Lets Talk About That Girls Episode on Sexual Harassment
Warning This post contains spoilers for season 6, episode 3 of Girls, "American Bitch.", Sunday night, while most people were trying to sort out whether the Best Picture card at the Oscars read La La Land or Moonlight, Girls aired one of its most unsettling and thought-provoking episodes to date. In it, Lena Dunham's Hannah Horvath is summoned to the apartment of fictional famous novelist Chuck Palmer Matthew Rhys to discuss a blog post she wrote about accusations of sexual assault against him. The conversation doesn't go smoothly, and then it does  and then it doesn't. What unfolds is a nuanced examination of the power dynamic between influential men and the women they abuse. Girls has explored the issue of consent before  that gray area between kink and assault. But this most recent episode is about more than consent. It's about the conversation around it. Initially, it feels as if Dunham, who wrote the episode, is having a conversation with Twitter rather than Rhys' character. Every time a powerful man is revealed to have allegedly abused women Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Woody Allen, to name a few, there's an inevitable clash on the Internet, of which Dunham has been an active participant. In he-said-she-said cases settled in conference rooms with ironclad confidentiality agreements, there's rarely any resolution. So Dunham carefully lays out the arguments from both sides. And in this episode the protagonist feels more like a doppelganger for Dunham herself than the much-less-logical character of Hannah. She combats the oft-given argument that accusers lie for publicity they take a risk by coming out and exposing themselves to harassment from skeptics in the form of trolling, death threats and even physical confrontation. But she also concedes that trigger-happy bloggers and journalists can sometimes condemn men without all the evidence. The conclusion, however, reinforces the notion that men, especially famous white men, wield a power still unmatched in society. In a moment of fantastical filmmaking on the show, as a traumatized Hannah walks out of his Upper West Side building, a flow of other women walk in, presumably to suffer the same fate. Allowing Hannah, a woke and righteous feminist who believes she has erected a wall against this man's charm, to fall for Chuck's tricks just further illustrates that even the most aware can be seduced by charm and power. , This isn't an episode of Girls, it's a morality tale  and it's groundbreaking. For better or worse, Girls is still like nothing else on television.