00:08:58.100Slate spoke to Rich Sabin-Williams, developmental psychologist and the director of the sex and gender lab at Cornell University, who said, quote,
00:09:08.480Children have been doing this stuff forever and ever and ever, and they will do it forever and ever and ever.
00:09:12.980John V. Caffero, a professor at the California School of Professional Psychology and an expert on sibling abuse, wrote in a Washington Post column,
00:09:21.000To be clear, sexual curiosity in children is normal.
00:09:24.460All children explore their bodies and may engage in visual and even manual exploration of a sibling at times.
00:09:31.080This is one of the ways that children discover sexual differences between boys and girls' anatomies.
00:09:35.060even siblings of the same gender become curious about variations in shapes and sizes of their
00:09:40.320sex organs. Two small children exploring each other's bodies does not predestine them to a
00:09:45.420life of emotional suffering. So, you know, that might all kind of sound like I am absolving Lena
00:09:52.580of having done anything wrong in this situation, right? But I actually think that this is where
00:09:58.280things get a little bit tricky. And this trickiness is exactly what drove me to wanting to make an
00:10:03.120episode about this topic. So I should say I myself am a survivor of sexual abuse. And so I know that
00:10:09.760when something can be difficult to talk about, like most sensitive issues are, but I also know
00:10:14.560that we really, really do need to talk honestly and thoughtfully about it. And you know what
00:10:21.980doesn't help us to have conversations about tough issues in a way that's honest and thoughtful and
00:10:26.480nuanced? Adding lies to the mix. This is a deliberate tactic that bad actors and disinformer
00:10:33.100employ, seizing on hot-button issues, adding lies to the mix intentionally to derail those
00:10:38.780conversations. And honestly, this is what really kind of gets me so upset about this issue is that
00:10:45.280we should not and cannot tolerate lies being added to conversations that are as sensitive
00:10:50.740and important as childhood sexual abuse, especially not as a way to score cheap political points the
00:10:57.880way that Shapiro and Truth Revolt did, because it really derails progress and our collective
00:11:02.880shared understanding. There is no conversation that is made better by the injection of lies,
00:11:09.100and people deserve the truth. That is a value that I will just scream from the rooftops over
00:11:16.000and over again. If you are adding lies to a conversation, you are doing us all a disservice.
00:11:22.160And so I also think that Truth Revolt really blowing up what Lena did write in her memoir
00:11:25.920with inaccurate information really makes it difficult to address, A, what she actually did,
00:11:31.940and B, how she actually wrote about it. And because of their lie, because of them
00:11:36.380starting off this conversation with such an inflammatory, big, you know, defining piece
00:11:42.840of inaccurate content, Lena, understandably, is then put in a position where she has to defend
00:11:48.500herself against a claim that was not true, that she sexually abused her sibling when she was 17.
00:11:53.540So I think it really turns the situation into a binary where she did it is on one side and no, she didn't is on the other. And that, again, is a classic disinformer derailing tactic, flattening out conversations and stripping them of any context or nuance that are required to have a thoughtful, substantive conversation about something that is sensitive or a hot button topic.
00:12:16.360And so I would actually argue that this prevents us from having a public conversation about what Lena actually did and how she wrote about it. We never really got to have that conversation because of how much oxygen Truth Revolts Lie took up in the room. And that is by design.
00:12:32.060And further, I would argue that their injection of inaccurate information into the conversation, you know, really just adds this sheen of inaccuracy.
00:12:41.300I would be willing to bet that at least some people trying to engage in a conversation probably have a misunderstanding about the basic facts of what happened.
00:12:50.160And so I guess all of this is to say, like, this is the conversation that I wish we would have gotten to have.
00:12:55.120Because if experts seem to suggest that what Lena described in her book is not abuse, I still don't think it was great or good. And I still want to talk about what actually happened without that inflammatory lie preventing us from doing that.
00:13:08.740Yeah, I totally agree with you. You know, the injection of lies into any conversation degrades that conversation. It makes it that much harder to have an honest conversation about whatever it is.
00:13:21.580And, you know, usually when people are making up lies, they're doing it for some kind of
00:13:28.180agenda to, like you said, take all the oxygen out of the room to prevent discussion about
00:13:32.980something else or to discredit and smear and shame a woman who they perceive as a leptist0.95
00:13:42.020And, you know, I don't have any strong feelings for or against Lena Dunham.
