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“She is a true friend/true artist and the only person who makes me wanna exult in nature.”
Credit: Instagram

Lena Dunham has joined a growing chorus of celebrity voices speaking out against Kanye West’s incendiary “comment on fame”, the video for his new single Famous.

In an open letter published on Facebook this morning, Dunham shared “some disjointed thoughts on the ‘Famous’ video” observed ‘from behind her fingers.’ Dunham begins by expressing her admiration for West and his wife Kim Kardashian West’s singular brand of empowerment before likening West’s depiction of famous women, including Amber Rose and Caitlyn Jenner, to the survivors of the assaults perpetrated by Brock Turner and Bill Cosby who look to have been “twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager”.

“I’m sure that Bill Cosby doll being in the bed alongside Donald Trump is some kind of statement, that I’m probably being trolled on a super high level. I know that there’s a hipper or cooler reaction to have than the one I’m currently having. But guess what? I don’t have a hip cool reaction”, writes Dunham, before she goes on to describer her horrified reaction at seeing women she admires like Rihanna and Anna Wintour “reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley”.

But it was West’s controversial depiction of Taylor Swift – Dunham’s close friend and the subject of Famous’s most controversial lyric – that hit home the hardest for Dunham:

“Seeing a woman I love like Taylor Swift (fuck that one hurt to look at, I couldn’t look)… 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.”
Dunham concludes by addressing West directly, imploring him to make a statement on “fame and privacy and the Illuminati or whatever is on your mind” but not if that statement “feels informed and inspired by the aspects of our culture that make women feel unsafe even in their own beds, in their own bodies.”

You can read Dunham’s post in full below. For your reference, the icing on the cake translate as ‘all the best’.

Tile image: Instagram
Cover image: Tidal