Lena Dunham Defends Her Friend Taylor Swift’s Silence During the Election
You know how Lena Dunham feels about President Donald Trump? Well, she feels the exact opposite about Taylor Swift.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the outspoken creator and star of HBO’s Girls had nothing but love for the pop star. Dunham, 30, defended Swift when she was asked about criticism of Swift’s silence during last year’s contentious presidential election. Dunham was an avid and vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton during the campaign, something she made no secret of on social media and in her feminist newsletter, Lenny.
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“I just think everyone has to do it their way,” Dunham told the magazine. “When I was lesser known, I was like, ‘Who could not share their opinion?’ Then I found out that when you talk about politics, people straight up tweet you the floor plan of your house and say they’re coming to your house. You have to f***ing watch it, because people are nuts.”
Dunham went on to compliment Swift for her strength.
“She’s been in the public eye since she was 15. I felt young when my career started and I was 23, 24. When I met her, she was newly 22, and she was a f***ing seasoned pro at this stuff,” Dunham continued.
“Watching the way that she understands the vicissitudes of the cycle, and she just keeps making her work — that’s just really impressive to me. That’s how I hope to live my life, which is not as a slave to public opinion, but just as somebody who continues to make things. She’s truly just an artist who has to make things to survive. I guess that’s what we have most in common. And she’s never not making music. If people know about it or they don’t, she’s never not making music, and that’s like, something that I’ve really watched with a lot of admiration. Because she’s been put through the wringer, and she’s continued to make her work. People who understand how to protect themselves but aren’t so beaten down that they can’t be creative — that, to me, is the greatest.”
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Dunham’s friendship with Swift goes back to before they met, as she revealed in October 2014. “Long before she was my friend, she was my friend in my head,” Dunham told ET. “I was listening to her while I wrote my first film, while I wrote the first season of Girls, while I wrote the second season of Girls — so she’s definitely a soundtrack to many of my feelings.”
Update: @taylorswift13's album is triumphant. If she'd been here when I was in college I would have written papers on her, not Sylvia Plath.
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) October 23, 2012
@lenadunham, 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.
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) October 23, 2012
Their real-life friendship began over Twitter in 2012, and many invitations to Swift’s star-studded parties, emails, and text messages followed. They obviously had conversations about more than cats and cupcakes, though, since Swift later credited Dunham with changing her view of feminism.
“As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities,” Swift told the Guardian. “What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men. And now, I think a lot of girls have had a feminist awakening because they understand what the word means. For so long it’s been made to seem like something where you’d picket against the opposite sex, whereas it’s not about that at all. Becoming friends with Lena — without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for — has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so.”
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