Because in America, men don't admit that they know things. Well, unless the things we're challenged with knowing include automobiles, sports involving automobiles and which surface streets you're not crazy to take at this time of day. So strong is the impulse to know these things, that when we do not know them, we are socially compelled to lie in order to appear that we do. I've been in hours-long conversations about automotive repair where I was able to nod and "uh-huh" my way through just enough so as to avoid the humiliation of a slowed-down and simplified explanation of the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine; or, to put it another way, being talked to in a way in which women have become accustomed.
Being a dude means rarely being at risk of being condescended to or spoken at. Because being a dude is a socially complicated and delicate balance where one must always be vigilant, ever watching for those moments when dignity and convention requires you to threaten to beat another man to death and/or copulate with his mother, each of those in no particular order of preference. In the face of what must be dozens of daily sessions of man-splaining, women have the simple and enviable option of simply walking away and mentally making a note never to procreate with that person. This is an option I don't have, one more way in which I'm handicapped by my lack of a uterus.
But that's cool I guess because not having a uterus means I do dude stuff, like I was saying before. Like growing chest hair. Or eating whole turkey legs at amusement parks. Or listening to sports-talk radio.
OK, I don't really recommend the last one. If you don't know, it's exactly as banal and insipid as it sounds. But there are a few shows who embrace the banality and make that a part of the metacommentary and subtext even while talking about baseball players taking steroids and what it must have done to their testicles. See, the new-format shows are way more out in the open about what the old subtext was, which was just how Kinsey 4 the whole enterprise is.
Which is why, a few months ago, one sports-talk show was assessing the HBO show Girls, which I've talked about before once or twice. And because these are dudes in a dude space (and there I was, just swallowing it all, like dudes do) of course the topic comes around to "the big one" and why she's always has to be naked. Like has to be. Does it have to be so often? The radio guy really didn't get it.
Because, and this is important to understand, seeing Lena Dunham with no clothes on is not the same as seeing, say Gisele Bundchen with no clothes on. Seeing Lena Dunham naked is less sexually arousing, which of course is the only possible explanation for female nudity on a television screen. It's not about the expression of the writer, director, actor and editor who have collaboratively presented this thing as their art, their mode and method of story telling. No, the culminating, fulminating crux of it has to be, first and foremost: how does this service my boner?
The second worst thing a woman--especially one in a position of any kind of influence can do--is fail to give a man a boner when he deems it socially necessary. This pales in comparison, by orders of magnitude, to the first worst thing anyone can do to a man: give him a boner he doesn't understand. Granted this is a gray area where women are concerned as these are generally inspired by drag queens, ladyboys or Idris Elba and not generally the fault of "women" in the anti-cisgender, trans-phobic way we understand the old binary sexes.
Since I'm such an obvious dude and so into guy stuff, like I said before about sports whatever, I feel comfortable enough talking about the expected continued privileged entitlement of the patriarchy and its punishing heteronormative psycho-emotional hegemony.
And also pointing out: it's a show called Girls. Made by girls. About girls. Maybe you're not meant to "get" everything? Or maybe they genuinely are trying to reach you and don't know how because men are unpredictable rage-sphinxes?
It's all there in the show, man. Look at the character Adam. Adam is raw male id, born out of this weird half-realized anthropogenesis informed by the lady-brain. Huge and muscly, driven and tormented by the twitchy, passionate volatility of demon testosterone. He's all threat, physical and sexual, except for the rare in-between moments when he's been soothed by soft words and animal fucking enough to appear... well, not "human" but at least a domesticated form of whatever it is he's supposed to be. A sloth maybe, or some kind of bear.
Either way, it's obvious: they're trying to figure you out, man. Take it as a compliment. Who's all the nudity for? Who knows? Like I said, it's made by ladies and who can figure them out, AM I RIGHT?! Just sit through it, take it in as passively as you can and if you're left feeling a little unfulfilled, you can always masturbate to an episode of Luther and shudder yourself to sleep.
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