Dependent but paraben-free

Like Miss Self-Important, I was baffled by Eric Posner's call for for declaring college students children. The biggest issue with it for me, though, was something much more basic, namely the vagueness surrounding whether the idea would be to treat college students or all individuals of traditional-college-student age as minors:

Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. We are increasingly treating college-age students as quasi-children who need protection from some of life’s harsh realities while they complete the larval stage of their lives.

It would be one thing if we as a society acknowledged the difficulties of becoming a self-supporting adult by 18, and the existing effective-majority of 21 (adult socializing is legally out of bounds for 18-20-year-olds), and decided to move The Age up by a few years. It might not be the best idea - if we let the 'the brain only fully develops at...' crowd pick an age, they'll go with 50 - but it would be, as I say, one thing. It would be another entirely to declare 18-22-year-old college students children, while maintaining 18 as the age of majority for the non-student population. It would be writing into law an existing norm, though, of a class-based age of majority.

This is, as others (Elizabeth Nolan Brown? a NYT op-ed? both?) have brought up, already an issue when it comes to campus rape. College-age women are evidently less likely to be victims of rape if they're college students, but the cultural conversation is about college sexual assault - especially cases at elite schools. One might also point to the issue of juvenile offenders (generally not from the most advantaged backgrounds) tried as adults - there's no upper-middle-class equivalent. Privilege - that amorphous buzzword - can be summed up as, at what age will society consider you an adult? If the answer's over 40, you're positively drenched with the stuff.

Except... is it actually advantageous to be a dependent at the age when your first gray hairs appear? It's advantageous to have the option - that is, to have a safety net if things have gone wrong. But are endless years of dependency desirable?

In a very interesting article of hers that Miss Self-Important links to, she points to "descriptions of emerging adulthood as something that one is 'supposed to have' [and that] soon enough slip into talk of emerging adulthood as a right, and one that government programs are obliged to provide for everyone." She's skeptical: "And what more important use of tax revenues is there than to level the emerging-adulthood playing field so that the less fortunate can have equal access to a year or two of aimless hipsterdom after college?"

This is already the case when it comes to the cultural conversation about unpaid (or negatively-paid) internships. These internships tend not to be necessary for entering well-paid fields, nor (last I checked stats on this) do they up the chances of getting paid employment. But rather than discussing them as yet another foolish undertaking of the pampered classes, another way well-off parents hurt their kids while trying to help them - as we very well might have done - we refer to them as the epitome of privilege. We ask how we can extend the ability to work for free for an indefinite period of time to all.

The obvious counterargument would be, well, college. It's now quite generally accepted... not necessarily that every individual should go to college (although that's a popular view with political support), but that no one should be prevented from doing so for socioeconomic reasons.

But the thing is, not everything common among elites is better. For that matter, not everything common among elites is conducive to perpetuating elite-ness! Some highbrow habits are conducive to regression to the mean. Going to college, getting and staying married, these have advantages. But the elite thing of researching the ingredients of all food and cosmetics products, this seems mainly to encourage women to stay out of the workforce, with dubious benefits to their paraben-spared offspring. Related: the elite thing of not vaccinating one's children. I'd lump unpaid internships and ever-emerging adulthood into that same category.

Women and comedy

(Spotted near the place where I returned the emptied-into-the-sink green juice bottle for the $2 refund. Photo includes a finger-selfie for good measure.)

-I've (finally) seen "Broad City" - the web series and a couple episodes. I feel as if I'm supposed to say it's better than "Girls," but I think it's more that the protagonists are more likable. If at times a little too likable - not "cool girls" exactly, but maybe a bit? 

As with other sketch comedy, it's hit or miss, but more hit than is typical. But those first few episodes of "Girls"... I mean, there's a reason they use a photo of Lena-as-Hannah to illustrate every article about millennials. Capturing a zeitgeist isn't the same as accurately representing the experiences of people your age. While "Broad City" does better at the latter (esp. the depiction of the extent to which first jobs, however advertised, tend to involve cleaning bathrooms), "Girls" has the former figured out. 

