Lena Dunham just posted an important message on Facebook about Kanye’s “Famous” video

On Friday night, Kanye West premiered the music video for his song “Famous,” and it was something nobody expected. The central image of the video depicts (wax versions of) Kanye West, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian West, Rihanna, Bill Cosby, George Bush, Chris Brown, Amber Rose, Ray J, Anna Wintour, and Caitlyn Jenner—all naked in bed together.

This scene gives us more questions than answers, which is likely what Kanye intended, but there’s also a lot he didn’t think about when putting this image out into the world, and Lena Dunham sums it up perfectly in a Facebook post.

Titled “Peeking From Between My Fingers: some disjointed thoughts on the ‘Famous’ video,” the post, which went up on Monday, makes some important critiques of the video, and how it only serves to perpetuate rape culture.

Lena is quick to say that she does admire Kanye and the Kardashians. “But it’s possible to hold two competing thoughts in your mind,” she says. “And the ‘Famous’ video is one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory.”

Lena pointed out that while so many atrocities are happening against women all around us (take the Stanford rape case, the Bill Cosby allegations, the revenge porn phenomenon), now we “have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager?”

Yikes. Not okay.

“I know that there’s a hipper or cooler reaction to have than the one I’m currently having,” she admits. “But guess what? I don’t have a hip cool reaction, because seeing a woman I love like Taylor 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, it makes me 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.”

There have been many reactions to Kanye’s video, but not enough people have focused on the way it manages to violate the people being depicted, how it eschews consent in a way that no one ever thought of before.

“Here’s the thing, Kanye: you’re cool. Make a statement on fame and privacy and the Illuminati or whatever is on your mind!” Lena concludes. “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.”

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