The Dunham Disconnect: NYC Media Love for Lena Isn’t Shared by Rest of America

Mediaite.com:

Lena Dunham was recently crowned “America’s new queen of comedy” in a recent cover story in Vogue.

Her Girls character, Hannah Horvath, says she is “the voice of her generation.” 

And on the heels of her Saturday Night Live hosting gig last week, Vulture declared the 27-year-old as “The Host of Her Generation.” 

The term “bubble” has been written about in this space before. It is defined as a world where folks in TV news live in, a world where 10-18 hours a day is consumed by what is going on in the world, what the hot stories are, and how to best present these stories to an audience. Oftentimes however, bubble stories don’t match what audiences tuned in for. But bubble stories play nicely to people that matter in the industry places like New York (because that’s where most media companies and publications are headquartered), so the feedback on the content is invariably positive, although the thing that matters most—ratings, the size of an audience showing interest—may not reflect that sentiment. 

Need proof? Just check out the hysterical coverage of any snowstorm that hits New York. Six inches is headed towards Manhattan? Better get the extra-obnoxious breaking news banner out! Six inches in Philadelphia? Kansas City? An ice storm in Dallas? Oklahoma City? Yawn. Doesn’t affect us. 

Which brings us back to the bubble phenomenon around Ms. Dunham… 

Is she a relative success? Absolutely. She has her own HBO show and is the toast of Manhattan media. She and her boyfriend got to hang at the White House with the President and First Lady last summer. She’s like a daughter to Judd Apatow. She has 1.45 million Twitter followers. She got multi-millions in an advance book deal. And she isn’t riding to stardom just because she’s the next pretty face who can also act like Julia Roberts or Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Lawrence before her. 

But the next queen of comedy? 

The voice of a generation?

The host of a generation? 

The numbers tell a much different story. 

For starters, her HBO show is one of the lowest rated on the network, averaging about 800,000 viewers per first-run episode. That number sounds pretty good until comparing it to other HBO shows such as True Detective (3.1 million), the late Sex and the City (3.5 million) or Game of Thrones (4.97 million). But if you read review after review after (glowing) review, the only conclusion one could come to was Dunham was single-handedly keeping the network from extinction. 

As for the voice/host of a generation, it’s a nice sentiment until seeing that said generation isn’t exactly flocking to their televisions to see her host the likes of Saturday Night Live. In that capacity last week, Dunham—despite getting naked again for the 101st time since entering the national stage two years ago—helped SNL register its second-lowest audience of the season. For context, the Dunham-hosted show was even 20 percent lower than the show hosted by the less-hyped Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) the week prior. This result comes despite as big a promotional push as you’ll see for a non-NBC employee leading up to the show in the form of featured appearances on Late Night with Seth Myers and The Today Show. And none of it mattered. 

Why? 

Because, in my opinion, Lena Dunham is who she is: Largely unfunny, profoundly annoying, extremely self-important. And don’t even think about asking her any obvious questions during a press conference…she’s proven to be more thin-skinned than Alec Baldwin. Just ask reporter Tim Molloy of The Wrap, who politely asked why there was so much nudity on Girls, particularly by its lead character. 

Here was Dunham’s response:

“Yeah. It’s because it’s a realistic expression of what it’s like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it. If you are not into me, that’s your problem,” she said.

That’s when Judd Apatow—who was also at this press conference, jumped in and got personal. 

“Do you have a girlfriend?” he asked.

“Sure,” replied Molloy. 

Apatow: “Does she like you?”

Molloy: “Yeah.”

Apatow: “Let’s see how she likes you when you quote that with your question and just write the whole question… and tell me how it goes tonight.”
 
Whatever that means. 

What Dunham and Apatow can’t seem to grasp is that Mr. Molloy isn’t alone in his perspective. You can’t meet anyone who knows Dunham’s work who doesn’t ask the same question about the nudity aspect. The simple theory here is Lena doesn’t have anything resembling depth in the acting or comedy department, so she resorts to shock value. Audiences find the act tired, repetitive and self-absorbed, so they tune out. 

