In this piece, Isobel Yeap takes an in-depth look at Lena Dunham’s 2010 feature film Tiny Furniture and its depiction of female sexuality.
That she’s expected to be both sexually liberated and autonomous and assertive, and yet at the same time she’s still conscious of the old respectable-girl-versus-slut dichotomy, and knows that some girls still let themselves be used sexually out of a basic lack of self-respect, and she still recoils at the idea of ever being seen as this kind of pathetic roundheel sort of woman.
— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men1
In her film Tiny Furniture (2010), Lena Dunham offers a portrayal of the female experience both bleak and startlingly honest. In one scene, Aura, played by Dunham, meets up with the chef at work who she’s been flirting with. He has a girlfriend but he takes her to a construction site and they have sex in a pipe. The ambiguity of the scene is arresting. It is neither the romantic bedroom scene, nor is it the horrific rape scene. Although Aura consents, it is unpleasant to watch him shove her head into his crotch then have sex with her from behind while she asks, “You don’t have AIDS do you?” He pulls her hair and pats her on the knee when he finishes.
This scene is unsettling for a number of reasons. First, it appears towards the end of the film by which point we are well acquainted with Aura’s insecurities. She is portrayed as being desperate for male attention, pandering to the need of any man who agrees to spend time with her. Were Aura beautiful we might think, “Poor Aura! Those men are such assholes! They are not good enough for her.” But Aura is not beautiful, at least not in the conventional Hollywood sense. She is slightly overweight, with small breasts and dimpled thighs. Her hair is scraggly, her complexion patchy with faint traces of acne, and when she applies make-up none of these flaws disappear, if anything they are made more garish by her uneven application of bright red lipstick. Watching her ill-treatment at the hands of selfish men thus becomes less a series of personal slights against one woman unlucky in love and more a feminist statement on how some men treat women they do not really care for and why these women let them get away with it.
This is not to say that good-looking women are always treated like princesses. Charlotte, Aura’s friend from high school, possesses the regal bone structure we are used to seeing in films – her heavy-lidded eyes and pouty lips akin to a younger, sexed-up Kristen Scott Thomas. She swans about the house in kimonos and lacy lingerie. While Aura faces the camera front on, Charlotte’s head is always a little tilted back; she surveys her world through lowered lids, ever contorting her body and face to make it most desirable for the male gaze. Indeed, this performance is maintained even when it is just she and Aura discussing unemployment.
Charlotte acts as a dating guide to Aura. However, her ideas on modern romance are just as, if not more, disturbing. Before Aura’s date with the chef, Charlotte makes this flippant recommendation: “Take him somewhere and grab his cock. Do something spontaneous.” Charlotte’s attitude has been shaped by her own formative sexual experiences:
“When I was sixteen, I was absolutely in love with this man. I was head over heels. One time, we were in Soho, and we broke into this residential park, and it was raining, and it was so romantic, and I was so sure he’d kiss me, and then he just reached over, and he just grabbed my cunt, and I was really traumatised, and I was super sad for a long time after that, and then one day I just got over it, and I realised that that’s what you call spontaneous.”
There is something disconcerting about Charlotte’s choice of vocabulary. She relays her tale of sexual assault in the same offhanded way she relates all of her tales; her phrases are short and sharp and strung together in a lilting sequence. She was naïve and the man she was in love with assaulted her in a park at night. Here is a rare instance where Charlotte’s choice of vocabulary – the term “traumatised” – is appropriate in its gravity.2 And yet sure, she was “super sad”—and the use of bathos here is touching in its childlike innocence—but then she just “got over it.” There was no coming to terms with the experience, no healing or grief.
Charlotte’s anecdote is a dark parable of modern romance and foreshadows Aura’s own experience. After having sex, Aura and the chef walk down the street together. He sees a friend of his girlfriend’s and immediately pushes Aura out of sight. When Aura tries to talk to him, he is dismissive and distracted.
Even more distressing is Dunham’s depiction of the sexual aftermath. When Aura gets home she showers on her hands and knees, her pose recalling the sex scene in the pipe. Dunham uses a long shot; it is as though we were watching Aura, hovering awkwardly in the doorway to her bathroom, uncertain as to whether or not we should comfort her. From here we can see her entire body – the folds of her stomach, the tattoo on her arm, her hair plastered down the side of her face. She is so vulnerable and at the same time so alien, disconnected from and oblivious to the world. She sits back and hugs her knees. Then she crawls to her mother’s bed and confesses what she has done.
Her mother is already lying down, facing away from Aura but towards the camera. She asks where they had sex and Aura replies, “I don’t want to say.”
“In the street?”
“No, worse than that.”
“What is worse than the street?”
“A pipe in the street.”
Still, she does not look at her daughter. Her face fills the screen but she appears unmoved, just quizzical, and the only questions she asks are pragmatic in nature. “Didn’t you get cold?”