-A different sort of humor can be found in the comments to a recent profile of Lululemon's founder. In an odd way, the thread amounts to an ad for the brand, if only because the counterarguments to the commenters' objections come so easily. Objections being things like, you can work out in cheaper clothes as well (yes, but you can also go to work in thrifted business attire, to parties in H&M sale rack outfits, yet we don't find it baffling when people spend a bit more in those areas, even though there, too, there's a mix of marketing and the more expensive things actually being nicer). Or that it's offensive that the pants are designed to make women look good to men (yes, how dreadful... and how likely to inspire readers who'd never heard of the make before to go to its website). 

My favorite, though, are the comments from women who'll have you know that their butts look good in cheap leggings. (OK, those, and the one from a woman who on principle won't buy clothes from a store that doesn't make larger sizes, but she - let the record state! - is a six.) A professor of mine in grad school would always talk about "the terms of the debate" and, well, these commenters aren't exactly changing those. A shapely rear remains the goal. And if it's a choice between working out twelve times a week or paying up for leggings that give the illusion you do (or that you've convinced yourself do this), I wouldn't be so quick to assume the fools are the ones in luxury stretch pants.

Strange bedfellows UPDATED

Something odd has happened online recently. An allegiance of conservative rabble-rousers and... black feminists? I suppose, upon reflection, it's not that strange, because if you think in terms of common enemies, there's the White Lady. Gwyneth? No - the other one. Yes, that's right, Lena Dunham, whose fame the National Review wants to hate-cash-in on, and whose work is already hate-consumed plenty from the left. This is, Google tells me, not new - way back in 2013, this very "common ground" was already being cited.

I do, rest assured, have a grand theory of all of this, but I don't waste grand theories on mere blog posts. (Actually, I do that all the time, but I'm trying not to!)

UPDATE

Still saving the grand theory, but in the mean time, see also Kay Hymowitz (and other conservatives) discovering "privilege" in the wake of the catcalling-video controversy. Underprivileged men of color become all of a sudden so sympathetic to the right when these men are the (perceived) antagonists of the young-Hillary demographic.

Transparency

This, as the kids used to say. Writers writing about writing not paying. Shall I join in? Places I've written for as a freelancer tend to pay between $50 and $100 an article. This can be parlayed into other things, and something is absolutely better than nothing (which is what my first regular post-college writing gig paid, back when I was too naive to know one was meant to ask for payment), and it's probably a different story for people who establish themselves on staff various places and then switch to freelance (I'm thinking of someone like Jessica Grose)... but it does say something about the viability of full-time freelancing as a career.

What the article unfortunately doesn't mention is how what "writing" consists of has changed. Yes, if you wanted to be a poet or novelist, this was always going to be a struggle if you didn't come from money or hit it big with something you wrote while still in high school. But now, anything however tangentially related to publishing or journalism likely won't pay. I do repeat myself on this, but it's important: The day job has become, for many, an unpaid, no-insurance-providing "dream job." Work that isn't particularly artistic (sorry but that first episode of "Girls"...) is somehow The Arts.

I could try to analyze this further - is this about places marketing themselves cleverly in order to get clerical work done for free? - but I want to make the most of this enormous stamp-card mocha and get some other writing done.

Freedom of spirit, overanalyzed

Jemima Kirke, aka Jessa from "Girls," has such pretty hair. Is her painting derivative? Evidently. Is there some fascinating unstated story behind why "Brian," "Mike’s best friend," is "there most nights after the kids go to bed"? I want to go with yes. That hair, but also that free-spiritedness. So many of these free spirits about! Such a funny expression - are we the relatively anxious and uptight in some kind of spiritual prison? How is a "free spirit" different from a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? So many questions! Questions the freer of spirit probably don't find themselves internally debating. If you're queasy about spontaneous DIY tattoos and people smoking inside in a house with young children, your spirit may be on the restricted side.

On a note totally unrelated to questions left unanswered in the Kirke photo-spread, men can now be bisexual. Science has now decided that this exists, whereas some earlier incarnation of science looked at the men attracted to and involved with men and women alike and said, nuh-uh, or something. What was news to me, though, was that the prof who had initially claimed men physically can't be bisexual is the same one as led the notorious in-class dildo demonstration at Northwestern.

Also surprising, to me: the extent to which that episode resembled that scene from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life." I must have skimmed the previous CCOA discussions of this incident, because I'd always thought the "dildo demonstration" was, some prof showed the item in question in class, in order to, I don't know, identify it? I hadn't quite put it together that "a female guest speaker was brought to orgasm by her male partner using a sex toy." Thank you, NYT Magazine, for enlightening. A free-spirited female guest speaker, no doubt.

