You may complain that you don’t like looking at Lena Dunham’s nude body, or even that you think her decision to get naked in her TV show is pointless and random. This, again, gets to a larger issue of the purpose of nudity in any form of visual storytelling and expression, and how its audience is meant to react. The oft-cited example of the tits and ass in Game of Thrones is controversial in some circles, but by and large seems to be accepted for its consistency with nudity, particularly as it’s depicted on HBO. It’s meant to be titillating, as they say. It’s supposed to be shocking, usually somewhat gratuitous, flaunting a certain amount of freedom, possibly expositional, but usually with a not-so-secret motive to give pervs something to latch onto, so to speak.
It would appear that many people are confused by Dunham’s nudity because it doesn’t fit into this norm. The vast majority of the nudity in Girls, in fact, is used for shock value, for comedy (which I’ll touch on next), and for a variety of narrative and expressive reasons. With Dunham’s in particular, it’s meant to a certain extent as a statement, and a welcome one, in my opinion. But the expectation that any nudity should serve to get you off is pathetic, entitled bullshit, especially when it’s the female body being shown. How entitled does a person have to be to get angry with TV nudity that doesn’t get their dick hard? The smart action to take after the immediate response of “oh, that’s a naked body I’m not attracted to” would be to seek out the reasons this body could be on display, many of which I’m trying to highlight presently, but could also be found by the common sense realization of the fact that women are people who are sometimes unflatteringly naked, just like their male counterparts, and don’t exist for the purpose of being ogled.
And because that point doesn’t seem to be hitting home for enough people, Hannah Horvath will continue to remind us all of this because she feels like it.
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