00:13:48.240And I've actually learned so much in just like making these episodes with you.0.60
00:13:52.040But it is just so familiar, a trope of right-wing shitheads making things up to smear somebody who they perceive as an enemy and just injecting lies into the conversation.0.75
00:14:07.900Exactly. So let's take a look at what she actually wrote and why, you know, it's still not good.0.64
00:14:13.960First, I think it's definitely an issue with tone and framing.
00:15:43.340I'm really happy that they left that comment.
00:15:45.100And, you know, I think it's one of those things where it's like, I think it's a completely valid question to ask about the behavior that Lena describes in the book and the way that she wrote about and framed that behavior.
00:19:54.000Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.0.98
00:19:58.540I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:20:03.120I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:20:10.540They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:20:14.500But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:20:17.940They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:20:21.080Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:20:30.040If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:20:35.980This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:20:48.460I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:20:55.560I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:20:59.140From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:21:05.100It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:21:12.560Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:21:22.180Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:21:49.420When we allow disinformers to flatten out entire conversations with inaccurate information, we don't really get to have the real conversation about what actually happens.
00:21:59.860And I think it creates the conditions that lead to Lena not really having to be held accountable for what she actually wrote, because the only thing anybody is really talking about is the lie about what she wrote.
00:22:11.820And I think that Lena would probably agree that, you know, how she handled this incident in her memoir wasn't great because she apologized.
00:22:21.760She wrote, quote, if the situations described in my book have been painful or triggering for people to read, I am sorry.
00:22:27.980That was never my intention. I am also aware that my comic use of the term sexual predator was insensitive, and I'm sorry for that as well.
00:22:35.500She also went on to say that her sibling is her best friend and, quote, anything I have ever written about has been published with approval.
00:22:42.140Yeah, that's I mean, it's hard to argue with that, that it was not very sensitive. And, you know, her apology is a reminder of how serious talking about sexual abuse is, you know.
00:23:00.280And so, yeah, she probably shouldn't have written that. But it is so notable that this whole controversy and apparently allegations that people continue to hold against her of being a 17 year old sexual predator were did not come from the alleged victim.
00:23:22.720her sibling did not come from survivor justice advocates, but instead came from Ben Shapiro,
00:23:31.280like a vowed and an open right wing activist. You know, like you're not going to convince me
00:23:38.060that he gives a shit about really anyone. Yeah. And a right wing activist who explicitly said0.98
00:23:47.560that the intention of his media outlet was to attack prominent left-wing folks, prominent
00:23:55.320liberal voices. Lena Dunham is a prominent liberal voice, and she certainly was when this all
00:24:00.840happened. And so I think that I also want to really lift up what you just said about these
00:24:06.480allegations not coming from Lena's sibling. I think the thing that really sticks with me about
00:24:12.520this whole situation is the way that Lena Dunham's sibling, their voice is almost universally
00:24:19.580ignored. And so I just really believe in centering survivors, centering, giving people space to be
00:24:27.480the experts of their own experiences. And so, yeah, the thing that really just really bums me
00:24:33.020out is that Cyrus Grace's voice is almost entirely erased when people talk about this,
00:24:37.980So when people repeat, you know, oh, Lena Dunham did this to her sibling, I just feel like we just don't.
00:24:44.860It's so easy to not make space for Cyrus's voice.
00:24:48.940And I think what you said really helps us see how problematic that is.
00:24:52.880Yeah. Like having this conversation, I'm sort of wondering, is this a conversation about childhood sexual abuse or is it a conversation about a celebrity?
00:25:01.720Well, I would argue that, like, I think for a lot of people, because they don't like Lena Dunham for whatever reason, and some of those reasons are valid, but the actual meat of the conversation, caring about and believing and uplifting survivors of sexual abuse, that kind of gets pushed to the sideline because the real thing is finding a way to talk about how much we don't like Lena Dunham and how awful she is. You know what I mean?
00:25:26.060Yeah, totally. Like, I'm no stranger to ad hominem attacks, you know, like, if there's somebody I don't like, I'll happily, you know, sign up for piling on for something shitty or stupid that they did.0.99
00:25:42.620But it does feel very different when that piling on involves allegations of sexual abuse about some third person who's not even part of the conversation and is built on lies.0.95
00:25:58.040And, you know, like you said earlier, just sucking the air out of valid conversations in the space.
00:26:04.880Not valid. I don't mean valid. I mean, truthful, you know.
