Hey girls, we’re all the same, aren’t we? At least, that’s what they’d like us to think. We are living through an unprecedented time of narrative richness, when people from an enormous range of backgrounds, including women and people of colour, are finally beginning to share stories about their lives across boundaries of class and distance in numbers too big to ignore. But you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream press, which still reserves a very few places for female creators, who are expected to represent all womenkind, then excoriated when they inevitably fail to do so.
Take, for instance, the three-year storm of publicity around the HBO show Girls, which follows the lives of four young white girls living in Brooklyn. I am often asked if I relate to Girls. Well. I’m a white, middle class media professional in my mid-twenties living and dating in a major western metropolis. Of course I relate to Girls, and I think it’s smart and funny and fun, although there are still bits that don’t speak to me at all. What’s more important is whether or not any piece of art to which some women relate – particularly women from a certain privileged demographic – can be considered definitive.
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