On discovering that one's boyfriend used to date Ms. Soda Stream

-Lena Dunham's boyfriend used to date Scarlett Johansson. Why is this fascinating? Oh, but it is. It asks us all to wonder how we'd feel if we learned that our significant others used to date noted heartthrobs. Or, I suppose, how we'd feel if our high school significant others went on to date super-successful writer-actor-etc. sorts, but honestly, there's no way I could identify with Johansson rather than Dunham in this scenario. So would it be a badge of honor, or a source of anxiety?

-Parental overshare isn't going anywhere. This is, meanwhile, a writer who once held forth on a popular podcast about how one of her sons is better-looking than the other(s?). Why, people, why?

-Curious what Rachel Hills thinks of this article. Me personally? It made me think that attempts to figure out Female Desire - or, for that matter, male - stumble when people want to believe that their experience is universal, and that those who don't experience the same are in denial. Like when gay men from places without much openness about that topic sometimes apparently assume that all men experience same-sex attraction, but generally repress it.

"They're men with jobs, Jerry" - George Costanza

Finally saw "Frances Ha." Greta Gerwig - allow me to spoil the movie - plays an aspiring dancer who's reached the age (27) at which it's either going to happen or it's not. And it's not. In a city where (as is remarked upon in the movie) an artist is generally someone with an outside source of income, Gerwig's income really is what she can earn from her art. At the very beginning of the movie, she's offered an easy way out - moving in with a wealthier, maybe older boyfriend whom she's not all that in love with - but turns it down. She does the same (at first) when offered an office job. She's deeply committed, but to what? To art, to her best friend, or to the idea of staying a college student forever?

-I'm not sure I need to see another on-screen rendition of my recent-college-grad years living with roommates in Prospect Heights. It was on the cusp of, did they actually film that in my old apartment?

-So is it just Variations on "Girls," with Gerwig the Dunham character, and the friend who works in publishing the slimmer, more uptight Marnie? Google reveals a similarly nepotism-charge-inspiring cast (Sting's kid and Meryl Streep's!); this, too, is a New York without racial diversity. ("Ha" isn't an Asian last name, but what happens at the end of the movie, when Frances can't fit her full last name, Halliday, into her mailbox label. And the Chinatown she briefly lives in gives no hint of having non-white residents.) The big, whopping difference from "Girls" is that here, the protagonist is 27 and - as is remarked upon throughout - not such a recent grad after all. They're both, though about an adult who identifies - against all odds, and all sense of reality - as a child. Which is apparently very millennial, or something.

-Age. I'd mentioned before (before seeing the movie, that is, in reference to an interview with Gerwig) that "Frances Ha" apparently deals with the not-so-recent college grad, and indeed, it does. At one point fairly early on in the movie, a woman Frances meets announces that Frances looks much older than she is, but acts much younger. And it's clear that this insult has stung. There's a life stage where everyone kind of pretends to be bohemian, but what they really are is young. Money's stupid! Marriage and kids are for squares! And then a lingering, earnest few in each friend group will be taken off-guard and will feel betrayed when it turns out these were not everyone's hard-and-fast values, but just young people being young. But the older you get, the more awkward it is for you to cry 'sellout!' every time a friend gets engaged. Frances has a bit of the Holden Caulfield about her, sniffing out phonies, but then her refreshingly non-Botoxed face reminds us that this is a grown woman in her late 20s. When she finally takes the desk-job she's been offered, you're at once relieved and stunned that she hadn't done so immediately.

-Money. The movie's been praised (where? I forget) for being really honest about money in a way that feels fresh. The $3 ATM fee scene is apparently a thing. (I was so expert at avoiding those!) It's a great big exploration of the line between broke and poor. At one point, a friend tells Frances that in calling herself poor, she's being unfair to actual poor people. You sort of agree with him (ahem), but then you remember that he himself can always turn to his family, while she's on the cusp of something that goes beyond broke. It's not entirely clear - she has a family that can't support her life in New York (as vs. Ms. Horvath's family, which won't), but they seem to have a home she could move back to. Because of whichever forms of non-economic capital - connections she's made in the arts world, being white and pretty, whatever - she's never entirely out of work, or at least not for more than five minutes.