00:26:08.780Right. So, you know, that's exactly what I think is happening here. So now that you know what actually happened versus the lie that Truth Revolt amplified about it, let's talk about exactly that. Like, what is it that made this such a sticky narrative? And that's the thing that really, I don't know, it fascinates me about this claim because it has had real staying power.
00:26:29.120So question for you, Mike, have you seen that meme where it's a black hand and a white hand, like grasping hands and a gesture of unity and something that they agree about, like a shared commonality is written on the middle of their hands?
00:26:42.620Yeah, of course. It's a beautiful meme about coming together.
00:26:45.060So that meme pretty much explains what I think is going on here. Basically, on the Black hand, you have, you know, feminists, people of color, just general people. On the White hand, maybe I got right-wing folks. And the thing that they're uniting over is that they all agree they hate Lena Dunham.0.97
00:27:06.980That's kind of what I think is going on here.
00:27:08.620Because even though the claim that Lena Dunham sexually abused her one-year-old sibling when she was 17, we know started in the right-wing blogosphere, it has really traveled out of those bases and become a fairly widely accepted claim.
00:27:21.560And that's because Lena Dunham is just like a controversial figure.0.99
00:27:33.100To put it bluntly, a lot of people just don't like Lena Dunham. And so in that way, I think it was really easy for folks to project an inaccurate claim against her and have it really stick.
00:27:43.740And this also tells us something kind of interesting about the way that inaccurate information works online. It can often speak to something that is already inside of us. And so if you're already primed to really hate Lena Dunham, when somebody comes along and tells you something that really squares with your already held belief, it can really stick because our brains love information, even inaccurate information or false information, that validates opinions or values that we already hold.
00:28:11.000So if your opinion is that Lena Dunham sucks, it sort of doesn't matter if she actually did joke about abusing her one-year-old sibling when she was 17 or not. It will stick because it squares with our already held belief. That's just how our brains as humans work.
00:28:25.320And another truism about disinformation is that it often seizes on legitimate existing tensions and pressure points and fractures that already exist, particularly within marginalized communities.
00:28:38.260If you listen to the episode that we did about End Father's Day or Vanessa Guillen, this will probably sound familiar to you.
00:28:45.580It pits Black women against white women or the Latino community against the Black community.
00:28:50.720And I think Lena Dunham is a really interesting case study for this, because people, especially people of color, really do have some valid reasons to dislike Lena Dunham. And these reasons are often reflected in the kinds of tensions that I was just naming above. You know, a lot of the tensions occur along racial lines.
00:29:09.800Yeah. So I want to talk about some of the valid reasons that folks have to sort of be predisposed to not like Lena Dunham and thus have this, you know, inaccurate claim really have a little bit of staying power.
00:29:24.920So, one, I think that Lena Dunham has really come to represent a kind of, I guess I'll call it white girl cluelessness, that a lot of feminists of color were frankly sick of seeing Amplified as the voice of feminism.
00:29:37.040You know, when the show Girls first premiered on HBO, there was so much fanfare cementing Lena Dunham, you know, as this voice of a generation, the voice of young women.
00:29:47.000And I think there was some resentment around who we amplify and who we give lots and lots and lots of chances to.0.93
00:29:54.240I often heard Black feminists saying things like, oh, a Black woman would never get as many chances to mess up like Lena Dunham has.
00:30:01.440Side note, Lena Dunham has had to apologize for so many things that there is actually a Twitter meme account called Lena Dunham Apologizes that just creates randomly generated apologies for fictional Lena Dunham missteps.
00:30:16.120And I actually went to go look one up because I was like, oh, I should read one here on the podcast.
00:30:21.340And so I googled Lena Dunham apology Twitter, and I found the tweet, Lena Dunham issued an apology for her new HBO Max series, Generation, using real cat corpses in a classroom scene. But that apology tweet was actually real. That was actually her apologizing for something that actually happened.
00:30:38.500wow so we're just living in a universe where there's just one can't tell what is true lena
00:30:46.360dunham apologies or disinformation lena dunham apologies it's just a miasma of lena dunham
00:30:52.620uncertainty exactly exactly is it is it art imitating life or is it life imitating art
00:30:57.720or is it art imitating cat corpses so this is a little bit of a tangent but i just have to mention
00:31:05.700it because I think it was such a weird thing that happened along the kind of race and gender
00:31:13.000intra-community tensions that I was just talking about before. And that is the whole thing that
00:31:18.400went down between Lena Dunham and Odell Beckham. It was just really weird. So if you don't remember
00:31:24.500what happened, a few years ago at the Met Gala, Lena Dunham attended and she was wearing a tuxedo.
