You’ve probably at least heard about Kanye West’s bizarre and disturbing new music video, Famous (NSFW and paywalled), which shows the likenesses of 12 celebrities lying naked in bed together. Yesterday Girls creator Lena Dunham criticized the video in a Facebook post, going so far as to link it to the Brock Turner rape case.
“Make a statement on fame and privacy and the Illuminati or whatever is on your mind!” she wrote to West in one part. “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.”
It’s hard not to feel disgusted by a video that so blatantly invades celebrities’ privacy. Our visceral reaction is probably the response West was trying to evoke, but Dunham believes it goes too far. Read an excerpt of her post below and then click here to see the rest.
Let’s break it down: 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? It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease.
