We're not the only ones disgusted by Kanye West's exploitative video for "Famous." Lena Dunham, too, has some things to say.
The video features a number of controversial and noteworthy celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian, naked and asleep in bed together. The Girls star took to Facebook to talk about just how problematic this video is.
"At the same time Brock Turner is getting off with a light tap for raping an unconscious woman and photographing her breasts for a group chat... As assaults are Periscoped across the web and girls commit suicide after being exposed in ways they never imagined... While Bill Cosby's crimes are still being uncovered and understood as traumas for the women he assaulted but also massive bruises to our national consciousness... Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they've been drugged and chucked aside at a rager?" she wrote. "It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease."
Dunham explained how she couldn't see the artistic merit of the video, "because seeing a woman I love like Talyor Swift (fuck that one hurt to look at, I couldn't look), a woman I admire like Rihanna or Anna reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley" makes her feel "sad and unsafe and worried for the teenage girls who watch this and may not understand that grainy roving camera as the stuff of snuff films."
But despite her criticisms, Lena finished up with a powerful appeal to the artist himself: "Here's the thing, Kanye: you're cool. Make a statement on fame and privacy and the Illuminati or whatever is on your mind! But I can't watch it, don't want to watch it, if it feels informed and inspired by the aspects of our culture that make women feel unsafe even in their own beds, in their own bodies."
