Girls' Fall from Feminism

I have found the HBO show Girls to be a source of media entertainment that both battles traditional gender stereotypes and also conforms to them. In Season 1 Episode 4, “Hannah’s Diary,” traditional gender roles are upheld and validated in a variety of scenes, causing me to pause and think about just how progressive and feminist the show could really be. Girls’ writer and protagonist, Lena Dunham, prides herself on resisting cultural norms for unrealistic feminine beauty and sex appeal and standing up for her gender. But how original is she really?

In this particular episode, Hannah depicts traditional female stereotypical traits when she is clingy and emotional regarding her very distant lover, Adam. One scene shows Hannah arriving at Adam’s door unannounced to inform him that they are ending. Although all she receives is silence, one physical touch has her falling on him immediately and gratifying his behavior through sex, providing an example of the stereotypical dependent female while also reinforcing the idea that the ‘real’ man provides attention in order to receive sex.

Further evidence of what being a “real man” entails is obvious when Charlie reads an entry in Hannah’s diary belittling his “feminine qualities.” To female audience members around the same age as Hannah and Marni, they observe that it is embarrassing and undesirable as a social female to date someone who doesn’t exhibit the qualities that should bespeak a penis: distance and dominance. This message is implicitly evident in Marnie’s distaste in Charlie despite his love asd well as in the words Hannah uses to describe him.

In Holz, Gibson, and Ivory’s article, Gendered Relationships on Television: Portrayals of the Same-Sex and Heterosexual Couples (2009), they confirm “Women are seen as passive, nurturant, and dependent, and men are seen as aggressive, competitive, and independent” (p. 172). Hannah’s behavior, as well as her ridicule of Charlie’s lack of traditional masculinity, provides evidence that these traits are supported in this episode. Also, gender schema theory proposes that children learn cultural definitions of maleness and femaleness, which are linked to a network of sex-linked associations, that are invoked when absorbing and evaluating new information (Holz, Gibson, and Ivory, 2009, p. 176). The young, susceptible female audience of Girls has much to learn from these depictions, and it is not positive.

While some consider Girls to be a feminist show, it is evident in this episode, through the embarrassment Charlie suffers for being sensitive and affectionate and Hannah’s dependency on a distant male figure, that it works to reinforce stereotypes and conventional ideas regarding gender characteristics. Before thinking about analyzing this episode, I had never considered the possibility that Girls might be sending out the wrong messages. It goes to show the potential for duplicity and incongruity all media has, especially when widely accepted for its supposedly feminist message, like Girls is, and the ability for this to be swept under the rug.

References

Dunham, L. (2012). Hannah’s Diary. HBO. Season 1, Episode 4.

Holz Ivory, A., Gibson, R., & Ivory, J. D. (2009). Gendered relationships on television: Portrayals of same-sex and heterosexual couples. Mass Communication & Society, 12(2), 170-192. doi: 10.1080/15205430802169607