There are bubble stories that play very well in New York. A little snow hits, the “national” media (mostly based in Manhattan) lets the rest of the country know about the horror they’re about to endure. 

Same goes for the blizzard of coverage around the dusting of snow that is Lena Dunham’s talent. 

The media may be very much into her…

But to almost everyone else on the planet without a byline—those outside the bubble—it hasn’t exactly been love at first, or 101st, sight. 

RELATED:  Lena Dunham apologizes for making off-color joke about sexual molestation 

'Six Californias' Instead of One?

Townhall.com:

"I love Germany so much that I am glad there are two of them," the French novelist and Nobel laureateFrancois Mauriac commented acerbically during the Cold War. Investor Tim Draper loves California so much that he thinks there should be six of them.

Draper is one of Silicon Valley'ssuperstar venture capitalists, an early funder of numerous high-tech enterprises, including, most famously, Skype and Hotmail. He is also the prime mover behind the "Six Californias" initiative, a proposal to partition the nation's most populous state into six smaller ones. From north to south, those new states would be: Jefferson, North California, Central California, Silicon Valley (including San Francisco), West California (including Los Angeles), and South California.

With 38 million people spread over such a vast and varied territory, Draper argues, a monolithic California has grown ungovernable. The state's population is more than six times as large as the average of the other 49 states, and too many Californians feel estranged from a state government in Sacramento that doesn't understand them or reflect their interests. He is far from the first to say so. Plans to subdivide California have been put forward since the earliest days of statehood in 1850. In an 1859 plebiscite, voters approved by a landslide a proposal to split off Southern California into a separate state. (The measure died in Congress, which was in turmoil over the looming Civil War.)

Can Draper's six-state plan do better? It moved one step closer to plausibility last month, when California's secretary of state gave backers the go-ahead to begin collecting the necessary petition signatures to put "Six Californias" on the ballot. If 808,000 signatures are submitted by July 14, the measure could go to voters in November.

Clearly, a six-way Golden State split is the longest of long shots, and critics aplenty have already started blasting Draper's proposal. But even many of the critics agree that California has become an unwieldy, unmanageable mess.

"No other state contains within it such contradictory interests, cultures, economic and political geography,"writes Keith Naughton at PublicCEO, a website that covers state and local California issues. "It has become impossible to even remotely reconcile the array of opposing forces. The only way to get anything done is to shove laws and regulations down a lot of unwilling throats." In the Los Angeles Times, business columnist Michael Hiltzik claims the economic fallout from the Six Californias plan would be "horrific" — he's especially disturbed that the proposed new state of Central California "would instantly become the poorest state in the nation," while Silicon Valley, where Draper lives, would be one of the wealthiest. Yet Hiltzik concedes that "Californians have lost contact with their government as more budgeting and administration [have] been upstreamed to Sacramento" and as state policies have "taken decision-making for everything from pothole repair to art and music classes out of the hands of the locals."

It's been a long time since an existing state was partitioned into smaller states. It last happened in 1863, when 50 northwestern counties of Virginia were renamed West Virginia and admitted as the 35th state. More than 40 years earlier, Maine, which had been part of Massachusetts since the 1650s, voted overwhelmingly for a divorce, and eventually entered the union as a new state in 1820. In both cases, separation was driven, then embraced, by communities and people who had grown alienated from a state government dominated by interests they didn't share. West Virginia's mountain people had chafed under Richmond's rule, and sharply opposed the formation of the Confederacy. Mainers had long complained that the Legislature in Boston — where Maine was underrepresented — was not only too far away, but too willing to sacrifice their interests to those of Massachusetts.

Maybe those chapters from 19th-century history have no relevance to California today. Or maybe Draper is onto something that shouldn't be dismissed too casually. Last September, in California's rural north, Siskiyou County and Modoc County voted to pursue secession from California and support the creation of a new State of Jefferson. Local residents crowded the Siskiyou board of supervisors' chambers, and when a speaker asked who in the audience favored the idea, the local paper reported, "nearly every hand in the room was raised."