“Not really.”
“Did you use protection?”
“No.”
It is this that upsets Aura’s mother most. “Aura, I really, really want you to be careful.” Aura starts to cry, her face raw from the shower and her hair still wet. We can see the blemishes on her skin and we see her bite her lip. Her voice cracks, “I’m really tired, mum, I just have to go to sleep.” She came to her mother for support and advice. But her mother offers neither judgment nor empathy.
One of the strengths of Tiny Furniture is that it offers a rare insight into the moral ambiguity that pervades sexual encounters. There is a clear power dynamic at play between Aura and the chef: she is besotted with him and seeks his approval, while he is only interested in her for convenient sex. Despite the sex being consensual, Aura, in the shower scene, evokes a broken rape victim trying to cleanse herself. On the one hand, we want to blame the chef for being so callous. On the other, we want to blame Aura. The warning signs were there: he cheats on his girlfriend and stood her up without apologising. If Aura were to regret her decision it would be akin to regretting the decision to get blind drunk after waking up in the morning with a terrible hangover. She could have predicted the consequences and at no point did she tell him to stop or leave. Then why did she do it?
The most obvious reason is that she is attracted to the chef. This is understandable. Even though he cheats on his girlfriend, he appears to be educated and intellectually curious. He even goes to pains to differentiate himself from other men who work at the restaurant. He warns Aura that they will “molest” her: “These guys are such fucking dirtbags. I’m just sitting around trying to read my book and they’re all watching cum omelette…a bunch of guys cum and cook it in an omelette, then some chick has to eat it.” He thus represents himself as higher-minded. For a moment we think he could be like Aura’s ex-boyfriend, the “male feminist.” But then he reveals that he too is into sexist porn, the only difference being that his choice of porn is more exotic: “like some Japanese shit…tentacle rape.” When Aura tells him about the porn Charlotte used to show her in high school about “women being kidnapped and ravaged,” his response is not, “Why would you want to be kidnapped and ravaged?” but rather, “Did that turn you on?”
Another explanation is nicely articulated in Gloria Watkins’ essay ‘A Feminist Sexual Politic: An Ethics on Mutual Freedom’ (2000). Watkins argues that female sexuality today needs to be understood as a product of history. The availability of birth control liberated women from the inconvenience of unwanted pregnancies, making it easier for women to engage in sex with multiple partners. However, in focusing on the practicalities of sex – the risk of contracting STIs, the ethics of abortion – we tend to overlook the emotional dimension to sexual liberation. When Aura tells her mother about her traumatic sexual experience, her mother’s biggest concern is not with how she feels, but with the fact that Aura did not use protection.
Watkins then points out that despite feminist attitudes being embraced in most aspects of society today, there has been a distinct persistence of patriarchal attitudes in the sphere of sexuality. Perhaps, she speculates, this is due to the extremism of the prevailing feminist sexual polemic: if all penetration is rape then women needed to be lesbians or celibate. This left a large set of heterosexual women with no example of what equality in a sexual relationship even looked like. Furthermore, insofar as the sexual liberation of women manifests itself in women having sex with multiple partners, the outcome happens to coincide with the interest of heterosexual men.3 As Watkins puts it:
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s females were often encouraged to make synonymous sexual freedom and sexual promiscuity. In those days and to some extent in the present most heterosexual men saw and see a sexually liberated female as the one who would be or will be sexual with the least amount of fuss, i.e. asserting no demands, particularly emotional ones. [at 86-7]
Aura’s experience is of the dark side of the carefree no-strings-attached sex made famous by Sex and the City. This is what makes Dunham’s representation refreshing, and to dismiss it as “just trying stuff out,” as her emotionally distant mother does, is to deny its confronting nature. During the act, Aura fails to assert her autonomy, and afterwards all she is interested in is gaining the chef’s approval: “I hope you don’t judge me too harshly for having fucked you in a pipe.” Her choice of words is telling. She is not asking him to not judge her at all, rather she is asking him to judge leniently. She then attempts to retroactively assert herself by grammatically placing herself as the active participant; she wants to believe that she was not fucked in a pipe, but that she fucked him.
He shrugs, “No harm, no foul.” It’s his mantra, which he repeats after hiding her behind a car. “You’ve said that like seven times tonight.” she says and he ignores her because he’s too busy texting. No harm, no foul. It’s his way of exculpating himself from moral responsibility. His likely thinking is that both parties were consensual; no one was hurt (including his ignorant girlfriend). He does not see himself as a bad person. Like Aura, he is “just trying stuff out.”