-Age, class, and money: What was most interesting was how the movie gets at that time in life when trajectories diverge. Because Frances is still hanging around with college friends, there's this sense of camaraderie mixed with the underlying fact that some people have family money or finance jobs (or both), while others, not so much. So it's not just that people with different situations are hanging out. It's that they're half under the illusion that they're all in the same boat.

-Online neurosis: The thing where the best friend moves to Tokyo with her banker-bro fiancé and starts a cringe-inducing couple-blog about it is just spot-on. And of course it turns out the friend was miserable at the time.

-I liked "Frances Ha." But I kept thinking of advice I got in grad school, that whenever you're writing something, you have to ask yourself, what are the stakes? Here, it seemed like if you look at the protagonist's trajectory, she goes from one artistic pursuit that isn't quite right for her (dancing) to another that is, and that has a longer shelf life (choreography). A great life-and-career crisis that lasts for all of five minutes, and that occurs at 27 rather than 22, but still within the decade when such things are socially acceptable. It's not that the problems depicted are too "first-world," exactly. More that it's never entirely clear what's stopping Frances from getting her act together, making it that much less surprising when, by the end of the movie, she has.

A smattering of the usual

-Parental overshare at its most face-value creepy: Your child's having an age-appropriate tantrum? Publish a photo of your kid in tears, with a caption that implies your own kid is a brat. (And if so, whose fault would that be?)

-Tim Kreider on writing and illustrating for "exposure." It's not that I don't share the complaint - as a naive recent college grad, I wrote this Gothamist post, irony of ironies, for $0 - but it isn't really all that mysterious why someone would think to ask for free writing, but not free dental services. As comes up in the NYT comments, the fault may lie not with trust funds, but day jobs. As in, freelance writing, at least, is something you can do in your spare time, without special training or equipment, and that, unlike, say, accounting, you might enjoy doing regardless of what it pays. It's no coincidence that not one but two (if not more!) freelance writers without another source of income matter-of-factly describe themselves as unemployed. It's work, and it can pay something, but that something may be best thought of as supplemental. But it's not like an unpaid internship, where you're presumably going into some office during hours you might otherwise be at a job that pays, and doing tasks you yourself wouldn't have chosen. The more pressing issue might be that many of the positions that used to be day jobs for writers are now unpaid internships.

-According to Jezebel, Lena Dunham has written something "tinged with privilege." I can't possibly be the only one who's come to the conclusion that coming-across-as-privilege is Dunham's... not gimmick, exactly, but what? Niche? Career-defining motif? Whatever we're calling it, if I were Dunham, I'd keep it up.

Meet - or not - the parents

The child-free should not tell parents what to do. Fair enough, if we allow for exceptions.

The Guardian just published this incredible whopper of a(n incredibly common) parental complaint: a mom distraught that her daughter is not as brainy as she is. Naturally, she blames the girl's father, and clings to the idea that this is not academic mediocrity but a disorder of some kind. Same old, same old, with one detail: the author? "Anonymous." As it should be. The daughter, should she grow up and learn to read, will Google herself, perhaps her mother as well if her mother's a writer. Better for this not to come up.

Meanwhile, the bad-parenting debate reaches a new level with this discussion about whether we may fault the Boston bombers' parents for their descent into terrorism. Will Saletan correctly notes that these parents are mighty unappealing. The shoplifting's a curious detail, but the father's ability, in so few words, to insult the United States on account of this country's not condoning domestic violence, well, it would have been Borat-esque if it weren't just so depressing. When criminals like this are siblings, one does wonder if they were brought up right, and in a case like this, the more we learn, the more the answer seems a definitive not-so-much.

On the other hand, isn't this asking a bit much? Both "boys" were adults. 26-year-olds are definitely grown-ups, probably even in the Lena Dunham universe, and all the more so if they're married-with-kids. Are we to be equally suspicious of dude's wife? And parents are notoriously blind to their kids' not-so-ideal behavior (except when, like Anonymous, they're not). Go to any thread about health and The Youth, and you're likely to find parents insisting that their kids would never go near alcohol/tobacco/sex/whatever. Children, including adult children, are angels. If parents have trouble imagining their kids being normal, how exactly are they supposed to wrap their heads around a crime like this? And it seems altogether irrelevant that some broigus uncle (and oh, does this scenario ever define broigosity!) thinks the kids are/were bad seeds. Not that the uncle's wrong - he's of course 100% right - but if there's pre-existing estrangement, he's not really comparable to non-estranged (but plenty strange) parents. So it doesn't work to say that some relatives caught on, while the parents themselves did not.

