Lena Dunham Addresses That Whole Jezebel Clusterf*ck

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | February 21, 2014 |

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | February 21, 2014 |

In case you missed the whole Jezgate (scratch that, the whole thing is too stupid for even the stupidest of names) debacle a few weeks ago, a brief recap.

Back in January, Jezebel offered $10,000 (REALLY??) for unretouched photos from Lena Dunham’s Vogue cover shoot.

Presumably, they expected the pictures to look like this:

When in reality, they looked like this:

Pretty anticlimactic, no?

Dunham hinted at a response by way of Twitter

Some shit is just too ridiculous to engage. Let's use our energy wisely, 2014.

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) January 17, 2014

Way cooler when people do things out of pure blind spite than out of faux altruism

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) January 17, 2014

And an interview with Slate:

I haven’t been keeping track of all the reactions, but I know some people have been very angry about the cover and that confuses me a little. I don’t understand why, photoshop or no, having a woman who is different than the typical Vogue cover girl, could be a bad thing.

But now in an interview with Grantland’s Bill Simmons, Dunham is dropping the “some people” thing addressing this bullsh*t directly.

I don’t know how much commentary I can offer on this issue that Dunham didn’t just say herself. I had the same reaction to this whole debacle. I was an enthusiastic Jezebel reader until this shitshow broke loose. Now, despite the fact that the site remains the same, it feels somehow broken. Jezebel is similar to Pajiba in that the readers and commenters feel part of a community, and there’s a bond that enables a sense of trust on the site. Once that trust is broken, the foundation of the site is eroded and the site’s core values are compromised. Just imagine if Dustin were to write a tear-down piece of Alison Brie or Paul Rudd. How would we, as a collective, ever be the same? Could we learn to trust again?

By the way, today Jezebel linked to the same interview, but to talk about a different anecdote, entirely ignoring her mention of their site. Does this seem icky to anyone else?

Via The Wrap.

Vivian Kane considers herself a Feminist with a capital F-bomb. Find her here.