Such an androcentric attitude towards sex is so deeply entrenched in our culture that we risk taking it for granted. It is why Charlotte dismisses her experience of sexual abuse as “spontaneous.” It is why Aura consents to demeaning sex. They do not understand what liberatory sex, that is sex where both parties, be they male or female, feel free to assert their autonomy, would even entail. Watkins writes:
We still need to know what liberatory sexual practice looks like…In the bedroom many men want a sexually desiring woman eager to give and share pleasure but ultimately they did not surrender the sexist assumption that her sexual performance (i.e., whether or not she wanted to be sexual) should be determined by their desire. While it was fun to do it with willing excited, liberated females it was not fun when those females declared they wanted a space not to be sexual. [at 90-91]
We live in a culture that confounds the concept of sexual liberation with sexual liberalisation. Mark Grief makes this distinction in his essay ‘Afternoon of the Sex Children’ (2006):
Liberation implies freedom to do what you have already been doing or have meant to do. It unbars what is native to you…and removes the iron weight of social interdiction….Liberalization makes for free traffic in goods formerly regulated and interdicted. [at 178]
He draws an analogy between the liberalisation of the sexual practice of women and the liberalisation of trade. Economic theory teaches that trade liberalisation is advocated insofar as there exist benefits from trade. For example, if I own a bicycle that I no longer want and you are willing to give me $50 for it we are both better off if we are allowed to trade my bicycle for your $50. Where sex is concerned we would say, A wants to have sex with B and B wants to have sex with A. In a sexually conservative society A and B would not have sex because they are deterred by what Grief refers to as “the iron weight of social interdiction.” Hence we could conclude that everyone would be better off if we transitioned to a state of sexual liberalisation.
Now consider the example of me trading my bicycle. The problem arises when I am pressured to sell my bicycle. Then I am not really better off. I liked my bicycle! Similarly, where there exists a societal pressure promulgated by the media for women (and men) to engage in lots of carefree sex, the liberalisation of sex comes with the risk that people will be having sex not because they want to but because they feel they have to. The upshot of this is a culture where young women feel pressured to engage in the sort of bad sex depicted in Tiny Furniture. Just as Watkins calls for a space for women to be asexual when they please, Grief writes:
But a test of liberation, as distinct from liberalization, must be whether you have also been freed to be free from sex, too—to ignore it, or to be asexual, without consequent social opprobrium or imputation of deficiency…One of the cruel betrayals of sexual liberation, in liberalization, was the illusion that a person can only be free if he holds sex as all-important and exposes it endlessly to others—providing it, proving it, enjoying it. [at 178]
Aura and Charlotte inhabit a world where engaging in these sorts of sexual encounters is not only accepted but encouraged. They are a rite of passage, marking you as sophisticated, insouciant, liberal. Stories about quirky sexual experiences thus become a type of social currency – young women trade them at parties to peers who remark, “Ooh how funny! How exciting! How desirable you must be!” It is easy for us to imagine Aura, a few months later, retelling her experience with the same deadpan tone Charlotte adopted when recounting her tale of sexual assault. She would say something like, “You know that really hot chef from my work? Yeah the other night we had sex in a dilapidated construction site. It was amazing.”
“That’s so cool!” her friends might remark, to which Aura might reply, “Yeah, so where’s the weirdest place you’ve had sex?”
In Interview Magazine, Dunham rationalises her representation of sex in her television show Girls, a representation similar to that in Tiny Furniture:
I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives. They’re willing to experiment with what it means to be treated well. You know, what’s it like to have a guy who totally demeans one aspect of your life? For Hannah [the character Dunham plays in Girls], at least, it’s an intellectual exercise.
Yet there are ways of intellectualising even the most traumatic experience. By the end of Tiny Furniture we’ve watched Aura throw numerous tantrums and parade around in only a shirt and underwear, evoking an overgrown infant. And so it is difficult to watch her look so uncomfortable during that sex scene, to watch her rock back and forth in the shower and cry in her mother’s bed, and to argue that her experience was formative in a positive way.
That said I do believe that while Dunham has offered us some of the most honest and modern representations of the female experience she has a tendency towards soft-line feminism. She touches on an issue, then apologises and makes excuses for the status quo. Dunham is aware of this. Later in the interview, she admits, “I’m always like, I’m sorry to be the girl who wants to talk about feminism, but that person is sexist.” I hold nothing against her for this. For me, her ambivalence is symptomatic of an artist commenting on a societal prejudice that is very much complicit in her identity as a woman.
That sex can be bleak or traumatic, even when it is consensual is an important idea that has been underrepresented in film and television. In Tiny Furniture, Dunham offers a rare portrayal of the moral nuances and power dynamics that underlie sex. Moreover, she comments on why people (in particular, young women) today might choose to engage in degrading sex and the ways in which they come to terms with such experiences. In moving away from the binary representation of sex as being either mutually enjoyable or an act of rape, Dunham highlights the persistence of the androcentric attitude towards sex that Watkins critiques. Thus it is in showing us precisely what it is not that Dunham brings us closer to understanding the nature of liberatory sex.