00:31:30.180And she was seated next to the professional athlete Odell Beckham Jr. And I guess Lena felt
00:31:35.160that he was ignoring her or not paying an appropriate amount of attention to her or
00:31:39.920something. And so after the event, Lena wrote in her newsletter, Lenny Letter, I was sitting next
00:31:46.580to Odell Beckham Jr. And it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and determined I was
00:31:51.980not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, that's a marshmallow. That's a child.
00:31:57.900That's a dog. It wasn't mean. He just seemed confused. The vibe was very much, do I want to
00:32:03.760fuck it. Is it wearing, yup, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone.1.00
00:32:09.880It was like we were forced to be together and he was literally scrolling Instagram
00:32:13.460rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, this should be called the0.99
00:32:18.580Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes. So yeah, that is a lot of projecting
00:32:26.860your own negative fantasies and perhaps insecurities onto someone who sounded like
00:32:33.420was just like minding their business on their phone at dinner you know add to the fact that
00:32:37.540Beckham is a black man and it kind of sounds like she is responding to this like perceived0.85
00:32:43.140projection of a hyper sexualized black man onto her like she was like disappointed or felt some0.90
00:32:51.580type of way that he was not behaving in a way like in an over sexualized manner toward her0.63
00:32:57.900and yeah it just feels like she like really projected a lot onto him she eventually apologized
00:33:02.880on Instagram, but it was just a very weird thing that happened along very specific race and gender
00:33:11.100fault lines that we know sometimes can be legitimate tension points in our society.
00:33:17.240Yeah, yikes. That kind of reminds me of what you were talking about from her book,
00:33:20.760where she establishes herself as an unreliable narrator and somebody who is dwelling in negative0.99
00:33:30.840fantasies all the time uh a that has to suck and b uh yeah it does establish them as an unreliable0.99
00:33:40.200narrator who is probably going to say some shit that they regret uh yeah over and over and over0.98
00:33:45.400again and have to apologize for it endlessly to the point where it becomes a meme yeah those0.97
00:33:50.060did the cat corpses accept the apology i wasn't able to find a response from the cat corpse
00:33:56.480community but i will keep looking okay i'll check in with some necromancers that i know
00:34:59.620If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:35:05.940This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:35:18.340I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:35:25.520I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:35:28.700From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:35:35.440It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:35:42.600Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:35:52.140Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:37:07.280So I mentioned how Lena had a newsletter called Lenny Letter.
00:37:11.220Zensi Clemens, who is a Black woman and a writer, worked with Lena on this letter, and she publicly quit citing Lena's, quote, well-known racism as the reason why.
00:37:19.880Right. Clemens said that she went to college with Dunham and her friends and that they kind of were in the same circles when they were in college and that she would call their strain of racism, quote, hipster racism, which usually uses sarcasm as a cover, which, boy, do I know a little something about that from my own days in college.
00:37:37.080Clemens encouraged other women of color to stop working with Lena Dunham, saying it is time for women of color, Black women in particular, to divest from Lena Dunham. She cannot have our words if she cannot respect us.0.90
00:37:48.440Oh, boy. Oh, boy is right. And coming from an old friend or somebody who's known her since college and has worked with her, that seems like a pretty damning charge with more substance to it than out of context typo from her autobiography.
00:38:07.740I completely agree. And you can really see how, again, this, you know, you having a Black woman writer say this about Lena, you can see again how like these things really do pop up along certain pre-existing tension points, you know, that really fall along racialized lines.0.61
00:38:28.940And so another, probably the biggest, deepest example for myself personally is the way that Lena handled a sexual assault allegation made against writer and executive producer of Girls, Murray Miller, that happened on the set.
00:38:41.800Basically what happened, actress Aurora Perrineau, who is mixed race, filed a police report accusing Girls writer and executive producer Murray Miller of raping her on the set of Girls in 2012 when she was 17 years old.
00:38:54.380Now, Miller said that she was making it up to extort him and try to get money from him, and Lena and her showrunner Jenny Coner published this statement.
00:39:03.880While our first instinct is to listen to every woman's story, our insider knowledge of Murray's situation makes us confident that, sadly, this accusation is one of the 3% of assault cases that are misreported every year.
