keep her baby after getting knocked up was fraught with peril given Dunham’s own stance comparing abortion to the ultimate act of human kindness. But that’s so Dunham to take the heat from her own abortion loving fans:

Every choice we’ve ever made on Girls has been politicized. I saw some piece — because my mother loves to send me everything — that said, ‘Girls did a disservice by not having Hannah have an abortion.’ And I was like, ‘Part of what we’re all fighting for is reproductive freedom in all of its forms.’ The argument I keep making is, Hannah is one of the people who, statistically, in society, is in the best position to have a child. She’s in the 1% of people who is likely cushioned by her parents, has a liberal-arts education and has access to a job. Like, it’s going to be fine, guys. And she’s totally still doing something from a place of privilege like she always has.”

Who doesn’t want to live in a world requiring constant clumsy logical justifications? It sounds amazing. 30% of women have a four year degree in the U.S. and the majority of women having abortions have some college, if not a degree. Where in the U.S. are only 1 in 100 daughters cushioned by their parents? In Dunham’s zip code it runs about 90. 

None of this makes any factual sense, but it provided an opportunity for Dunham to get naked in a bathtub one final time for the series. While the show has covered numerous topics pertinent to yoga class attendees of New York and Los Angeles, Dunham’s own repeated nude and naked sex scenes have been the trademark of the show. And the fact that she waited to lose her Meadowlands beer gut until after all naked filming was complete. There’s no Hallmark Thank You card to cover that.

Every good run must inevitably end. SeaWorld after the Blackfish documentary comes immediately to mind.

_{Photo Credit: HBO}