If you wish you had an abortion to call your very own, you might be deeply warped, or you might just be Lena Dunham. There’s a fine line between self-awareness and narcissism, and Dunham is on both sides of it. Her amazing capacity for reducing everything to a story about her personal experience is becoming the norm among pop-culture figures and in the art they produce.

“I still haven’t had an abortion, but I really wish I had,” Dunham said earlier this month on her “Women of the Hour” podcast. Dunham explained that she believed that having a true personal story about undergoing the experience would somehow de-stigmatize abortions for other women. As if that’s an issue foremost in anyone’s mind: “Gee, should I terminate this pregnancy? What are the pros and cons? Am I doing the right thing? It sure would help if I could be sure if Lena had an abortion, because that would make it totally OK.”

Bizarrely, Dunham claimed this week that the whole thing was a joke and that she had (unnoticed by anyone) made the remarks under cover of a fictional persona, one who has a tendency to say dumb things. So she gave a non-apology apology of the “Can’t you guys take a joke?” variety, a dubious position given that it was only three months ago that Dunham castigated New York Giants superstar Odell Beckham Jr. for thinking mean thoughts about her even though she had zero reason to believe that any rude notions had crossed his mind when he was sitting at her table at the Met’s Costume Gala.

On her HBO show “Girls” (which, unlike many conservatives, I respect and enjoy), Dunham has adroitly lampooned the Lena Dunhams of the world. Or has she? Maybe she is embracing, or at least shrugging off, the many solipsistic errors committed by her characters: Hey, world, this is my vanity, deal with it the way you’ve had to deal with my jiggly bits flopping around while I played topless ping-pong.

So it goes with narcissistic choices depicted by Hollywood: Consider HBO’s Sunday night dark comedy “Divorce,” or the new sci-fi movie “Passengers,” in which one character makes a decision that is so self-centered and oblivious to others’ feelings that it amounts to a theft of a life.

On the long-gestating “Gilmore Girls” Netflix sequel “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life,” young Rory (Alexis Bledel) is a smug, entitled millennial who thinks the world owes her a living as a fabulous journalist when she is too lazy to even prepare for interviews. She tortures her boyfriend Paul, who is constantly doing nice things for her, thoughtlessly sleeping with other guys as the show mines laughs in her careless admission that she never got around to breaking up with the poor schmo.

When a show pushes back against the waves of narcissism, the effect is bracing or even mesmerizing.

I’m not saying only millennials are narcissists. On “Divorce,” created by the Brit Sharon Horgan, middle-aged people who have major responsibilities to their spouses and children act just as self-centered, just as oblivious, as Dunham. In the pilot, Horgan casually reveals that Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker), who is enduring an increasingly sour marriage to Robert (Thomas Haden Church) has been having an affair with a doughy, granola-eating professor, Julian (Jemaine Clement). Her request for a divorce isn’t just a matter of her husband failing to please her anymore; it’s a sign that she thinks she can simply swap out one man for another as though exchanging a pair of pants.

Her plan starts to hit snags when it turns out that others are just as self-absorbed as she is: Julian has no interest in giving her anything more of himself than the occasional sack session and Robert, incensed when he learns about her affair with Julian, is determined to leverage her bad choice to cause her maximum misery, never mind that their children will be harmed in the process.

All of these loathsome people are played by such likable actors, though, with the aid of such waspish and witty scripts by Horgan and her writers, that viewers may well be taking the series as a how-to guide rather than a critique of indefensible behavior. Narcissism grows so common that it becomes part of the atmosphere contemporary characters breathe.

When a show pushes back against the waves of narcissism, the effect is bracing or even mesmerizing. Netflix’s superb series “The Crown,” about Queen Elizabeth II, is, like many other shows, focused on the tribulations of an attractive young woman, but one of the principal takeaways from this riveting drama is that the attitude that you should do whatever feels good at the moment is improper, intolerable and just plain wrong.

Explaining why the queen should stick to tradition even in hiring decisions, the show’s stern voice of authority, Buckingham Palace private secretary Tommy (Pip Torrens) explains to the young monarch (Claire Foy), “Do the wrong thing once, it’s easier to do it again. Do the individualistic thing once, it is easy to do it again.”

Alas for “The Crown,” the days when such advice would have seemed obvious are gone. The show isn’t just a look back at history. It’s a moral period piece.