The Lena Dunham dramedy Generation on HBO Max reached a new low this week when it had a cute little girl ask a gay teen couple if they were going to touch each others' penises.
In the episode, 'Deepfake,' on Thursday, June 16, gay teen Chester (Justice Smith) is on a date at a roller rink with his new boyfriend Bo (Marwan Salama.) While they are awkwardly skating around the rink, a little girl skates by and asks them if they are brothers. The dialogue that follows is disturbing.
Little Girl: Are you guys brothers?
Chester: No. Do we look like we're brothers? We're on a date.
Little girl: Oh, so are you gonna touch penises?
Is this bit of interaction supposed to be funny instead of troubling? Years ago, Dunham apologized for passages in her memoir that described sexually molesting her younger sister. “Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying,” wrote Dunham back then in her tell-all Not That Kind of Girl. Critics rightfully called her out on it. Has she learned nothing from the angry reaction to her previous winks and nods at the sexualization of pre-pubescent children? Leave children out of your sex jokes, Lena.
The rest of the episode takes jabs at the left's usual objects of hatred. When one bisexual character, Nathan (Uly Schlesinger), wants to upset his mother with his sexuality, he calls upon Chester to "fake date" him in front of her. Chester thrills at the idea of "messing with a homophobic Evangelical white woman." Before getting Chester on board, Nathan relishes mocking his mother and her pastor by making up the idea of a real boyfriend. "Lying just to fuck with them which is a really ballsy move," one of his friends cheers.
'Deepfake' was only one of the three awful Generation episodes that dropped this week on the streaming service. Another episode, 'Built for Pleasure,' included a dick pic for the audience. In that episode, the show's characters play a socialistic remake of the game Monopoly with "Bernie bucks" because "Capitalism is white supremacy."
Of course, no woke LGBT show would be complete without a nod to the trans agenda. One of the Monopoly players includes a rising high school freshman girl who is a trans boy and is supposedly good enough to make varsity with her brother. But, "I don't even know if they'll let me try out since I'm trans so I don't know," the girl who imagines she is a boy says.
"Well, then we'll boycott or protest or whatever you need," a sympathetic mother in the living room replies. It is interesting that the show did not use a boy pretending to be a girl for this dialogue, a more common scenario among trans athletes. Perhaps doing so would have made the unfairness of trans players in female sports too obvious. Or maybe they had a trans-male so that a character could say "all professional sports are just male-dominated, money-making, rapist defender organizations."
The big question after watching this series is why is Lena Dunham still writing for television at all? Even her past "success," Girls, never had a very large audience. HBO Max, like so many other streaming services appears determined to push away American audiences with an unwatchable and sexually perverse woke show written by another over-hyped and untalented "It Girl" that never really was.
