Sex? Check. Drugs? Check. Psychological troubles? Check. The show that so many people love, while others love to hate is talked about by everyone. The second season of the HBO show Girls brought with it a continuation of the controversial topics which pervaded the first season and introduced new ones that created more talk.
The show has been talked about since its premiere in April, 2012. Created by Lena Dunham, 26, it deals with the lives of four girls post-graduation in New York City, dealing with what life throws at them and how to go about moving forward. While on the surface it may seem like a show depicting twenty-year-olds whining about their problems, there is something about Hannah, Shosh, Jessa and Marnie that moves the show past this base line of whininess into something more. Many have criticized the second season, including myself, for losing its spark in the middle and falling back into this region. Despite this, the show still introduced many issues such as cocaine use, sexual relations and conditions such as OCD.
While marijuana is a drug that has become rather ubiquitous in society, cocaine is a different story. Hannah (Lena Dunham) takes the drug with a friend of hers “for the experience”. While not exactly promoting drug use, the show definitely displayed cocaine use as something that could be a great experience—Hannah goes out to a club, has a great time dancing, and only when her friend Marnie tells her something she doesn’t want to hear does she dismiss cocaine–not because of it’s actual effects but because her friend upsets her. This drug use controversy follows the much spoken about topic of sex on the show.
Lena Dunham has been pretty vocal about the fact that she uses nudity so much on her show because she wants people to see a body that is not a “model-type”. While I highly support this idea, most of her nudity involves her and her (ex)boyfriend Adam involving in sex that is unusual, and sometimes harmful. Hannah mentions that she allows him to hit her in her side during one episode. While Hannah does not like it, she engages because she wants to hold on to this man. The show does not really show a healthy sexual relationship between a man and woman, or for that matter, a man and a man. Should this sort of sexual relationship be displayed? Or do they promote the idea that in order to hold on to a man, you must put up with whatever his strange sexual fixations may be?
Sex is not a new topic to the show, but what is, is OCD. Hannah’s OCD appears in the last few episodes of the second season, a condition that creator Lena Dunham deals with herself. Many have asked if the condition is properly presented. Knowing that the woman who wrote the show itself has dealt with the condition in a pretty severe state, I think that it is an appropriate topic for her to breach.
Girls has never shied away from these topics, which not only creates a space to discuss them, but also creates a space to criticize and critique. What’s so great about the show is that unlike previous shows about four girls in New York City (Sex and the City), the show discusses topics that aren’t normally breached when speaking about young women. Life is not all buying overly priced shoes and going on awkward dates. Dunham does not seem in any hurry to slow down the depiction of these debated topics, so all I can ask is what will season 3 bring to us? I can’t wait.Â