On ‘Girls,’ Leaning In Doesn’t Have to Happen in the Boardroom
When Girls premiered on HBO almost exactly three years ago, the tagline “Living the dream. One mistake at a time” was acutely fitting. While the show was immediately hailed as creator Lena Dunham’s witty, millennial answer to Sex and the City, it was equally criticized for its unlikable, irresponsible characters who reeked of privilege and entitlement.
“I don’t want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation—or at least a voice of a generation,” Dunham’s clueless protagonist, Hannah Horvath, declares to her parents during the first episode.
If Hannah is the voice of her generation, then that generation might finally be growing up—and leaning in. After four seasons of mostly misadventures, including crappy jobs, even crappier boyfriends, and plenty of running away—to the Hamptons, to rehab, to grad school—the Girls girls more closely resemble fully-formed adult women who, in Sunday night’s season finale, radiated a kind of bold confidence and empowerment viewers had rarely seen on the show.
The episode is thematically wrapped around a piece of feminist advice made to Zosia Mamet’s character, Shoshanna Shapiro, by a man in a coffee shop: Don’t give the power to your partner. Grab a seat at the table. He admits to referencing Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which offers data and theories on how women can best achieve their goals, especially in the workplace.
In the finale, typically naive and indecisive Shoshanna takes the Sandberg advice and chooses a job offer abroad over an invitation to move in with a man who says he might soon fall in love with her. And Shoshanna wasn’t the only one leaning in. Allison Williams’ character, Marnie Matthews, takes a leap and performs solo onstage when her fiancé-bandmate never shows; Jemima Kirke’s normally brash and reckless Jessa Johansson remains calm and helps save and deliver a friend’s baby; and Dunham’s Hannah, who is seen throughout the season making poor decisions in an attempt to get over ex-boyfriend Adam Sackler (played by Adam Driver), turns him down after he says he wants her back.
Still, the ladies of Girls aren’t necessarily known for leaning into their careers—Hannah, for one, might have been suffering from what Sandberg would call “imposter syndrome” when she hastily quit her new job at GQ magazine last season and this season dropped out of the MFA program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to run back to Adam. He’d already moved on, and another woman had moved in, taking Hannah’s place.
As many critics have pointed out, Hannah and her friends aren’t the most positive role models for women—they’re commitment-phobic, self-sabotaging, and at times emotionally and financially dependent on the men in their lives. But just because they don’t have everything figured out doesn’t mean they have to be at odds with Sandberg’s ambitious, corporate stance on female empowerment. Dunham herself argued that it’s precisely Hannah and her friends’ questionable life choices that make them fundamentally feminist.
“We have an essential belief in that being complex, annoying, and multifaceted is the right of women on television, and therefore, to see characters you don’t necessarily adore all the time is hopefully, in some way, an inherently feminist attribute, because it’s a form of representation we’ve been lacking for a long time,” the Girls creator, writer, and producer said at a PaleyFest talk earlier this month, according to Variety.
The characters on Girls present a less slick version of leaning in—one that happens not in boardrooms and at conferences but in coffee shops and at music venues and hospitals. They may never become the CEOs of a Fortune 500 company, but that was never the goal. Instead, they’re leaning in to their own dreams. One mistake at a time.
Original article from TakePart
