After creating the hit TV show Girls (HBO), Dunham has become something of a poster child for sex without consequences and abortion-on-demand in popular media. So it’s no surprise that her guest appearance on Scandal (ABC) came with a heavy side of sexual adventure and condemnation for anyone who would dare not affirm those choices.
On Thursday night’s Scandal episode, Sue Thomas (Lena Dunham) is an author of a soon-to-be-published book detailing her erotic confessions of kinky affairs with the elite of Washington, D.C. Sue is confronted by Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) who is concerned not only about the political ramifications of these explicit memoirs, but also about the well-being of Sue. Olivia warns her that the press will be eager to shame her publicly. “I’m trying to protect you,” Olivia pleads. That’s when Sue fires back, and Dunham gets a chance to plug her agenda:
“Protect me? That’s … that’s awful. I thought you’d be brave. I thought you’d be adventurous, fearless, sexy, confident. But instead you’re just this dried up prude who instead of celebrating the fact that I fully own my body, and use it however I want with whomever I want, as many times and in as many kinky ways as I want, you’re shaking your finger at me? You’re telling me to be afraid of what names someone is going to call me just cause I had the audacity to have too much great sex? As if picking up a hot stranger in a bar for a dirty screw is a crime. What happened to you? Where did your power go?”
Ah, modern feminism – anonymous sex equals power.
Predictably, Olivia Pope is somewhat rattled after this speech, and appears to have some greater respect for Sue as a result. Popular TV shows like Scandal are quite willing to give Dunham platforms from which she can lecture the rest of the country on how traditional values are obsolete (and how she doesn’t care what conservative white men think). While these moralistic rants about the virtues of casual, kinky, sex are Dunham’s bread and butter, they are honestly getting a little old. Somehow, sex has never been less sexy.
