Well, insofar as we should care what anyone has to say about a TV show with a deceptively small viewership, yes. We should. Gordon is, after all, a feminist icon to legions of women, and a measured adult with a track record of not behaving like an idiot. Which is more than a lot of people inserting themselves into the conversation about Girls can say.
Anyway, after Elle‘s new profile of Kim Gordon went online yesterday, news traveled pretty fast about her decision to “open up” about the backstory of her (still heartbreaking) divorce from Thurston Moore. It’s bittersweet and fascinating (especially when the presumed other woman is the kind of person who earnestly says shit like “I’m from Venus and I will explore the Milky Way”) but then, Moore is just another in a long, long tradition of “people who you thought were impossibly cool and admirable that turned out to be sad messes like the rest of us.” Anyway, it’s not like any of us were ever actually in the day-to-day of their two decade marriage (unless you were? I don’t know), so best to just leave it be.
In the course of the same interview—which is a pretty interesting read all the way through—Gordon also touched on that show we like to talk about a lot. The one on HBO. That isn’t Game of Thrones. Specifically, its portrayal of sex. “I love that all of the sex scenes are awkward and kind of a failure,” she tells the interviewer, also nothing that scenes like the one in which Marnie (briefly) has sex with Elijah in spite of her (also brief) objections, are a “mixed message about what no means […] If you’re going to do that you also have to —in some other instance—show that it’s not cool.”
Gordon also partially blames the “ironic Williamsburg hipster” ethos from shying away from earnest political correctness. Which is a touchy way to phrase it, but also, fair enough. At a certain point, progress sort of gets taken for granted and thus never discussed, creating a whole other set of problems. It’s not necessarily Lena Dunham’s job to promote sexual (or social, or professional…) best practices in every episode, but then, never hurts to be forced to think about it. So, these have been Kim Gordon’s thoughts on Girls. They were pretty reasonable. We all got through this just fine.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.
Poorly edited writing.