The controversial star of Girls wants to talk about her first time. On The Internet, naturally.
Ari Melber
The Obama campaign released a sexy, controversial and hip pitch for voting on Thursday from Lena Dunham, the star and creator of the HBO show Girls, at a time when sex, abortion and women’s rights have been front and center on the campaign trail.
The Obama campaign has aggressively used YouTube to mobilize base voters, and it often taps celebrities who have a built-in viral punch. But this video is unusual even for the young, digital set in Chicago. The ad’s style is vintage Lena: edgy and informed, controversial but achingly self-aware, sexually proud and affirmatively feminist—if anyone can pull off an extended metaphor of voting for the president by giving him your virginity, it’s Lena Dunham.
Conservative bloggers, of course, were already cranking up a reflexively outraged response just hours after the video was released on Thursday. Well, they never claimed to have a sense of humor.
While it’s safe to say that Dunham’s tone is different from every other ad the Obama campaign has ever made—she jokes about “doing it with” the president—it neatly reinforces the president’s closing argument about women’s rights.
Dunham riffs that “your first time” should be with “someone who cares whether you get health insurance, and specifically whether you get birth control.” On Thursday night, that someone launched an overtly feminist attack on Republicans. Riding Air Force One en route to campaign events, President Obama told NBC News that Republicans’ recent remarks on abortion show that “you don’t want politicians, the majority of them male, making a series of decisions about women’s healthcare issues.” While some might think the President is simply responding to incidents and press questions, the Obama campaign has been aggressively promoting his remarks, circulating a YouTube clip of the exchange to reporters under the headline, “Politicians Should Stay Out of Women’s Health Decisions.”
In the end, maybe Lena Dunham said it best: “You want to do it with a guy who brought the troops out of Iraq—you don’t want a guy who says, ‘Oh, hey, I’m at the library studying,’ when really he’s out not signing The Lilly Ledbetter Act.”
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.