4 Reasons Why Lena Dunham’s Performance In ‘Girls’ Is Braver Than Anything My Father Has Ever Done - ClickHole

My father is 58 years old. Not once in his entire life has he demonstrated the type of courage that Lena Dunham brought to the role of Hannah Horvath. Here’s why Lena’s performance in Girls makes my dad look like a sheltered coward in comparison.

1. My father says proposing to my mother was the biggest risk he’s ever taken, whereas Lena Dunham did full frontal nudity for an HBO show

If proposing to my mom is the biggest “risk” you’ve ever taken, you simply do not have the stones to appear nude—and bottomless nude at that—throughout six seasons of a popular cable TV series. My dad has not been to war, or been the victim of a violent crime, or ever physically fought someone. The extent of his valor begins and ends with asking a woman he’d dated for five whole years, and who’d explicitly told him she wanted to get married, to marry him. Whatever nerve it took for him to commit to my mom does not even begin to compare to the raw vulnerability it took for Lena Dunham to show her vagina on HBO from 2012 to 2017.

2. Lena Dunham imbued a semi-autobiographical character with a cringe-inducing lack of self-awareness, but my father is a real person with a cringe-inducing lack of self-awareness 

Hannah Horvath was a polarizing protagonist whose self-absorption and immaturity often resulted in Girls’ most cringe-worthy moments, as well as its most thoughtful and hilarious insights on millennial women. But Hannah Horvath is a fictional 20-something. My father is a real, 58-year-old accountant with no emotional depth or character development whatsoever. At the slightest hint of criticism, he will get quiet and drink beer while watching The Sean Hannity Show. He does not have the fortitude to admit when he’s wrong or to even try to understand his own feelings, let alone dramatize personal experiences and traumas with the unflinching honesty that made viewers either love or love to hate Girls.

3. One time when I was in middle school, I called my dad “gay” for these really short shorts he was wearing to do yard work and he never wore them again, but Lena stayed true to her artistic vision despite becoming a punching bag for critics and Internet trolls

If The Onion had published this headline about my father, he would’ve cried and begged them to take it down. I guarantee it. At least relative to my father, Lena Dunham possesses the intrepidity of Jesus carrying the cross to his own crucifixion.

4. Lena Dunham explored female sexuality in all its messy, unsanitized glory, while my father once returned a Wedding Crashers DVD because it was the ‘Unrated Edition’

Do not mistake my father’s choice to return the “unrated” version of Wedding Crashers I was given on my 16th birthday for modesty. This was the behavior of a sexually repressed invertebrate. Knowing my dad, the mere suggestion of “unrated” material probably made him horny in a way feared he couldn’t control, which he then projected onto me, causing him to exchange the gift for a theatrical edition of Wedding Crashers. My dad was only able to accept the sex comedy in its most neutered form because he is a stranger to desire, and to the bravery one needs to properly understand and express it. He wouldn’t be able to handle watching Adam and Hannah attempt anal and then settle for awkward doggystyle in Girls’ pilot episode—forget about writing, directing, and performing it. In this scene alone, Lena Dunham demonstrated more courage and conviction than my father ever has, and ever will, in his 58 meek, gutless years on Earth.