Lena Dunham

When it first started, Girls was automatically compared to Sex and the City, mainly because it was about four female friends in New York. And really that’s where the similarities, for the most part, end. All season, our characters have been messy and aimless, desperate for things that they seemingly cannot attain. And that process has been rife with ugly, rotten situations, and depressing, humiliating sex that has no place in the alternate reality of Sarah Jessica Parker's show. But last night's show—the season finale—veered into rom-com territory.

If you want to know why we see so few fully realized female characters over 50 on TV, look no further than the shows about women under 35.

We don’t need characters over 50 to help us work out our aging anxieties! Our 20- and 30-somethings on Girls, 2 Broke Girls, New Girl, and The Mindy Project have it covered, thanks.

• Survivors of military sexual assault testified this week in a Senate hearing to advocate for outside review of cases. Among the strongest voices for a chance in policy was that of New York senator Kristen Gillibrand, who told lawyers for the Defense Department, "I appreciate the work you're doing, but it's not enough." [L.A. Times, N.Y. Daily News]

• The Steubenville rape trial continues, with key evidence in the form of damning text messages and, today, testimony from eyewitnesses who took photographs and later erased them. [Huffington Post]

• The dismal 2012 numbers on gender equity in magazine bylines were released by VIDA last week. Flavorwire asked Granta and Tin House, two literary publications where women are published in equal (and sometimes greater) numbers than men, the secret to running a publication that actively courts and publishes female authors. Their answer is the piece's title: "It Isn't Rocket Science." [Flavorwire]

• Meet the new pope, same as the old pope—especially when it comes to LGBT rights. Salon has a roundup of Pope Francis's greatest hits on the subject, and by "hits" we mean "terrible, awful, heartwrenchingly bigoted statements SHUT UP MAN UGGHHH STOP TALKING." [Salon]

• In other pope news, the wags at Mother Jones compiled a handy "Pope Francis vs. Black Francis" chart for all you Pixies fans. [Mother Jones]

• It's Women's History Month, which you know. The Grio name-checks four black women activists you might not know. [The Grio]

• Alternet's Don Hazen, like us, has just about had it with the whole is-feminism-dead question, asking "Why is it that women who clearly need feminism less than most are debating whether the whole notion should get junked?" Why indeed. [AlterNet]

• Martha Stewart doesn't care who likes her—or more to the point, who doesn't. As Ann Friedman argues, that makes her a compelling, if problematic, example to women in business. [The Cut]

• Finally, we know this is a tough crowd when it comes to Lena Dunham, but her answer to Playboy's question about what she would do if she "woke up in the body of a Victoria's Secret model" was pretty damn on point. Also, don't you love how the interviewer used "Victoria's Secret model," like somehow that's just SO MUCH MORE NORMATIVE and male-gazey than, oh, "Playboy model"? [Playboy]

I’ve never known quite what to make of the sex scenes in Girls. While I appreciate the show’s desire to examine how flawed and awkward sex can often be, the fact that the characters so often seem unsatisfied with their sex makes it difficult to distinguish an off night from sex taking place without consent. More often than not, the scenes that are hardest to read are the ones involving Adam.

Nowhere was consent in the show more confusing that this week’s episode, which made many people pause and say, “Wait. Was that rape?”

This idea of cleansing oneself has permeated this season—and the theme continues in this episode. Our characters here aren’t particularly good at cleaning up and starting afresh, but what they are good at is self-sabotage. In this episode, "On All Four," several characters successfully take themselves out at the knees. 

Last week, a woman at Adam's Alcohollics Anonymous crowd set him up with her daughter, Natalia. Surprise, surprise, the two actually hit it off. Suddenly, they're going to see romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock, taking lunch breaks together and even attending friend’s engagement parties. Natalia seems good for Adam, mostly because she’s completely up-front about what she wants. When the two first have sex, it at first seems awkwardly negotiated. But Natalia tells Adam what she won’t do, what doesn’t work for her, and is clear about her boundaries. Adam isn’t really used to. He says, “I like how clear you are with me.” To which Natalia responds, “What other way is there?” 

Girls, I love you. But this week's episode just didn't work.

