Lena Dunham went on Twitter to respond to a widely-circulated story on the conservative website Truth Revolt titled Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.
That story highlighted a chunk from a longer slamming of Dunham published in the conservative magazine National Review titled Pathetic Privilege, in which the writer labels a passage about childhood experimentation in Dunham's new memoir Not That Kind of Girl as "especially suspicious" and basically horrific.
From Dunham's book:
“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.
“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I look at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Webb, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.
“Does her vagina look like mine?”
“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”
One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.
My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”
My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.
It's worth noting that when Truth Revolt's story first started making the rounds, it included a typo that said Dunham was 17 instead of 7 when the story took place, which obviously makes a huge difference.
Either way, Dunham was pissed, as evidenced by this series of tweets:
Columnist Kevin D. Williamson says "There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode,” while Dunham says she was just being a weird, curious little kid who didn't know any better. What do you think?
[Via Gawker]
