"I could never be a gay man. I hate blow jobs and anal sex. I assume I hate anal sex..."
Last night saw a new inductee into the infamous television sex trope club that is '
Hand or Object Underwear'; ie, when a person inexplicably covers up their nudity using their hands, arms, hair or an inaminate object. Unlike 'Scenery Censor', this is intentional on their part and can be done with men or women and can be (though not neccessarily) related to 'Sex for Product', 'Public Exposure', 'Naked People Are Funny', 'Godiva Hair' and 'Improvised Clothes'. Among photographers the breast version is sometimes known as the "arm bra."
The offending moment occurred in the season two opener of HBO's
Girls and, as such, involved one of the most awkward sex scenes ever to feature on a mainstream cable show; a coupling that had
at least one reviewer yelling at her set: "He's gay! What is he doing? What is she doing? This is just weird!" The first time we are invited to question how committed to being gay Elijah (Andrew Rannells) is came right in the opening scene. There he was, now Hannah's (
Lena Dunham) roommate because Marni (
Allison Williams) moved out, spooning Hannah who you recall is his ex. The guy that gave her HPV. He's got morning wood but says it's not for her. Later, we meet Elijah's older and slimy boyfriend George at the big party the new roomies throw at their apartment and we realize why Hannah's gay ex proceeds to get so drunk he ends up ass in the air and getting it on with Marni on the couch after singing some Sarah McLachlan jams together. This right after Marni confesses she could never be a gay man because she doesn't like oral and never had anal. Apparently that's sexy talk. No one's around at the time - party had long been over. They kiss. She slaps him. They kiss again. She pushes him. Next thing you know he's naked, she's covering up her boobs because, you know, she's Brian Williams' daughter, and he gets a condom. A few thrusts later, he loses his erection; he accuses her of rolling her eyes and they're done.
Williams and Rannells later
spoke with HuffPost TV about the latest twist in Elijah and Marnie's complicated relationship, which progressed from him bitch-slapping her in Season 1 to that impulsive attempt at sex that ultimately fell flat. "I'd never done a nude scene before. I'd never done a sex scene before. So the idea that you were gonna have a bad sex scene, where you also had to sort of fluff yourself, I was like, 'How the fuck?'" Rannells said. "Allison was my first, and she could not have been nicer about it ... She made me very relaxed." Williams said she could relate to Rannells' "first time" sex scene concerns. "There's a lot to take in. You don't know what the details of it are going to be. How many people are around? What is it going to feel like and look like?" she remembered. "Once you know that drill, it becomes like ... 'Oh, Thursday, I have to be naked next to someone I'm not dating' ... You learn that it's just being light about it ... Once you realize that, it immediately liberates you ... and that also helps the performances too."
Williams' own comfort level with such scenes has increeased since Season 1. Filming the scene with Rannells was "so funny to shoot," she said. "There's only one way to get through those scenes, and it's laughter - that's it. No amount of logistics and nude coverings and number of crew members, nothing can affect it other than sense of humor." She added that it also helped that they "borrowed lotion from my makeup guys, so we both smelled like a piece of cake." While shooting the scene, Rannells was looking out for Williams, who has gotten through several Girls sex scenes while eschewing Dunham-levels of nudity. "I think I properly protected her nakedness," he recalled. "I mean, I was also trying to cover my penis. It's like really degrading - you wear a cock-sock and you just tie it around yourself and it's pretty humiliating; although then I became wildly comfortable with it at a certain point. I was just like standing around. I remember Lena saying to me at one point, 'Do you want to put on pants?' And I was like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.'"
In stark contrast to Dunham's in-your-face nudity, there are three explanations as to why William's sex scene played out as chaste and unrealistic as it did; ie, it was a character choice, an actress choice or an editorial decision. As a character Marnie is uptight, critical and regularly complimented for her beauty on the show. She is, essentially, Hannah's opposite both in body type and body visibility. In the premiere of season one, Marnie and Hannah sit in a bathtub. Dunham’s arms drape over the side of the tub while Williams sits upright, tightly wrapped in a towel. "I only show my boobs to people I’m having sex with," Marnie says at the time. Even before we got to last night's debacle the audience already knows this to be untrue having sat through numerous bizarre nipple-less onscreen sex scenes throughout the first season.
