Lena Dunham has called Kanye West’s “Famous” music video “sickening” and “disturbing,” particularly in light of the Stanford rape case and dozens of publicized allegations of sexual assault against Bill Cosby.
“At the same time Brock Turner is getting off with a light tap for raping an unconscious woman and photographing her breasts for a group chat … As assaults are Periscoped across the web and girls commit suicide after being exposed in ways they never imagined … While Bill Cosby‘s crimes are still being uncovered and understood as traumas for the women he assaulted but also massive bruises to our national consciousness … Now I have to see the prone, unconscious, waxy bodies of famous women, twisted like they’ve been drugged and chucked aside at a rager?” the “Girls” star wrote on her Facebook page. “It gives me such a sickening sense of dis-ease.”
On Friday, West debuted his music video for the song, in which the rapper refers to Taylor Swift as “that b-tch.” The video features the naked bodies of public figures like Swift, Donald Trump, Anna Wintour, Kim Kardashian West, Amber Rose and Rihanna in a giant bed.
“Seeing a woman I love like Taylor Swift (f–k that one hurt to look at, I couldn’t look), a woman I admire like Rihanna or Anna, reduced to a pair of waxy breasts made by some special effects guy in the Valley, it 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. I hesitated a lot about saying anything cuz I figured the thinkpieces would come pouring in. But I didn’t see this angle being explored as much as I had hoped. It’s weird to feel like you’re watching alone. I bet I’m not.”
Dunham believes that West’s music video was “inspired by the aspects of our culture that make women feel unsafe even in their own beds, in their own bodies.”
She continued: “The ‘Famous’ video is one of the more disturbing ‘artistic’ efforts in recent memory.”
So far, only one of the 11 featured people in the music video have responded to their likeness being used, and it’s not clear whether West received approval.
“Why I gotta have the plumbers butt/ crack showing WAX figure?” Chris Brown wrote on Instagram on Friday night. “This n— KANYE CRAZY, talented, but crazy.”
The provocative video debuted at a live event at the Forum in Los Angeles on Friday. Like West’s premiere of the album “The Life of Pablo” and his fashion collection Yeezy Season 3 at Madison Square Garden earlier this year, the entire event was live-streamed on Tidal. The rapper did tweet, “Can somebody sue me already #I’ll wait” on Saturday before deleting it from his account.
Read Dunham’s post in its entirety below.