MONDO EXTRAS

On the bright side, Girls doesn't contain any body or slut shaming. Hannah is not a conventionally attractive lead, and yet we see her stripped down to her underwear (in episodes to come) and sexualized. Like the aforementioned sex, this is something that this series obviously understands about what women want to see on television and what is missing from the dialogue -- a representation of what another type of female body looks like. Hannah sitting around in an intimate post-coital state and talking about reclaiming her body was one of my favorite moments in the pilot. When her idiot hook-up partner Adam (Adam Driver) asks about her seemingly random tattoos that she got in high school, her explanation was impeccable: "Truthfully, I gained a bunch of weight very quickly and I just felt very out of control of my own body, and it was just this, like, riot grrrl idea and I was like, 'I'm taking control of my shape!'" The female body, as Ashley Judd will tell you, is not on display for the patriarchy to deem "good enough," nor are we waiting around to be finally redeemed by society and allowed to be "real" because of our "curves" -- Hannah has a body which she uses to have sex with, go to her job with and do drugs with, and it's allowed to be naked whenever she wants it to be. Yes, it may be Dunham's actual figure, but in Girls, Hannah's nudity signifies what is hopefully a new pattern in modern television: women of all shapes and sizes doing whatever they want with their bodies, playing any and every role unapologetically.