When the season finale of Girls aired on 16 April, it was received with exactly the amount of division that fans of Lena Dunham’s work have come to expect.

Girls, which Dunham directed, wrote and starred in, has been lauded for its groundbreakingly complex and multifaceted representation of women – but through its six seasons, as Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner discussed at a Tribeca film festival event on Wednesday night, it was never far from criticism.

Lovers and haters of the show would hash it out in a seemingly endless array of thinkpieces, comment threads and forums, which ranged from thoughtful (if angry) critiques of the show and its creators’ white privilege brand of feminism, to straight-up misogynistic vitriol. Most, the pair tried to ignore. But some hit home.

In the panel, which was moderated by Ugly Betty star America Ferrera, Konner spoke of one male journalist at a screening who sent her into a “rage spiral blackout” with a question he spat out from the audience: “Why do you show your body so much?”

“It was that hostile, and I lost my mind,” she said. “Also it was a screening of the third season – I was like, ‘Dude, Google it. We’ve answered this question.’”

Dunham and Konner admitted that while they tended to avoid the comment sections, some criticisms hit harder than others – particularly when they came from people who they admired.



“I can take whatever the ‘alt-right’ wants to say, that’s fine … I can’t even understand what they’re saying, it’s insane, and everyone that I know and love knows it’s insane,” said Dunham, who campaigned with Ferrera for Hillary Clinton last year. “It’s when I thought I was being misunderstood, or willfully misunderstood, by other women who shared my politics that things were really hard.”

Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham and America Ferrera at the Tribeca film festival. Photograph: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Fe

Most recently, Dunham was the subject of a media furore after an episode of her podcast Women of the Hour, in which she joked: “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.” During the episode, Dunham had been talking about how women like her still internalise stigma about abortion; she later apologised, calling the joke “distasteful” – but the renewed vitriol from all corners of the internet had become increasingly difficult to ignore.

“I’m not even going to say I was taken out of context – I made a joke and people had a really negative reaction to it,” Dunham said on Wednesday. “As someone who has devoted a lot of their adult life to reproductive choice, justice and freedom, to be misunderstood by other pro-choice feminists was like hell to me. That was when I started thinking I really need to be more strategic [about what I say].”

It was a particularly prescient controversy considering the series’ surprising season finale, which leaves Hannah in upstate New York with a baby on her breast. “That was a real litmus test for people,” Dunham said. “There were people to whom it seemed totally natural that Hannah would keep her child, and there were people who seemed almost more scandalised than if she had made the other choice.”

Another critique which made the creators take a step back was levelled at the show’s casting and limited focus. Girls centres around four privileged white women living in New York – a city that, in reality, looks very different. “It wasn’t like we didn’t know, but [those criticisms] opened a conversation for all of us to have that we really appreciated,” Konner said.

Dunham said that conversation was the impetus behind Lenny Letter, an e-newsletter the pair launched in 2015 as a platform for young women from all backgrounds. On Tuesday they announced the Lenny Letter: America IRL tour, a variety show of comedy, reading, poetry and music which will bring nine Lenny contributors to non-coastal cities around the country, with a proportion of profits going towards supporting young women in the arts.

“You learn a lot from a smart thoughtful person letting you know where they think your blindspots are,” Dunham said. “You don’t want to tone police people, but it’s like [Muslim activist] Linda Sarsour said recently: nobody ever learned from being shamed. So it felt like there was this fine line between these really thoughtful criticisms and this desire to sort of shame us out of having a voice …

“When I would look at the comments, it was this big generalised sort of, ‘When will she fucking stop!’ – and that’s something I know that a lot of women have experience with. Somehow, certain sections of the internet think that if they just direct enough negativity at you you’re gonna retreat, and they can move on to their next whack-a-mole target.”



Although Dunham has previously distanced herself from lead character Hannah Horvath, she revealed on Wednesday that she did once have what she called a “Hannah Summer”, after she graduated from college in May 2008.



“I spent a year after graduating [where] I really lost sight of the part of myself that felt connected to making things … I felt really far away from myself. And I remember working at the children’s clothing store and I became more – I behaved deplorably. I lived with my parents, I misused their cookware and ruined my mum’s La Creuset pot then threw it in the garbage on the corner, I drove my dad’s car without a license, I was verbally abusive when I was caught doing it, I had sex with the very wrongest people – I was just on this tear, and I was like, ‘How far can this go?’ And then at the end of August my back went out – because that’s who I am,” she said, laughing.

The two weeks Dunham spent lying still in recovery gave her the space she needed to recognise what she’d left behind – and she took that energy into the script for her first film, Tiny Furniture. “That’s what kind of brought me out of that phase,” she said. “And so a lot of Hannah’s darkest moments or the most gauche, horrible things she’s done literally came out of a year and a half of my life.”

Konner and Dunham also revealed that if the first season had panned out as they had initially planned it, the first episode would have been the one to feature Jessa’s abortion.

“They [HBO] were like, ‘We might want to get to know the characters before they’re throwing an abortion party’,” Konner said. “I remember [executive producer] Judd [Apatow] being like, ‘It’s as if Kramer killed a puppy in a pilot.’”



Dunham added: “For me it was so obvious that none of these characters would ever keep a child [at this stage], and that all of them would be coming from a liberal arts school and wouldn’t have any particularly strong emotions about it … and Judd was like ‘I think you’re not quite properly estimating America’s feelings on this one.’

“And by the way – they let us do it second,” Konner said. “It wasn’t like they fought us on it; they were just like, ‘How about we have another one first.’”