Conventional wisdom says Draper's scheme hasn't got a chance. But venture capitalists have a knack of seeing openings and opportunities that most people miss. Would "Six Californias" would be an improvement over the status quo? That's definitely a debate worth having.

RELATED:  California drought: More than 255,000 homes and businesses still don't have water meters statewide

Politiks As Usual: In The News 3/9/14

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No, Atheism and Conservatism Are Not Compatible 
 
Santorum: GOP Should Follow Pope's Example to Gain Followers
 
Obamacare Surcharge Appearing on Restaurant Bills Across the Country
 
George Will: Obama Donor Investigating IRS Scandal ‘Kind Of A Sham’ 
 
NBC Warns: Midterm Election 'Holds the Fate of the Rest of the Obama Presidency'
 
Ed Schultz Goes from Supporting Keystone to Comparing It to 'Vietnam' 

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Liberal Rutgers Group Asks That Condoleezza Rice Be Denied Honorary Degree Because She's Black and Conservative

FOXNews.com:

Have you heard the news?

Condoleezza Rice lacks “moral authority.” She fails to meet the standards of “exemplary citizenship” and she does not have what it takes to “inspire” graduating college seniors.

That crazy thinking comes from the New Brunswick Faculty Council of Rutgers University. They voted last week to ask university leadership to cancel Rice’s invitation to be this year’s Commencement Speaker and receive an honorary degree.

Yes, apparently the first African-American woman to serve as National Security Adviser and the nation’s Secretary of State doesn’t have what it takes to be honored by Rutgers.

Rice holds a Ph.D. in political science. She has taught college for decades. She was Provost of Stanford University. She worked her way up from a working-class family in the segregated South to the highest echelon of world power and politics.

But according to the Rutgers faculty council, all of that is negated by her service in President George W. Bush’s administration.

They cited her roles in pushing the false claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They also point to her support for using enhanced interrogation techniques to get information from terror suspects.

The facts are right. The conclusion is wrong.

I, too, disagreed with many of the policies Rice faithfully supported as a member of the Bush administration. But only partisan hatred can blind the faculty to her extraordinary level of accomplishment for herself and her country.

Rice is smart, disciplined, hard-working and the model of an inspiring modern American. She personifies the American Dream. She is living inspiration for a young person trying to accomplish great work no matter what the barriers. And in Rice’s generation there were some serious barriers starting with her race and gender.

That is why New Jersey Republican State Assemblywoman Mary Pat Angelini called the Rutgers faculty’s wrongheaded decision "appalling and an embarrassment to our state."

"This is nothing more than a political firestorm fueled by their hatred of an opposing ideology, and President George W. Bush in particular. Dr. Rice and the people of New Jersey deserve better," Angelini said.

There is an added element at play here. There is a disgraceful double standard amongst liberals, particularly those in academia, in the hatred they direct at black conservatives.

We saw this last April when the conservative neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson was forced to step down as a Commencement Speaker for Johns Hopkins University (where he ably served as the head of pediatric neurosurgery).

Liberals on the Hopkins campus mobilized against Carson because he criticized President Obama’s health care reform law and said that he opposed gay marriage.

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals.

Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America.

Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.

I’ve experienced some of this vitriol firsthand when I have veered by liberal orthodoxy. I wrote about it in my book “Muzzled – the Assault on Honest Debate.”

This shunning of Rice is especially troubling coming from a great American university. This is the place where debate and dissenting views are to be valued as sacred.

RELATED:  Rutgers president reaffirms selection of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker

Porn Star/Whore Belle Knox Is Too Stupid To See How Pornography Exploits and Oppresses Women

Women with any kind morals everywhere should be outraged at this whore for trying to make porn look like any other job while supposedly sounding "educated" while doing it. But sex for money, whether you're a "porn star" or a street hooker, is no different no matter what kind of deceptive spin you attempt to put on it:

In what may be one of the splashiest media sagas of this year, a Duke University freshman has revealed her secret porn performer persona after being "outed" to her classmates by an insensitive male friend earlier in February. The student, known now by her stage name "Belle Knox," has vociferously defended herself through editorials submitted to the feminist website xoJane, and has enjoyed a great deal of support from sex positive quarters, though not without a good amount of admonition from sources both within Duke and on the web at large.