00:39:17.180It is a true shame to add to that number, as outside of Hollywood, women still struggle to be believed.
00:39:23.200We stand by Murray, and this is all we will be saying about this issue.
00:39:31.580There's so many things wrong with that.
00:39:33.400Well, it gets worse. So obviously, this statement makes it seem like, you know, Lena and her team have some kind of inside information that proves that this assault never happened. But come to find out, that was all a lie. She made that up.
00:39:50.320because in a 2018 follow-up piece called To Aurora, An Apology, Dunham writes, quote,
00:39:57.840when someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable.
00:40:03.780I publicly spoke up in his defense. There are few acts I could ever regret more in my life.
00:40:09.120I didn't have the insider information I claimed, rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping1.00
00:40:15.700and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all um so yeah lena basically smeared a woman
00:40:25.680who said that she had been sexually assaulted by someone that she met on lena's set the set of her
00:40:32.880hit show she lied about this woman for a long time and then eventually admitted that lie in this piece
00:40:40.620Yeah, I just think it's really horrible.
00:41:06.920It's such a, I don't even know how to put it.
00:41:09.600It's such a big claim that is so, because we live in a racist, sexist, misogynistic society, when you say a woman of color is lying about being abused or sexually assaulted in public, you are just making a big claim that is going to get a lot of attention that you can't take back.
00:41:29.780And so for me, that was the moment that Lena Dunham lost me forever.
00:41:34.280So Lena eventually took the stage with Aurora's mom, Brittany, at a Women in Hollywood event to publicly apologize again.
00:41:41.620Last November, when Brittany's beautiful daughter, Aurora, accused a friend of mine of sexual assault, I denied her experience publicly.
00:41:48.300So I remember this moment so viscerally, watching it and thinking, this is a capital B, capital M, bad moment for women.
00:41:59.780Lena lied about a woman of color who opened up about her experience of sexual violence and just essentially publicly smeared her.
00:42:07.720Then, a few years later, she brings this woman's mom on stage and performs contrition in this kind of like, oh, gee, I'm just a kid with a lot to learn kind of way.
00:42:18.880When in reality, she was the very powerful creator and showrunner of a highly successful business with her HBO show.
00:42:28.920So this idea that she was just like a kid who had a lot to learn, that's completely incorrect. And that framing is so clearly self-serving. I'm sure you can make the argument that it was a genuine moment of, you know, apology that she wanted to happen in public. But I just, it just really made me feel weird. And I really didn't like it. And yeah, it just lost me forever.
00:42:51.840Yeah. And why her mom? Why not the woman herself? Like, that just seems weird. I'm sure people have answers to that, but it seems weird to me.
00:43:01.920Yeah. And you can really see how all the different controversies with Lena Dunham that I just laid out really do exist along pre-existing political, racial and social tensions. You know, white women versus women of color, white women versus black men. These tensions that really do already exist in our society and always have like way before Lena Dunham. It's not like she created these things, but that tensions that we have already have a kind of a tough time talking honestly about.
00:43:30.120And when those tensions are present, it's just the textbook conditions for inaccurate or misleading information to fester and spread. And in a lot of ways, I feel like Lena Dunham is like a walking embodiment of all of these tensions. And so it's not really surprising that a particular misleading claim about her would then stick.
00:43:49.180And I think that is why we see this claim have such stickiness, you know, this claim that she molested her sibling when she was 17. I think that is the reason why we see it being, you know, having such staying power.
00:44:02.180Yeah. And it's so sad that, you know, all those societal tensions of racism, sexism, misogynoir just get shoved to the side and it becomes a conversation about a single, like a specific white woman.
00:44:22.060And is she good or is she bad? And like, what a useless conversation.
00:44:26.160Exactly. That's exactly my point. Like, we don't have the conversation of like, was this harmful to survivors of sexual violence? Was this a harmful experience for Lena Dunham's sibling? What does it mean that she wrote about it in this jokey way? We don't get to have the conversation of like, what can we offer survivors of childhood sexual assault? Or like, how can we support them? Or how can we create the conditions to eliminate sexual abuse in our world?
00:44:49.820Those conversations are too big, too thorny, too meaty. We don't have the conversation of like, well, why would Black feminists or Black women have a bone to pick with white womanhood or white feminism? Or in what ways have white women historically, you know, attacked Black men or, you know, like projected things onto Black men that were harmful to them?
