This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Leeds chapter.
I often debate, usually out of boredom, who I would invite to the dinner party of my dreams. There would be a majority of women, family and friends – each bringing something different to the table. Incorporating snobby remarks, insightful wisdom and, in the case of my youngest sister, inappropriate innuendos at pudding. I would also invite my two heroines: Lena Dunham and Caitlin Moran. If you asked me who I would have invited 5 years ago, I would have said Blake Lively from Gossip Girl and Marie Antoinette, just for the cake. Now at nineteen, although I still love Gossip Girl, Dunham and Moran have shaped my outlook on life and demanded me to think for myself – as a girl and as an equal to every single other human being. I want to be friends with these two. BFFLs.
Primarily, my love for Caitlin Moran began when she replied to a tweet I sent when I was 15. She said she appreciated my love of her and gave me three kisses. THREE!
But seriously, what I have learnt from both Lena and Caitlin is that being a feminist is as simple as being a woman. There is no two ways about this; I am a girl, a daughter, a sister, a girlfriend and a feminist. I believe that I have the same rights as my brother, my boyfriend and the boys I attend university with. That is, to have a job that pays an equal wage and to be employed for the skills I possess rather than for the length of my dress or for the expanse of my cleavage.
This article is written in light of both my beloved ladies who have written new books – both of which, in enthusiastic eagerness, I had to pre-order.
After reading Caitlin Moran’s new fiction novel ‘How to Build a Girl’ however, I was disappointed. She is my favourite columnist in The Times; she never fails to make me laugh out loud with her comments about the government and snort at her attempts to function when drunk. But How to Build a Girl just lost the humour. I wanted it to be a fiction I could relate to and laugh at, like I do with Moran’s weekly columns, but I couldn’t. Whilst Moran maintains that her book was all a work of fiction, the impoverished setting of a council estate in Wolverhampton is all very true to Caitlin’s own childhood and you just can’t help but imagine that it is in fact her in the story.
So, with dampened spirits, I began ‘Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”’ by Lena Dunham. Reading this book on a two-hour train journey to London, I forgot I was on the train. I was wholly and totally inside Lena’s brain. The book is a collection of autobiographical essays in which Dunham sheds light into every dark corner of her life, including sex, drugs and therapists. By providing this exposed, real memoir, Lena makes herself more tangible to me. I can separate her from her character Hannah in Girls and it turns out that I actually I like Lena much more than I like Hannah.
In the introduction, Dunham states that she aims for her experiences to be helpful and to help other girls not make the mistakes that she made. She wanted to remind other women that they aren’t alone (whether that’s when feeling bored during sex, having impulses to eat whole jars of peanut butter or crying alone in a toilet cubicle when it’s all going wrong) and she concludes that if each reader takes something useful away from the book “then every misstep of [hers] was worthwhile”.
She wrote that her food diaries were the hardest part to publish which, to me, shows her human strength against adversity in the face of food. One day she ate over 4,000 calories. Why does that resonate with me? Because, by publicly displaying her battles with food, Lena reminds us that difficulties are not reserved only for eating disorders. We see Dunham as vulnerable with a weakness, which aligns many readers with her. In contrast to celebrity culture, Dunham defies these perceived norms of perfection. Through her book and TV series Girls, she’s appreciated for her brain and her value as a woman. She herself admits to her self-obsessive nature, which is perhaps why she is so brilliant at acting and directing. She is the absolute boss. Obviously, she is scrutinised and mauled by the media but her book made me feel like she was normal.
Lena Dunham is scared of death; in a way that surely everyone alive is scared of death. But, for me, the anxieties that Dunham has with death and her worries about other supposedly menial things makes her even easier to relate to. She grants us permission into the weakest parts of her disposition. From this I felt strongly connected to Dunham, in a way that she is another person on the planet who has innumerable worries – just as I do too. Out of the many memorable quotes of Dunham’s, my favourite is her view on not being ready for enlightenment because “So much of what I love – gossip and furniture and food and the Internet – is really here, on Earth”. I could have said the same quote myself and those words would have tumbled out of nearly all of my friends mouths because, underneath, Lena Dunham is a girl, still trying to discover her path in the manic world of the media. In light of her book, she’s doing a fantastic job of parting the tabloid sea and remaining totally relatable and true to herself and others who look up to her.
I implore you to read Not That Kind of Girl and Caitlin Moran’s weekly columns and you’ll see how they have revolutionised the notion of feminism to be a simple fact of living and loving, not one of discrimination or man hating.
See further: #YesAllWomen campaign
Image Sources:
1. Writer’s own