Of course, a good chunk of the criticism Knox has received has been of the reprehensible and personal sort, including threats and harassing messages sent through social media. These attacks are of course odious and inexcusable, and no amount of disagreement with Knox's message can justify them. This kind of behavior is not only harmful, but disproportionately aimed at women in the public sphere.

That having been said, Knox's agenda is misguided. Knox, a self-described libertarian with reluctant GOP affiliations, believes that performing in porn is a direct affront to the patriarchy, the term she uses for general systematized and institutionalized oppression of women. According to Knox:

We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that's exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society. [xoJane]

Knox's mission, in other words, is to attack the oppression of women by intentionally flouting sexual norms, such as the expectation of some level of modesty or exclusivity in partners. But does that actually undermine patriarchy? I doubt it.

It's notable, for instance, that the major media venues who are now airing Knox's feminist editorial are only doing so because she's a curious sexual tabloid spread. That women's bodies are easily marketed is no strike against the patriarchy, and that a woman can get attention for her political views only after appealing to male sexual desire certainly doesn't seem to indicate any serious move in the direction of equality.

But let's leave aside whether this theoretically breaks the barriers of sexuality and focus on a side of porn that has gotten far less attention in this debate. What material good do women gain from the porn industry?

At the performer-level, porn is a notoriously treacherous place to make a career. While female performers might make more than their male counterparts, most of them just don't get paid that well, thanks in part to the rise of piracy, cam sites, and the glut of material online. And dwindling profits mean not only pay cuts for performers, but an increased willingness to jockey to meet the demands of a mostly male audience. This competition has two major negative outcomes for Knox's anti-patriarchal project.

First, it means that male consumers dictate the terms of what's depicted. As a result, male desire impacts the work and health of performers. For example, a 2012 study found that porn performers in LA had higher rates of STIs than prostitutes working in Nevada; the study authors chalked the prevalence of infections up to the reluctance of studios to enforce condom use because visible condoms aren't arousing. In other words, the industry drive to respond to male sexual desire could well be the reason performers like Knox are in danger of contracting life-threatening illnesses like HIV. Is this what bucking the patriarchy looks like?

Two, porn doesn't feature the kind of workplace a woman — or for that matter, a man — should want to join. While one could imagine building protections within the industry against unsafe sex practices, that's a difficult task in the absence of any labor union, as porn performer Jenna Jameson has noted. It is unclear to me how working without any collective bargaining power in an unsafe industry is a helpful move for women. Now, I don't mean to imply that Knox is secretly unhappy in her niche, but many women are surely suffering in a low-paying industry with little control over working conditions that pose significant threats to their long-term health.

The obvious retort is that while the material conditions of porn performers might leave something to be desired, the work of porn performers helps non-performing women at large by challenging gender roles. (This is heavily disputed, of course, with many women expressing concern that readily available porn imbues young men with disastrously misguided expectations of women's bodies and committed sexuality.) But it is difficult to imagine, even in that case, how porn really challenges gender roles.

Her assertion is that by making a choice — any choice — she's bucked the patriarchy because she's asserted her decision-making capabilities. But this is only a net increase in one particular woman's freedom, which means both that it isn't any improvement for the status of women as a whole, and also that it only signals an increase in liberties, but not necessarily any gain in measurable well being. This is perhaps satisfactory in a libertarian frame, wherein freedom is the ultimate value, but for women who are interested in measurable material gains, it leaves almost everything to be desired.

One hopes young women paying attention to Knox will choose not to campaign for ambiguous increases in freedom, but rather in targeted betterments in the arenas of life you can take to the bank: good and fair wages, health, and safety in the workplace. In the world of porn, none of those goods are on offer.

RELATED: Duke Porn Star Speaks Out: ‘I’m Not Being Exploited, I Love What I’m Doing’