Sweeping

When the "Girls" backlash (and backlash to backlash...) first broke, and everyone was saying that the show was too white, my thought - and that of approximately 10,000 of the 300,000 weighing in - was that the problem wasn't so much "Girls" being too white as that shows by-and-about white people are the only ones getting made. A TV show about a small group of friends is never going to be a sweeping portrait of society, or even one borough.

What is frustrating, however, is when a work that does claim to be a sweeping portrait of society manages to be one, but only to a point.

I just finished - and am going to reveal the plot of, if you haven't read it and were planning to - Tom Wolfe's 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, a sweeping portrait of New York in the pre-Giuliani age of puffy-sleeved evening gowns, back when the Upper West Side was plausibly scrappy. One of the book's great strengths is, we get all these characters separately, but also how they perceive one another. But we only get three perspectives: McCoy, the white Protestant banker, Kramer, the insecure Jewish government-lawyer, and Fallow, the alcoholic British journalist - all three white and at least middle class. We get a bit of a glimpse into the mindset of various working-class white (Jewish and Irish) men, but anything beyond that is too unknowable-Other. Obviously, no work can address the entirety of human experience. But when a work is about themes like race, class, and heterosexual intimacy, but only manages to convey the range of viewpoints of white men, this is distracting. Not as in distractingly un-PC. Distracting as in, it feels somehow incomplete.

Women in the novel are on the one hand central to the action - an affair is what ultimately brings down McCoy - and on the other, at best sketches of characters. They exist in two varieties - wife whose looks are fading, and pretty-young-thing love interest. Which is no doubt how many men see it. But a novelist might want us to have the perspective of McCoy's wife and mistress, and so forth. Particularly the mistress, who, you know, killed someone. One does not need to have been especially influenced by Women's Studies 101 to want to know what's going through this character's mind. Zola, who Wolfe apparently admires, and who (if I know anything, I know this) certainly wouldn't meet 2013 standards of political correctness, would jump around to different perspectives, male and female. There's this one moment in The Bonfire of the Vanities when we get a glimpse of how Kramer's mistress sees him, and it's brilliant. Obviously Wolfe is capable of such observations. Why aren't there more?

More to the point: African-Americans! Specifically, this is a story about a confrontation between the poshest and most sheltered parts of white New York and the most dangerous and tragic parts of black New York. Black characters - mostly male ones - are incredibly important to the plot - a community leader/Al Sharpton stand-in; a hit-and-run victim in a coma who, fine, can't say much; a teenage crack dealer; and an aspiring middle-class mother stuck in the projects. The only thing we learn about how any black people feel is, they don't like it when one of their own is killed. Well, go figure. But the idea that we might know what a black character is thinking is somehow well outside the bounds of conceivability. This is a problem not because, for some anachronistic and PC reason, I'd like this to have been a book about black New Yorkers. It's a problem because it is a book about black New Yorkers. See the difference?

It would be one thing if the book honed in only on McCoy, looking at only at how the hierarchy looks from the precarious top of it. But then there's Kramer, and Fallow - the jumping-around. It would also be something else if the stance of the book was that the fall of McCoy is an unmitigated disaster, that some lives really are worth more than others. If, in other words, the book were a racist comment on societal decadence. And some well-written novels (see: late-19th C France) have, alas, been along those lines, and what to make of those is its own conversation. But McCoy is a douche, an overgrown dudebro, in modern parlance. He's an entitled Wall Street fool who thinks he can get away with murder, or close. He's not entirely unsympathetic, or the book wouldn't work. But the reader is also supposed to feel a bit of schadenfreude, a bit of, he got an exaggerated version of what was coming to him.

At any rate, I was wary of reading this what with having really disliked that Charlotte Simmons book, but overall, I suppose, despite the caveats above, a recommend.

On "Josh" and "Seth"

I will admit that I first read this reference to TV writers as "white dudes with names like Josh or Seth" as a bit Jews-control-the-media. But then I thought about it and wasn't sure. Is Seth a Jewish name in this context? Maybe yes, maybe no. (I have no Jewdar, as Seth Adam Meyers is apparently not Jewish.) While half of all Jewish men of my generation are named Josh (I exaggerate, but slightly), it's just a common name all-around. Right?

