Lena Dunham's frumpiest-horniest scandal, revisited

You know the one

Despite giving straight womanhood generally and Lena Dunham specifically a decent amount of thought, it had been a while (nearly a decade) since I’d pondered Lena Dunham’s notorious September 2, 2016 Lenny Letter conversation with Amy Schumer, the one where Dunham insinuated that a star NFL player didn’t want to have sex with her at that year’s Met Gala. Do I agree with my 2010s self on this? We shall see. What was the passage that caused controversy?

The full deal, from the non-forgetting internet archive:

I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like, “That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.” It wasn’t mean — he just seemed confused.

The vibe was very much like, “Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a … yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cell phone.” It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, “This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.”

There is a bigger context, namely the conversation itself, which I will return to.

This is the most Lena Dunham scandal ever because it’s both a little bad and not remotely the level of bad it was made out to be. And you can’t tell if she knew she was toeing a line or if she simply couldn’t help herself. And there’s this element of, what if she was kinda-sorta misunderstood and in the right, to a point, all along?