lenadunhamtaylorswiftgraziaImage: Taylor Swift via Instagram

Taylor Swift was recently criticized for tweeting about the women’s march movement without actually attending one. It was just the latest example of Taylor, one of the world’s most high-profile stars, being damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t in the courtroom of public opinion.

Like everything for Taylor, her dating life is always under intense scrutiny and has been since her teenage years. So while at times it has seemed like the now 27-year-old monkey bar-ed from one man to the next … don’t many/most twenty-somethings? And even if she did date a few men in quick succession, is there anything wrong with that?

Lena Dunham, a close friend of the Shake It Off singer for several years, defended Taylor’s dating life in an interview with Howard Stern this week.

“It’s so hard,” she said. “I think about the relationships that I had in my early twenties and if they had been public, it would’ve been a disaster.

“I mean, not to repeat age-old feminist points, but it’s like, you know, any male actor her age who’s going out and dating is applauded,” Lena continued.

“To just have a perfectly normal amount of romantic partners but be held to impossibly high standards by the press. Like, it’s just an unfair and unwinnable game.”

Dunham, who’s on a publicity tour ahead of the final season of Girls premiering this weekend, denied, however, that she’s a member of Taylor’s notorious ‘squad’ of female friends, despite appearing in her infamous Bad Blood music video.

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Image: Taylor Swift via Instagram

“I’m more of a one-on-one hanger,” she said. “A big group hang is not my specialty.”

At first glance Taylor and Lena might seem like an odd friendship pairing; Lena does not subscribe to cultural norms in her work on Girls, while Taylor is arguably the ultimate embodiment of the mainstream, of the uncontroversial (well, aside from her dating life, apparently). But the two have large amounts of mutual respect. In 2012, Lena tweeted her praise for Swift’s album Red, saying it was “triumphant … If she’d been here when I was in college I would have written papers on her, not Sylvia Plath.”

Swift responded by gushing about Girls, then in its first season, writing “you made my day with that. I’m now going to sit in my dressing room reciting my fav ‪@girlsHBO quotes.. Which is all of them.”

Lena also came to Taylor’s defence after she was unwillingly given a starring role in Kanye West’s Famous song and video.