But if not "Jewish," what are those names meant to indicate? "White," maybe, but since that's already in there, it would be redundant. But these things are complicated. If I can't say offhand whether "Seth" and "Josh" mean "Jewish" to most Americans, how on earth do I know if this Jezebel writer (whose name only tells me "female") is or is not someone who'd even know that these names would read that way to many people, that this would fit into a really fundamental anti-Semitic accusation. And not just some accusation one reads about in history textbooks - I've seen this criticism recently regarding the writing staff of "Girls" - that the show is not merely white but Jewish apparently does the opposite of mitigate the problem for some observers. Hmm.

Back to Jezebel. A reply to a comment calling this post anti-Semitic is both helpful-ish and itself possibly offensive: "This tells me that you have never been in the US of A ever. Josh and Seth are pretty stereotypical White non-Jewish frat boy names these days, just like Zack." The second sentence, helpful. (Old-Testament first names are confusing! If you're Jewish and you mostly know other Jews, or know mainly Catholics, these sound to you like Jewish names. And then you start wondering whether all the British Davids and Rachels could possibly be Jewish, and you realize, ah, Protestants!) The first, purest anti-Semitic assholery - a provincial American Jew from whichever Jewish coastal/suburban enclave is just as American as a provincial Methodist from Kansas. Ugh that this needs to be pointed out.

Emerged adulthood

Lena Dunham's New Yorker essay about how puppies are nice was what finally permitted me to articulate what it is about Dunham's persona that grates. And no, it wasn't that I too think puppies are nice, and yet the New Yorker didn't ask meeee to write about it. Nor even that her face is there looking at you every time you open the magazine's app, for reasons I don't entirely understand. (She made a video explaining it? and one must be alerted to its existence every week?) Nor is it that she comes from privilege* (she is, as we all know, next in line for the British throne), nor that she doesn't resemble a "Friends"-era Jennifer Aniston.

No, it's something much more simple than that. It's that the Dunham persona is a child. A child in whom we must celebrate any glimmer of adult competence. The essay ends with Dunham saying, of her new dog, "He is mine, and I am old enough to have him," adding of herself, her boyfriend, and her sister, "We are all adults here." And this seems consistent with the tone of other Dunham alter egos elsewhere in her oeuvre. The reason for the Marnie character.

Now. Dunham is 26 years old, nearly 27 (thank you, internet, for such trivia). That is not emerging adulthood. That is emerged adulthood. It's adulthood even for those who aren't as well-established in their careers as Dunham famously is. Why should we be surprised that a grown woman has a boyfriend, or is able to care for a dog? Why, more generally, should we be surprised that Dunham isn't a child anymore, any more than we're surprised when anyone else comes of age and then some? 

It's because of an aw-shucks persona of sorts, this idea that Dunham and the alter egos are such messes, such eternal bratty children, that we should be impressed when they reveal themselves capable of tying their shoes. And this is grating for several reasons. We who are about her age have felt like adults for a good long while. Moreover, we suspect that Dunham has as well. We suspect that the self-presentation as an overgrown (age! not a body-snark!) petulant teen is calculated, with two aims: first, to make Dunham seem like a child prodigy ala Tavi Gevinson (who was legitimately famous at, what, twelve?), and second, to tap into cultural anxieties about adult children living in the proverbial basement. 

Re: the first, this is a bit like scrappiness oneupmanship - all achievements are more impressive if done by someone from a poor background, or if done by a child. If Dunham is a pseudo-child, and we're impressed that she tied her own shoes, we need to be positively awed that she's on HBO and in the New Yorker. The hype about Dunham being so young to be that successful needs to last as long as possible. Re: the second, the possibility that you or your adult child (depending your age) will never quite make it to self-sufficient adulthood is really the concern of the moment. Dunham embodies that, all the while having her act together far more than most definitive adults decades into adulthood. So some of the eye-rolls the Dunham phenomenon inspires might not be resentment over her being successful at a young age (or the expected gender/privilege/looks angle), but rather annoyance over her persona's reliance on eternal youth. 

*Dunham is not helping matters, referring to her Tribeca-loft upbringing as follows: "We didn’t have a proper home. We lived in what was essentially one big room, on Broadway."