Rewatching Girls: bad sex, worse friendships

10 years after the HBO show first aired, a lot's changed for Hannah Horvath—and for me

My last year in college I took a senior seminar on women directors. It was the capstone to my self-declared major in “Narrative Studies” (basically just a combination of Literature and Film), led by my thesis adviser and favorite professor. It was 2013, and HBO’s Girls was on its second season, as controversial and zeitgeisty as it would ever be. We spent one week of the seminar on Lena Dunham, analyzing her feature debut Tiny Furniture and four episodes of Girls. At some point in our discussion I remember our professor asking us, “Are all of your sex lives really this terrible?”

We were discussing, among the series’ many depictions of unfun sex, one incident in season two episode nine, “On All Fours,” when Adam is newly dating a woman named Natalia. In his previous relationship, with Dunham’s Hannah, he’d grown used to a girlfriend who acquiesces to his preferred style of degrading, forceful sex. But Natalia is not Hannah.

Before having sex for the second time, Natalia tells Adam that she doesn’t like soft touching or being top, but “everything else is ok” in bed. Then, when they’re actually having sex, Natalia tells Adam, once, “No” — when he’s about to go down on her, saying she hasn’t showered. “Relax, it’s fine,” Adam says, before fucking her from behind then masturbating onto her chest.

“Was That A Rape Scene In Girls?” asked an Amanda Hess article for Slate after the episode aired in March 2013. Her answer, in part: “Though terms like ‘gray rape’ help some people talk about assault outside of the context of the legal system, they shouldn’t be used to excuse the aggressor—they should help raise the standard of what we all consider acceptable sexual behavior, whether or not the cops are called.”