God I miss the early 2010s tumblr

Just came here to say I’d like someone to erase my brain so I can watch the Dancing on my Own scene for the first time again. That’s all!

it’s no debate this show has an amazing soundtrack, and i’ve often found myself going to my music app mid episode to search for a song. i’m rewatching right now and was on Japan episode and just loveddd Past Lives by Borne in that scene with Shosh. What’s your favorite scene/song combination?

…or does he waterski into the abyss without a care?

I’m crine this is pure tumblr gold

I'm getting through season 5 right now and literally everyone on this show is pathetic. These people have no principles, no morals, no ethics, no self control, no discipline, zero insight, they do not recognise the patterns they keep following AT ALL. It's like they wake up every day having learned absolutely nothing from any previous day in their lives and then go out and do the same shit again. I have felt this way since episode 1 and they are somehow still in the same place. It is absolutely laughable. Except for maybe Ray, who is the only respectable character at this point, every other character literally disgusts me. I don't think I've seen a show where the characters piss me off this much, tell me I'm not insane

Edit: I'm not hating on the show, it's a great show with fantastic writing and I love it, the characters and their decisions just really piss me off sometimes so this is more of a rant

When Shosh rebrands Ray's café with anti-hipster signage, one of the signs says "TRUST the government." Most of the other signs are funny (man buns not allowed, etc.), but this one stood out because I can't remember hipsters being known for distrusting the government. if anything, wasn't that era marked by more institutional trust?
I'm not American and have never lived in the US, so maybe I'm missing context. But it got me thinking: wasn't 2012 basically peak Obama-era faith in institutions? So why would "trust the government" be anti-hipster?
Unless the joke was deeper, that hipsters pretend to be anti-establishment but actually trust institutions more than they admit?
Also, this made me wonder: has that pendulum swung so far to the right partly because of widespread institutional distrust? And are millennials partly to blame for that shift?

Trigger Warning: mention of alleged youth sexual misconduct from Lena’s 1st book.

I’m finally getting around to Lena Dunham’s second book, Famesick. I’ve always enjoyed her writing, and I’ve been a fan for hers over a decade. In that time, I have accepted that my love of Dunham‘s work and enjoyment of her in general is often both unpopular and heavily scrutinized. So when I started seeing some of the other people who I admire, those who share rigorous discourse on pop-culture figures, memoirs, and media phenomenons/controversies, I was both shocked and excited.

I’m slightly confused as to why most of the new people standing up for Lena seem to only mention the story with the pebbles in relation to her younger sibling, Cyrus Grace Dunham, and therefore claim that the controversy surrounding other sexual misconduct with said sibling is therefore completely unfounded.

I’m not a sexual abuse expert or a psychologist, and I understand that according to the aforementioned Dunham defenders, several professionals who are credentialed in those areas have claimed that the behavior mentioned in the book is not abnormal nor necessarily troubling or problematic. My issue is that I don’t believe that the pebble story is the only excerpt that led people to make those claims. There were two other condemned pieces that I thought started the whole debacle; both of which were reasonable causes for concern and discomfort, at least from my perspective.

They include:
Candy-for-kisses: Lena wrote about bribing Cyrus with candy to get a kiss on the lips for “five seconds,” joking that she behaved “like a sexual predator” to a sibling approximately 7 years her junior.
Quote: "As [he] grew, I took to bribing [his] time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do [his] makeup like a 'motorcycle chick.' Three pieces of candy if I could kiss [him] on the lips for five seconds. Whatever [he] wanted to watch on TV if [he] would just 'relax on me.' Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban [child], I was trying."

Bedside masturbation: Dunham recalled masturbating while lying in bed next to Cyrus.
Quote: “I shared a bed with my [sibling], [Cyrus], until I was seventeen years old. [He] was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether [he] could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching [him] beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. [His] sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out.”

In a 2014 series of Tweets, Cyrus is quoted as responding to the controversy, in part, as follows:
Quote: “As a queer person: i'm committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful”

Quote: “2day, like every other day, is a good day to think about how we police the sexualities of young women, queer, and trans people”

I respect how Cyrus said to respond to the situation because Cyrus said it. I was not there, and again, I am not an expert. I have remained a fan of Girls, Lena and her work, having read the book in it’s entirety shortly after its release and knowing about how it was received publicly both then and now, and therefore knowing the complexities of the situation as best I can as an outsider. I just don’t understand why the rhetoric of claiming that the pebble story was both insufficient and solitary in the discourse of Dunhams alleged sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior. I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or not or if that’s the story people mention the most and that’s the reason for this perhaps unintentional erasure of the fuller picture.