00:45:13.100Those are all the big, thorny, systemic conversation that's hard to have and that, frankly, we are not equipped to have. We're not having it. And so that just gets conflated into Lena Dunham bad. Lena Dunham did this. Or Lena Dunham not bad. Lena Dunham not did this. Right? Like, it just completely flattens the conversation so that we're not really able to have it be a thoughtful, substantive, nuanced conversation.
00:45:38.700And some lingering questions that I still have about this are whether or not people who say that Lena Dunham abused her sibling, do they know they're talking about incidents that happened when she was seven and not 17?
00:45:49.760Like, how much did that particular specific lie seep into people's actual consciousness and their understanding of what happened?
00:45:57.360And maybe the answer is we'll never know.0.99
00:45:59.120And I think that is ultimately the reason why this is such a big tactic for disinformers, liars, and bad actors.
00:46:06.300just creating enough negativity around someone or something so that it ultimately doesn't really0.96
00:46:12.700matter what actually happened at all because all anybody remembers or thinks about when it comes up
00:46:18.520is the lie. Damn yeah but I think you're you're right I think we've seen time and again that's0.95
00:46:25.620their goal to create just a miasma of unspecific negativity and and lies and0.98
00:46:33.080not just spread lies, but reduce confidence in there being any sort of truth.
00:46:41.680Exactly. Right. And so it's like creating the conditions where it's like, oh, well,
00:46:46.160the conversation is so muddled and difficult to follow that like, what is the truth anyway? And
00:46:51.560so I think the further we get away from that, where things that are not true can sort of become
00:46:55.760true, the worse off we all are. And I have to say, you know, this all happened back in 2014.
00:47:01.600here we are nearly 10 years later and just last week av club published an article about lena's
00:47:07.320new film project on june 23rd and the top comments were all some iteration of the claim that she
00:47:13.100sexually abused her sibling like it will never go away it basically is true now whether or not
00:47:19.920it actually happened is just sort of a non-issue at this point that is grim all right well so so
00:47:28.580And Bridget, what is the point of you telling us all of this?
00:47:33.820So here we are in 2022, and we have seen more and more right-wing extremists using very similar tactics, not just on public figures, but on more and more regular people.
00:47:46.220You know, look at things like libs of TikTok, that page on Twitter where people are regularly labeled as, quote, groomers or basically accused of some kind of, like, vague sexual impropriety against children.
00:47:58.420And it's really gross and sad because we actually do have a sexual abuse problem in our society.
00:48:05.980So many of us are survivors of sexual violence or sexual abuse.
00:48:09.120And bad actors and liars who spread damaging lies and inaccurate content, they know this is a trigger and a tension for so many of this.
00:48:17.740This is a pressure point in us that can be, you know, poked at and inflamed.
00:48:23.900And it creates a situation where the sexual abuse of kids is a topic that is easily exploited and inflamed and can be weaponized against political opponents.
00:48:33.500And so ultimately, I guess, in conclusion, there are plenty of reasons to not like Lena Dunham, including what she wrote about her sibling in her memoir.
00:48:42.660We don't need to add lies on it to talk about it.
00:48:45.180We're not better served when we add lies into a conversation as important and as sensitive as childhood sexual violence.
00:48:51.500And when we do that, we do a disservice to issues like sexual abuse that are so important and critical that we talk about. And ultimately, it's very concerning that we have a kind of media climate and ecosystem that create the conditions for this kind of damaging lie to persist for years and essentially become true, even if it's not.
00:49:43.860I really, really, really want to hear what people have to say.
00:49:46.500Please don't come for me, though. I'm a baby. I don't like be be cool about it. But like, I want to know what you think. You know, what do you what are your thoughts on Lena Dunham, her memoir, all the things that we laid out today? I really want to hear your thoughts. So please, you can email me. You can find me on social media. I want to hear what y'all think. And Mike, thank you so much for for taking this journey with us.
00:50:09.020Yeah, thanks for bringing me on it. You know, I agree. It's been great hearing from listeners about this who have, you know, feelings about it and thoughts about it. And that's great. And that really, we, this is actually the second time that we've recorded this second part because we wanted to incorporate feedback that we heard from listeners. And so, yeah, please email us at hello at hangody.com.
00:50:35.320And thanks, Bridget, for having me on.
00:50:37.280It's always a pleasure talking to you.