We’re All Girls
By Mia Ogle
The past couple of years have kindled a newfound interest in Lena Dunham’s 2012 HBO TV show Girls. TikTok and Instagram have been teeming with clips and edits of Hannah Horvath and her controversial band of friends (there’s even a Girls Rewatch Podcast that has been climbing through the ranks since its debut in 2023). Girls comes on the heels of plenty of revolutionary TV shows about 20-somethings living in New York City. Probably the most notable is Sex and The City, which presents a glossy version of life in NYC. Carrie and her friends have problems, certainly, but they cry about gorgeous men in designer shoes and never fail to debrief over a sexy cocktail. Everybody wants to be Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, or Miranda. Or at least they wanted to — until now.
2024 gave rise to Brat Summer, a hedonistic bender spearheaded by Charli xcx’s most recent album. On Brat, Charli sings about various decidedly unsexy topics — from jealousy to contemplating suicide — over the upbeat pound of hyper-pop. She is vulnerable about the torments of life, transforming them into something gritty and real yet ultimately emboldened and triumphant. Brat’s success speaks to a culture that not only tolerates the less glamorous parts of life but encourages them. And this cultural embrace of messiness has opened the door for the perfectly and painfully real Girls.
This phenomenon is best illustrated by season one episode three of Girls, “All Adventurous Women Do,” in which Hannah learns that she has HPV. Hannah assumes that her college boyfriend Elijah is the culprit, so they meet up at a bar where Elijah reveals that he is gay. Hannah is shocked and begins to cry, which she describes as “an inappropriate physical reaction to my total joy for you and your self-discovery.” But any joy for Elijah’s so-called self-discovery quickly devolves into a catty argument in which Hannah proclaims “I was supposed to know that you were gay? Because this fruity little voice that you’ve put on is a new thing.”
Girls’ Hannah and Elijah
The end of the episode features Hannah tweeting “all adventurous women do,” a reference to her friend Jessa’s claim that “all adventurous women” have HPV. As she hits post, Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” begins to play. And when her roommate Marnie comes home, she finds Hannah having a full-blown solo dance party. Still dancing, Hannah tells Marnie that Elijah is gay, to which Marnie responds “That is funny.” “Funny is one word for it, I was going to go with fucked or sad,” Hannah says, and Marnie laughs before joining in the dancing. The final shot is Hannah and Marnie hugging as the screen cuts to black.
Both Marnie and Hannah are right — it’s funny, fucked, and sad all at the same time. It’s hilarious that Hannah’s HPV diagnosis morphed into a discovery about her ex-boyfriend’s sexuality, and it’s fucked that some of her most formative years were not what they seemed. Hannah’s response is true to the painful realism of the show — we’d all want to be unconditionally supportive, but who wouldn’t feel at least a tinge of sadness and resentment And in the end, Hannah’s tweet/dance party turns her messy life into a celebration of living to the max, complete with a cathartic moment of female friendship.
Girls isn’t delusional — it is well aware that HPV and a gay ex-boyfriend aren’t exactly the pinnacles of young adulthood. But it lays them out truthfully, with all the joy and pain involved, and still encourages us to dive in. Nobody wants to be Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, or Shoshanna, but we all kind of are. And Girls celebrates that.