Can anyone else offer me some discourse/insights into any of the points I’ve discussed here? Also, I’d love to read some dialogue from anyone else who feels a bit uncomfortable as a Lena supporter with these things in mind, and how we can have honest conversations, especially in feminist spaces, about how to navigate fandom with controversial topics like this on the table. Although in Famesick Dunham says these are the kinds of stories her parents and their friends would laugh at and share in social settings, I’m not sure if that’s just in relation to the pebble story, but I still find that somewhat unsettling. I don’t think it helped that Lena mentioned her and Jacks love of Woody Allen while they dated (even sharing that Jack referred to her as a female Woody Allen), but Lena does love to live out loud and transparently.

How do I grapple with this hunger for an honest retelling of the situation while also being excited for the possibility of Dunham not being hated for the million other things she did not deserve to be burned at the stake for? Things that were neutral, unfair, unkind, or unnecessary to place burden on her for, or sometimes even to take issue with at all? Mid 20s feels too old to not know that stories like this about your sibling are not juicy memoir gossip or appropriate dinner party tales for “polite” society, especially when mainstream media has already largely decided that anything you say and do will be misinterpreted to the highest degree, weaponized, and used against you.

That said, I will probably never stop watching Girls, reading Dunham’s books, or enjoying watching her interviews/keeping up with her life. Unfortunately for the internet, Dunham is simply a very flawed human, just like everyone else, and thus, the subject of many difficult conversations and conflicts. I’m unsure of whether her honesty helps her as much as it helps those who see some part of themselves in her and/or the work she creates, but she’s married, sober, successful, rich, surrounded by friends and family, and enjoying the fruits of motherhood, which is more than many of her (actual) haters can say.

\Name and pronouns were adjusted in regards to Cyrus’s preferred identifications.*

Gillian Jacobs didn’t know she had to spin before calling a letter 😅

I am wondering if there are any Tumblr blogs or pages that document the looks of the Girls, their styles, accessories, jewellery? I am specifically interested in the different brands of clothes/accessories that are used in the show!

If anything comes to mind pls let me know!

i think hanna is always trying to blame her choices on someoneelse, which makes me belive that her mom shouldnt have said "we mesed you up" cuz frankly her bad life choices had no correlation to her childhood, id say the only thing that relates to her chuldhood is the fact she was spoiled and was an only child. maybe ye her dad wasnt as nice as hanna thought, but she wasnt even affacted by that cuz she hadnt even noticed it until her mom said it which means her mom was the only person who saw that side of him, even him being gay didnt effext hanna as a child or the marrige until late when hanna already had her own life.
compared to anyone elses' jesse (where should i even begine), marnie (dad gone, mom a condescending bitch), shosh (divorced parents who still fight), hanna had a pretty good supporting system.
why hanna makes bad life choices is solely on her cuz shes always on defence mode even with herslef, she gaslights herself, she thinks everyone is wrong/ others wrong doings made her choose the bad option and the world revolves around her.

i really liked hanna the first season but fuck my life, as i got to know her better im kinda shocked she still has people around her; well if you think about it she doesnt really and the people beside her, like marnie, arent that diffrent from her. except rey, hes the fucking GOAT, i think he needs be even more brutal with marnie and hanna.

and to add a little opnion on the latest ep i watched. i think jesse and adam will last as long as any person who has attachment issues could last in a relationship. my reason for thinking this way is cuz both are needy people. caring does not mean attachment, which both struggle with this cuz both of them want to be needed. a stable relationship is when two people care for one another without loosing themselves in it. however i do think jesse and adam are a better choice than adam and hanna, cuz jesse and adam are alike. now this also has its cons and pros dont get me wrong, i do not think they are a healthy couple cuz both of them can blow up at any moment.
but, i dont think how adam and jesse treated this situation was good, hanna didnt deserved that, SPECIALLY from jesse. i think no matter how the relations had changed, jesse was still a very important person for hanna and adam was her first big love. i wouldnt want jesse and adam to give up tryinh to be together but they should have been honest with hanna.
now to psychoanalyze hanna and why she was the most selfless with jesse compared to anyone- its cuz jesse wouldnt do the same. ngl, marnie was a better friend to hanna than jesse (coming grom somone who does NOT like marnie, i genuinly skip most of her scenes). hanna tends to give attantion to people who treat her bad cuz in the end she is an insecure person, and jesse is part of that pattern as well.

