The Girls of "Girls" Experience a Day in the Life of an Average New Yorker

On Sunday night, the cultural event of early January 2013 goes off, when the second season of Lena Dunham's polarizing dramedy Girlspremieres on HBO at 9 p.m. Critics have unfairly savaged the series for focusing on the lives of four privileged, college-educated white girls instead of speaking to the lives of all young women (as if something in Dunham's life experiences suggests that she's perfectly suited to write about what it's like to be underprivileged or an ethnic minority). But it's true that Girls, with its narrow POV, presents only a small slice of life in New York City, one that the masses of less fortunate daughters do not recognize as their everyday struggle.

We're not mad at Dunham writing what she knows, but we can't help wondering: What if her characters did experience life as the rest of us? It's about to get really real, as The Girls of Girls Experience a Day in the Life of an Average New Yorker.

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Written by Justin Monroe (@40yardsplash) and Foster Kamer (@weareyourfek)

The Girls Experience: In the first episode of Girls, a homeless African-American man shouts at Hannah: "Oh, girl, when I look at you I just want to say, 'Hello, New York!'"

The Average New York Experience: Hannah isn't being hollered at. Marnie is. By some construction worker remarking not-so-charmingly, and certainly not upon the way her spirit inspires them so much as the shape of her derriere, and the things he would like to do with it.

The Girls Experience: Hannah and Marnie strut around Greenpoint, Brooklyn, never once bothered by the locals, who no doubt find them charming additions to the neighborhood's ever-developing character.

The Average New York Experience: Some drunk Polish guy screams at Hannah on the way to the G train in a mixture of Eastern European dialects and mostly unintelligible English about his rent before puking on himself, and narrowly missing her shoes. As it happens, he is also their super.

The Girls Experience: Nobody gets flashed.

The Average New York Experience: Marnie—having already been catcalled—is sitting on the L to 8th Avenue when some guy opens his trench and starts pleasuring himself before running off the train at 6th Avenue, pressing his dong on the subway window once more for good measure, then running away. (She later gets to relive the entire episode after she is pictured being flashed by said flasher on Gothamist, which is trying to shame the flasher on its site. Sure, editors blur out her face, but not before Jessa leaves a comment laughing at her outfit that day.)

The Girls Experience: Nobody transacts any part of their lives in Times Square, because Times Square is obviously a part of New York City that only exists in the realm of tourists.

The Average New York Experience: At least two of them work in Times Square, if not in the same building (Conde Nast or Viacom, take your pick). Jessa eventually scores a prescription of Xanax just to deal with having to body-block tourists on the way from the train to the office, a two-block walk that takes 15 minutes, because the tourists move like mentally challenged cattle. She often scratches her head on the elevator once inside her building only to free a clump of hair, loosened by stress.

The Girls Experience: The girls eat Tasti-D'Lite, and they eat it together.

The Average New York Experience: Hannah regularly eats Rafiqi's for lunch, because it's all she can afford. Unlike her colleagues, she can't eat at her desk, as she's too ashamed of her choice in food, which would stink up an office to high hell. She sneaks off to a far corner of Bryant Park to eat it in shame, and later confesses to her physician that she suspects it as the primary cause of her recent "daytime leakage."

The Girls Experience: Hannah gets HPV from a former lover.

The Average New York Experience: Dealing with the aforementioned lunch, Hannah sneaks off to the closest park restroom. Despite covering the toilet with half a roll of grizzly city-provided toilet paper and half of that month's Vogue, she still manages to contract some sort of rash that doesn't go away for another three days.

The Girls Experience: A character only ends up in one of these neighborhoods after falling asleep on a subway line. She is laughed at by the locals, gets off the train, and goes to eat cake on the beach.

The Average New York Experience: Shoshanna and some friends from NYU decide to go to Flushing, Queens for Chinese food. After spending 45 minutes trying to navigate the two block walk from the station to get to the place they read about in New York Magazine (the one with the great dumplings), they high-tail it back to Manhattan for dinner at Pastis, and laugh about how scared they were back there.

The Girls Experience: Life is a series of parties, and what few bars they go to are sparsely attended to and beautifully lit.

The Average New York Experience: There are no good parties, and everyone has to go out to bars or clubs jam-packed with either (A) better looking hipsters, (B) cooler hipsters, or (C) B & T sleazebags who spend the night trying to bed them. When they attempt to go to the hot new club that is "cool," all but Marnie are promptly turned away at the door, informed that there's a "private party" that evening. Marnie goes in without the rest of the group.

The Girls Experience: They have yet to actually encounter any police on the show.

The Average New York Experience: "Terrorism," a cop explains to the girls before making them get into the stop-and-frisk position. "But we're white!" screams Jessa, at a cop who laughs at them as she pulls Jessa's one-hitter from her pocket, cuffs her, and informs her that she'll be spending the evening in The Tombs. Hannah starts having an asthma attack, and her inhaler is in Marnie's purse. Reaching for it, the cop then cuffs Hannah, who passes out. (Both relieve the entire traumatizing episode on Gothamist a week later when the video is posted, and they both become a hipster cause célèbre against police brutality.)

The Girls Experience: Nobody gets mugged, though one character does wake up without her purse on a train.

The Average New York Experience: Shoshanna gets her purse snatched steps from her home. She starts crying about how much the purse cost, but because she goes to NYU, she can still get into her dorm. She pukes on her floor, passes out on her bed, but not before crying to her parents about it in a frantic voicemail. Her folks—who don't have the financial means to buy the more safely located apartment she'd begs for—try to convince her that she should stay indoors because "only bad things happen after 10 p.m."