The second option, that what we're seeing here - or rather, aren't - is just evidence of a strict no-nudity clause in Allison Williams' contract does carry more credence. Speaking in GQ magazine in April last year she made it clear she would prefer to avoid Dunham style clothes shedding... "unless there's a brisk breeze or something, I tend to keep them on." When asked directly in the Vulture that same month, if she would be getting naked on the show, Williams replied she was not 'planning on it' and insisted she could talk about her contractual stipulation in that regard. By June, in conversation with Fashion magazine, Williams clarified the situation a little further. "Right now, I don’t see myself ever doing nude scenes," she said. "Once you do them, you can’t take it back because of the way Google Images works. I also think that unfortunately nudity seems to overshadow some of the more brilliant things that are going on." In the unlikely event that she is offered the lead for one of Tinseltown’s most buzzy about-to-be-made films, Fifty Shades of Grey—the steamy best-selling novel currently on her nightstand— Williams said she would decline. "I wouldn’t take it. It is just too much for me but I applaud whatever actress steps up to the plate and I can’t wait to watch it."
The final explanation, posited by The Cut's Yael Kohen, is that the show was trying to disguise Williams' obvious weight loss. It comes amid concerns that Girls should still be believable now that its actresses look so ‘Hollywood’ this season. So much has been made of Dunham’s penchant for flaunting her less-than-perfect body on the HBO series she writes, directs, and stars in, that it’s been easy to overlook how the other girls of Girls bucked the repressive Hollywood standard of beauty too, he observes. During the first season, Girls co-stars Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams played what can, in TV parlance, be described as the hot and pretty friends, and indeed they were hot and pretty — but in a refreshingly normal way. That is to say, neither was particularly skinny that first season — certainly not Hollywood skinny. Trim, yes, but their bellies were noticeably soft, their hips curvy and faces full. Like so many of us, they’d look luscious in bikinis, like women who enjoyed brunch and weren’t cultish about spinning. And yet they were no less attractive or desirable: Kirke as the sexually adventurous, bohemian femme fatale with “a face like Brigitte Bardot and an ass like Rihanna,” so tempting she breaks up a marriage; and Williams as the uptight career gal with the classically patrician face and curves, who attracts a hot young artist at his own art show.
This realism was a departure from the standard template of a sexually desirable woman we’re used to seeing on TV and film in recent years: typically modelesque things with cut arms, a smooth hip line, and flat abs. Today, most sitcom actresses have the kind of fantasy figures that in real life require hours at the gym: Cheryl Hines as a hard-bodied cougar on Suburgatory, Krysten Ritter’s willowy vixen in Don’t Trust the B---- In Apartment 23, Sofia Vergara as an impossibly buoyant trophy wife in Modern Family. (Even Vergara's theoretically less-glamorous Modern Family foil is the astonishingly toned Julie Bowen.) There are exceptions, of course, among them Kat Dennings on Two Broke Girls and Mindy Kaling on The Mindy Project, but neither character spends much time unclothed or rolling around in the sack. That isn’t the case on Girls, where sexually explicit, skin-baring hookups are frequent and much like in life, having a stick-thin body is secondary to attitude and style.
It’s a testament to the show, then, that during the first episode of the second season, Dunham doesn’t let Williams get away with her real-life weight loss — she looks very Hollywood now — without comment. In a scene between Williams’s Marnie and her mother (played by Rita Wilson), her mother tells her that she looks "30 years old." "I miss the softness in your face," she tells her. "All you girls think that you look really good, but you just look like floats in the Macy’s parade — these big heads on these tiny bodies." And over the next few episodes, Marnie’s problems only seem to get worse as she starts to rely more on her looks than her smarts to make a living.
But it’s unsettling to see one of the most unseemly aspects of the entertainment business encroach upon the cast of Girls so quickly, and so visibly, if only because the show seemed such an aggressively defiant fuck-you to how women (and leading ladies) are expected to act and look on screen. While it’s never surprising when an actress loses weight once she lands a hit show — we’ve seen this play out time and again, from Valerie Harper on the Mary Tyler Moore Show to Jennifer Aniston on Friends — it’s a slippery slope when a popular series succumbs to Hollywood’s baser pressures. Think of how quickly Roseanne degenerated once she gussied up; or how Elaine Benes lost her Everygirl neuroses once she starting using product to smooth her frizzy hair. Authenticity matters when authenticity is a crucial part of the story line, which has been the case for Girls, a show that prides itself in getting the details right, down to the "gross underwear" real women find themselves wearing during "goofy," "awkward" sex scenes.
Since there is a different standard in movies than there is on the small screen, some of the thinning out that happens to TV stars is inevitable. Historically, television has been a presumed launch pad for a bigger career in movies. But for the cast of Girls, some of this pressure seems self-imposed. Kirke, who started shooting the series six weeks after giving birth, alluded to as much in an interview with Vulture last year: "I mean, I’ve considered [losing weight]. Obviously I’ve been like, 'Maybe? I’m on TV. Allison Williams is looking really skinny and Lena’s, like, lost a ton of weight, and Zosia’s always, like, tiny. Maybe I should.' And then I’m just like ‘I love eating with my family and I love eating Reese’s at night and watching American Idol.’ I can’t." But then Kirke, who was roped into the show by childhood friend Dunham, has also said that she does not want to be an actress long-term.