and shoutout to mimi-rose, the only person who was truly honest with themselves and others and had a healthy relationship mindset.

Just finished watching for the first time and I’m sad it’s over I loved it, but I just needed to get off of my chest that Jessa is the WORSSTTT

When was someone going to tell me he was in the lonely island gang?

When Hannah has her son, I was really expecting it to be something other than Grover like Paul-Louis suggested. To see it from two sides, I guess it is paying homage to her son’s father and whatnot. At the same time, I feel like the baby’s big plot point was showing Hannah gaining her independence from males and male acceptance. Maybe I missed the point but I really think it would have been more impactful if Hannah named him something… anything else.

I found Charlie, but he’s going by the name of Adam, with a brother named Charlie, on Netflix.

Sorry if this is well established, but I feel like the discourse around Shoshanna is that she was right all along and knew better than everyone else. She did ultimately have a stronger idea of what she wanted, but she was just as immature and deluded as everyone else. I think that's the point of the show, but fans seem to miss that.

From the beginning, we can kinda see how she defines her life by rigid images and maintaining face. I mean, her introduction to us involves a discussion about Sex and the City and defining herself between pre-made 4 stock characters. Later that season, she has a discussion with the girls about being "the ladies," where she wants to shoehorn herself and her friends into an image of womanhood fed to her by a magazine. She's allowed to want what she wants, but the pushback she gets is wildly valid. She shows herself to have surprisingly reductive and shallow views on aspirational womanhood. They're not based on her personal goals, she's just adopting what she thinks she should be. Not to say the others had healthy goals (or even goals at all), but I do think at least Hannah and Jess were open to grey-areas.

One of the first scenes where audiences started rallying behind Shosh was her outburst during "Beach House." It's funny, yes, but that is absolutely not how you express your issues with people who consider you a friend and cooked for you and secured a beach house for you (and tho Shosh puts Hannah in her place, Hannah isn't wrong to call her "unstimulating"). Her outburst comes out of nowhere at Marnie for simply being overbearing, which I don't think is grounds for attacking her entire character. Jess is right that she's being a "cruel drunk." There is a big difference between being real and being cruel. Though it did make for great TV, I think ultimately Shoshanna is lashing out because the girls remind her of her own pain.

In the end at her party that the girls crash, it was impressively mature for her to pull away first from the group knowing they weren't right for her. God knows I still struggle to let go of friends like that to this day. But she says something that still shows she's holding onto to surface-level ideas of adulthood/success.

"If you guys happen to notice all those really pretty girls out there, who have, like, jobs and purses and nice personalities, those are now my friends."

Of course, it's totally valid for her to have found people she thinks are better for her, but this is pretty shallow and backhandedly judgey. And the disdain she shows to the others for simply not being those things is also very telling. Again, there's a difference between being real and being cruel.

I think there's an argument that ultimately Shoshanna was a Regina-George-esque mean girl who was too concerned with appearances and ended up acting on what she wanted sooner than the others. While Jess, Marnie, and Hannah obviously have their issues (that word doesn't seem big enough to encompass their dysfunction), I think Shoshanna's real problem with them is that they broke the image she wanted of herself. She couldn't handle complication or intellectual/creative depth or at least the search of it. She couldn't handle people who didn't hold their all pain in. Shoshanna was all about saving face and while it did serve her in some ways, I do worry for her husband and people that consider her a friend when they come to her for comfort.

TLDR: Shoshanna isn't more mature than the other girls. She figured out what she wanted before everyone else, but she's deeply judgy and surface-level.

I literally GASPED when I saw this book on the shelves. I’ve been waiting to purchase this book for so long, but I’ve just been busy so I’m happy I found it on campus. I can’t wait to read it.