In a piece for the Huffington Post, NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tackles the messages of the popular HBO series Girls.
… Girls wants to tell us something important about twentysomething females of the 21st Century. And, as the elders of our society, we should always be listening to those new voices crying out.
But what are they telling us?
1. Their world is mostly white.
Last season the show was criticized for being too white. Watching a full season could leave a viewer snow blind. This season that white ghetto was breached by a black character who is introduced as some jungle fever lover, with just enough screen time to have sex and mutter a couple of lines about wanting more of a relationship. A black dildo would have sufficed and cost less …
2. They like to talk about (and sometimes engage in) sex.
It's like a checklist of being naughty: masturbation (check), sex during period (check), oral sex (check), anal sex (check), virginity (check), etc. The show is actually at its most engaging during these awkward, fumbling, and mostly embarrassing (for the characters) scenes …
3. They're too self-conscious, too cutesy, and not that funny.
We're supposed to find these girls somehow charming because of their flawed characters. Their intense self-involvement is meant to be cute and it can be … at times. But not enough to overcome our impatience with their inability to have any personal insight. They're all educated but fatally ignorant …
4. The guys are more interesting than the girls.
Adam, Hannah's (Lena Dunham) abrasive boyfriend, is a wonderful character whose quirkiness never diminished his depth of character. The episode in which he performs in the one-man show is brilliant. Charlie, Marnie's ex-boyfriend, is a complex mix of too stable and too nice. The fact that he's dumped by a girl who is actually more boring and shallow than she claims he is, makes for some excellent social commentary, although that seems like an accidental byproduct. Could it be that Dunham actually is better at writing guy characters than girl characters? …
Read Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's entire piece at the Huffington Post.
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