Attractive women have always had a place on television but the extreme hottiefication of comedy’s leading ladies only intensified when Friends debuted in 1994 with a cast of attractive twentysomethings portrayed in an aspirational light. Friends was a ratings blockbuster, and its ability to capture the elusive 18-to-49-year-old demographic that advertisers coveted made it a particularly lucrative cash cow. In an effort to re-create that magic, network executives greenlit a number of forgettable sitcoms with good-looking casts, and the drive for programs that feature young attractive cast members continues to this day. (Remember Brooke Shields as the suddenly single magazine writer on Suddenly Susan, or Lea Thompson as boyfriend-less cartoonist in Caroline in the City?) In the meantime, as the Friends stars grew more famous and opportunities to star in movies increased, so too did the pressure on its female cast members to look good.
During interviews for Kohen's book We Killed: the Rise of Women In American Comedy, Marta Kauffman, the co-creator of Friends, said, "I think that the pressure that women who are in the limelight feel is enormous, and looking a certain way becomes a priority for them. No one ever said to these women, you have to be skinny. But I think when you go into a dressing room twice a week and try on clothes that you are going to wear in front of the camera, and you have to walk a red carpet and your picture is constantly being taken, it’s going to become a priority.” And Lisa Kudrow concurred: “There’s still a pressure to be as attractive as you possibly can. And, you know, it’s not from outside, it’s inside too. They start feeding into each other. You see yourself on TV and it’s, like, 'Wow, I really should lose; I really should be ten pounds underweight if I can manage it.'"
In her memoir Bossypants, Tina Fey — who famously lost 30 pounds before getting her star turn as co-anchor on Saturday Night Live’s "Weekend Update" and now glams it up regularly on the red carpet and on the covers of glossies — argues that "we should leave people alone about their weight. Being skinny for a while (provided you actually eat food and don't take pills or smoke to get there) is a perfectly fine pasttime. Everyone should try it once, like a super-short haircut or dating a white guy." She gives us her “remembrances of being very, very skinny,” running three miles a day, six days a week and “lov[ing] it when people told me I was getting too thin.” It's clear that Fey doesn't put too much stock in Hollywood standards of beauty but she does play along. After her remembrances of being skinny, Fey offers remembrances of being “a little bit fat," yet another "natural phase of life and nothing to be ashamed of." It's a juxtaposition that also plays out on 30 Rock, as the objectively attractive Liz Lemon gets kicked around for being dowdy. The jokes are entirely out of character but as Fey got more famous and glamorized, some fans, fair or not, found it harder to take her self-deprecating slights.
Could the transformation of Girls from fleshy Williamsburg hipsters to glammed-out A-listers mark the beginning of the end, the moment when the rest of us stop believing that these girls echo, to paraphrase Hannah, the voices of their generation? Not that Dunham & Co. need to look schlubby, of course, but there is something particularly un-Everywoman about actresses we see on red carpets wearing Prada and Oscar de la Renta, as Dunham and Williams did to the Emmys last year. So far Dunham has managed to stay true to her mission and the first few episodes of the new season, which premieres Sunday on HBO, are fantastic. But it’s hard to imagine that once the magazine covers roll in, and then the movie offers, that we won’t soon see our girls get Simonized by the Hollywood machine. Now, with all the fanfare surrounding Girls' second season, Dunham and her co-stars are having their cake — let’s just hope they keep eating it, too.
Whatever the truth about the logisitcs of that very clumsy looking sex scene, Williams at least understood why, in a moment of weakness, the characters might try to sleep together. "There was an attraction ... just aesthetically. But I also think they both needed someone else to be attracted to them, for different reasons and it's in the conversation leading up to it," Williams said. "He says he feels weird about his relationship because his boyfriend pays for everything ... and Marnie's talking about Charlie and Audrey, and trying to throw that off like it's not a big deal, like she didn't just get wasted because of seeing them at a party together ... And then they there are, and he punches her in the boob and then that happens."
Rannells, an openly gay actor simultaneously playing gay roles on "Girls" and "The New Normal", initially approached the storyline with some trepidation. Reflecting on the fact that Elijah has now had sex with two of the four "Girls," he said, "It was not my personal experience coming out, I didn't do that, but I know a lot of folks who did. I asked some of my gay friends before I did it, 'Well, do you think this is realistic?' And they all said yes ... particularly at that age. I'm 34 -- I'm not going to get drunk and stick it in a girl right now. It's not gonna happen. But at 22 or 23, when you're still sorting out identity and all that bullshit, I think it's more of an option. You're like, 'Well, why not? Give it a shot.'"
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