This could be because it’s hard to keep momentum after a string of excellent episodes, but this week's uneven episode "It's Back" was built on out-of-nowhere plot points. 

The episode opens with Hannah receiving a phone call from ex-boyfriend Adam which she seems nervous about.  After stopping at a store to buy chips to cope with the call, she carefully counts out a specific number of chips before counting the number of times she chews them.

Hannah’s parents are visiting—her mother is attending a conference where she's excited to meet so many other women who “feel like I do about Ann Patchett.” While waiting on Hannah to meet them at their hotel for a Judy Collins performance, they give her a “Hannah cushion of 15-40 minutes.” Hannah shows up but looks pretty disheveled.

Over drinks, Hannah’s parents can tell what’s going on. Her father asks if her head is filling up with too much and she’s getting count-y again. Her mother expresses the worry she felt that Hannah’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) would hinder her from having a real life. This was my “what?” moment. Not that it’s unrealistic that Hannah could have OCD, but that in the scope of the show, it's never even come up before at all. 

Throughout this season, the characters of Girls have been trying on different lives and personas. They try to be different people and better people, eventually defaulting back to the familiar and the easy.

In night's episode, "Video Games", a minor character says she believes life is one big simulation—a video game. That sounds ridiculous, but it's an apt description for what Jessa experiences in this episode as she tries to reconnect with her absent father and play the role of daughter.  lives and personas. They try to be different people and better people, eventually defaulting back to the familiar and the easy.

The episode starts with Jessa and Hannah to go see Jessa’s father, who Jessa hasn't seen in years and is living in the country with his girlfriend Petula and her son, Frank. Throughout the whole episode, Hannah is in rough shape: She has a UTI and describes it in the most accurate language. “My urine feels so daggery.”

Last week’s weirdly controversial Girls episode "One Man's Trash", was defined by melancholy. This week's episode, “Boys”, articulates that melancholy in a precise way with a metaphor about—what else?—Staten Island. Ray describes Staten Island as a place where people who want to live in Manhattan but can't are relegated to watch the city in a “quiet rage” on its fringes.  Ray’s not talking about Staten Island—he’s talking about himself, Adam, Hannah, Marnie and all the other young characters on the show.   

Even with book deals, fancy art parties, a seemingly perfect relationships,Girls' characters want more from their lives. The main characters all present a veneer of being okay with where they are, while actually longing to change their lives.

In this episode, Hannah finally she seems motivated. She's sent out some essays and has met with the editor (played by John Cameron Mitchell fromHedwig and the Angry Inch!) of Pumped magazine. He’s read her essays and describes them as “sweet, naïve and infuriating” but asks Hannah to write an e-book for him. The only catch is that he needs it in a month.

Patrick Wilson: That's a good lookin' newspaper.

Love it or hate it, Girls fits into a specific, maligned literary genre, noted television critic Emily Nussbaum in this week's New Yorker. Nussbaum compares Girls to previous works about young women, most notably Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group. Like Lena Dunham's show, critics at the time called The Group drivel about self-important, privileged young women. But that hasn’t stopped dozens of women from continuing to publish similar stories. As Nussbaum writers:

These are stories about smart, strange girls diving into experience, often through bad sex with their worst critics. They’re almost always set in New York. While other female-centered hits, with more likable heroines, are ignored or patronized, these racy fables agitate audiences, in part because they violate the dictate that women, both fictional and real, not make anyone uncomfortable.

This week’s Girls episode, “One Man’s Trash,” reads like a short story from McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, or, I would even say, from Raymond Carver. It’s a story that’s based on the uncomfortable nature of two lonely people who just want to experience something else for a brief moment.

In its fourth episode of the season, Girls continues to let us know that our early twenties years contain some of life's best experiences: publishing a piece of writing on a hipster blog, dating an artist of midlevel fame, going to the "best warehouse party ever!", losing your virginity, getting a surprise marriage. But amid these exciting times, Girls characters are exploring those big, troubling questions that maybe they’ll never shake. In this episode, "It's a Shame About Ray", even gruff Ray gets a little vulnerable. “What makes me worth dating?" he says to Shosanna. "What makes me worth anything?”