Lena Dunham says she’s not surprised by the rise of alt-right vitriol: “Those voices existed in the comment section”

Lena Dunham says she isn’t surprised by the rise of alt-right rhetoric—because she heard it coming from Girls critics over a decade ago.

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In a recent interview on the Girls Rewatch podcast, Lena Dunham admitted she couldn’t relate to the people who were surprised when far-right vitriol started being spewed more and more in public spaces over recent years.

“There were so many people who, when the voices of—whatever we want to call it—really alt-right, or MAGA, or conservative voices, Proud Boys or whatever started to rise, and people were like, ‘I’m so shocked by the way people are talking,’” she recalled.

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“I was like, ‘I’m not.’ Those voices existed in the comment section. I was experiencing those voices in 2012 in the way that there were so many angry, seemingly men and some women dissecting the show in these incredibly conservative terms.”

At the time, Girls sparked polarizing conversations for its depiction of messy 20-something women in Brooklyn. Critics raised valid concerns about the show’s lack of diversity and its narrow depiction of privilege. Others simply found the characters annoying and unlikeable. 

Dunham made a point to specify that there’s a difference between those types of criticisms and the ones that she feels were early warning signs of the way our society has regressed.

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“There was a big contingent of conservative people really looking at it as evidence of a sort of moral decrepitude and also making big judgments about our physical bodies, our sexualities,” she continued. “So it was really interesting to realize what a surprise that was to some people.”

The 2012 reception to Girls

When Girls premiered in 2012, it was seen by some as sort of a millennial, mumblecore-adjacent answer to Sex and the City—rougher around the edges and more real, even if just in theory.

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The more attention and praise it received, the more criticism came alongside it. As mentioned, a lot of that was based in concerns surrounding lack of diversity, privilege, and navel-gazing. In certain ways, the fact that there was an audience even aware of those concerns (right or wrong) felt like progress.

But there was an undercurrent of something more sinister in some of the backlash, as Dunham suggested when she mentioned the conservative lens through which some viewed this progressive (for its time) show. Other times, it was much more overt, as people targeted Dunham herself with body-shaming and open misogyny that crossed the line from actual criticism to pure spite.

(It’s worth noting that while Dunham is a controversial figure outside of the show, a lot of the controversy that stems from her actual words and actions started after Girls was off the air, or at least a couple of years into its run.)

Modern responses actually still prove her point

With the X algorithm prioritizing blue checks, there is no shortage of people responding to Dunham’s interview clip with the same brazen phobias and vitriol that she said clued her in to how comfortable people were becoming with spreading hate over a decade ago.

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Other people dismissed the point she was trying to make outright because of her own personal controversies or because of the valid criticisms people made of Girls at the time. 

But some appreciated what she was putting out there.

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Regardless of anyone’s personal feelings about Dunham or Girls, her comments on the conservative backlash in the era during which the show aired offer a bleak perspective about the direction society was already heading.

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