Honest Question on Lena Dunham
Galley Friend Mark Hemingway has a fantastic piece up about Lena Dunham’s sexual . . . experimentation? . . . on her much younger sister. I can’t recommend it enough. The Dunham family has tried to put this episode to bed by having the now-adult younger Dunham sister declare the Smith College version of “no harm, no foul.” On Twitter, of course. Here’s Grace Dunham:
As a queer person: i’m committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful
— Grace Dunham (@simongdunham) November 3, 2014
This is an honest, not smart alecky, question: Where does the left draw the line on the question of people having the right to narrate their own experiences? And the specific case I’m thinking of is Ray Rice’s physical assault on his girlfriend, Janay Palmer. At the time of the assault, Palmer refused to press charges. When Rice was suspended by the NFL, Janay–who is now Rice’s wife–released a statement decrying the punishment and saying it was “a nightmare in itself.”
If you come from “queer” world, do you think that Janay Rice has the right to narrate her own experience and determine what has and has not been harmful? Is it wrong for police to charge Ray Rice with a crime and for the NFL to suspend him, since doing so places the verdict of a privileged white man (Roger Goodell) above the narrative experience of an African-American female (Janay Rice)? Or is there some sort of societal imperative which, in some cases, overrides the right of personal narration?
Again, I’m not trying to be snarky: I’m genuinely interested in how leftism squares a circle like this.
By the by, I’m so out of touch that I don’t fully understand what “queer” means anymore, though I have the sense that it doesn’t mean what it did five or six years ago. But I suspect that it’s not an accident that once you begin the cultural movement to decree that the self is infinitely plastic and that all society must celebrate such plasticity, that you wind up with the type of logic Grace Dunham exhibits here regarding the sanctity of personal experience. After all, if you and only you can determine what gender you are–which is a relatively objective fact–then it only makes sense that the individual should get to define much more subjective things, too. Like whether or not a certain behavior was normal, or abusive.
