on girls, five hundred months after everyone else

Recently, a friend of mine asked me what I thought about the series Girls. I suspect I know the reason for this inquiry! It’s because, last year, everyone had opinions about the series Girls. Now that the second series is out, the opinions are more abundant than ever. A lot of the discussion has focused on the whiteness of the show, by which I mean: everyone in this here show is white!* You all know this, because you have access to the Internet and, like I said, an abundance of opinions all over that place.

A lot of people are, like, “Why does everyone go on about how Lena Dunham doesn’t include people of colour in Girls? There are no people of colour anywhere, in any shows! I will not take your complaints seriously, MADAM, until you have criticised How I Met Your Mother for the very same reasons.”

Surprise! I think there’s something valid in this argument (except, I don’t watch How I Met Your Mother, so I’ll leave that particular blog post to someone else). I do think we should more frequently analyse the way in which whiteness on television is so pervasive that we don’t even see it anymore. I absolutely think we should look into how whiteness as a norm shapes our society and affects the self-perception of people of colour. But, for some reason, a lot of people decided to focus their criticism on Girls in particular. “How come?” I hear forlorn voices cry out. “Girls isn’t worse than Game of Thrones!”

I have a thought about why some people turned on Girls: it is because the entire world, when Girls came out, was all, “This is so feminist and totally true to the world! This is a show about girls being gross, and fun, and pathetic, and friends with one another. Feminist!” And then a lot of us who are not white, and who identify as feminists, were frustrated, because once again ‘feminism’ was being conflated with ‘stuff white girls do’. It can totally be this thing, if the stuff the white girls happen to be doing is feminist in nature, but the two are so frequently made one that it makes me want to weep a single tear and watch re-runs of Moesha. A lot of the anger, I think, is directed at the hype surrounding the show (“this feminist show is true to every woman’s life, everywhere!”) rather than at the show itself. It’s an entertaining show, you guys! I am aware of this because I watched the entire series with improbable efficiency.

But then, the fact remains that it is, you know, a very white show. And, guess what? This can be alienating to a lot of its viewers!

What can frustrate me as a black lady feminist is when certain (usually, but now always, white) feminists suddenly dismiss the importance of representation when it concerns questions of ethnicity and race (or sexuality, or disability, depending on day or mood or the Alignment of the Planets, I suppose!). These are the same people who routinely – and rightly – raise the issue of female representation. They protest the way in which women are marginalised, objectified or made invisible in popular culture, and argue that this stems from and feeds into a patriarchal society. Why, then, is it so difficult to see that a similar logic is at work in connection with race? Why, when this is pointed out, is the answer so frequently, “Sigh, do you need to see yourself everywhere?” Yes, please! But if I can’t have that, can I at least see examples of more diverse representation? Can I not be reduced to the Sassy Best Friend or the Magical Negro or the Exotic Lady of Various Mysteries? At the very least, can I be made visible? I’d like that a lot. We all do.

So what do I think about Girls? I think it’s sometimes very funny. I think Lena Dunham seems like one cool lady. I also think it’s a show that loves its shiny, privileged bubble and, to some extent, criticises it. Personally, I don’t think it criticises it enough. For me, then, it’s a show that I occasionally watch and enjoy rather than the Herald of the Coming Feminist Revolution, after which, it has been said, the crops shall quicken, the unicorns return and the backrubs will be plentiful. All hail the Revolution!

* Although I have heard rumoured that this is no longer the case, which is cool, because Donald Glover is the secret boyfriend of my heart and he should be in everything. First stop: my flat! HAHA no seriously.