The Girls Who Watch Girls
“I remember us talking on treadmills positioned next to each other…getting ready to go out by rubbing the coconut oil she read porn stars used on our chests...”
THE NEW CRITIC
*Submissions for the first New Critic essay contest are due Wednesday, May 27th! On the occasion of our graduation, the New Critic founding editors seek a proper commencement address — one that answers “What Was College For?” The winning essay receives a $1,000 prize!*
Sarah Miller is a 24-year-old writer living in Brooklyn. She studied Creative Writing at Middlebury College and currently writes the drawing board.
The summer before our senior year, my roommate and I came up with a way to rescue our humiliations: we would term them part of our Girls reel. Setting our hair on fire taking selfies too close to the candles? Spraining my ankle walking up the stairs when I was stoned? Vomiting blackout drunk into the Delaware river as my childhood friend kissed my roommate, my puke still pooling in her hands? The embarrassment and pain would fade if we passed off these moments as half-hilarious, half-glamorous; they signified the beginning of our fumbling 20s — very Girls. It was like that Nora Ephron quote, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”
Later that year, the two of us ate together at a nice Italian restaurant I was too hungover to enjoy. She told me she wanted to be a lawyer.
I thought this was a little sudden for someone who played the drums and permanently wore eyeliner, but I didn’t say so.
She said if she had a clear artistic passion she would have followed it. She just wanted to have a plan. Didn’t I understand?
“Sure totally,” I said as I picked at my inedible sausage ragu.
That night, when we returned home, we decided to watch Girls.
While it’s unclear when exactly the Girls renaissance took off, it was in full swing by March of 2023 when The New York Times asked, “Why Are So Many People Rewatching Girls?” Viewing figures had doubled between November and January of that year. Millennials were revisiting their youth with kinder eyes and gen z was watching the show for the first time. Why then, why now? Maybe it was another recession indicator.
It can only have helped that Lena Dunham, the show’s controversial star and creator, had withdrawn from the public eye, allowing new viewers to connect with the show without being forced to solve the problem of Lena Dunham. I was vaguely aware of Dunham’s many scandals — as far as I knew at the time, there had been something in the news about her claiming a basketball player didn’t talk to her at the Met Gala because she wasn’t his type, that time she said she wished she had an abortion — scandals which epitomized white feminism, a thing most of us didn’t talk about anymore but I knew we were supposed to be against. Still, I didn’t think too much about Dunham while I watched Girls; like most 20-somethings, I was consumed with myself.
Girls is but one entry in the canon of young women figuring things out on TV. Many of these shows take place in New York City, and almost all follow the model of Sex and the City. Dunham pitched Girls as an explicit follow-up to Sex and the City:
“Sex and the City was about being a woman in New York, already established and looking for love. But what about the phase before, when you don’t even know enough to even know what you’re looking for? The New York I know isn’t glamorous — we graduated during a recession. We’re the first generation that can’t reasonably expect more than our parents had. We all grew up on Ritalin and AOL Instant Messenger. We’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.”
Swap out AOL for Instagram and Ritalin for vapes and it’s disconcerting how contemporary the pitch remains.
My roommate and I were constantly trying to square our politics with our dogged heterosexuality. How could we, that generation of women raised to believe they could break glass ceilings, pine and wait by the phone? We read Mary Gaitskill, debated the merits of Emily Ratajkowski’s feminism, and fumed over the hypocrisy of those Lefty boys who performed feminism while treating us so poorly. It seemed an insult to our education that we couldn’t think our way out of our heartbreaks. But at least we had each other. Ours was one of those friendships that creates new language, a bevy of nicknames and codenames that could sometimes make it seem like we talked in tongues. For two years, we ran a radio show we described as an “indie, feminist version of Call Her Daddy,” in which we talked at a clip and rarely planned our playlists.
Our senior year, we lived in two singles connected by a small room with only a sink and a mirror, the layout a quirk of our college’s ancient dormitories. My roommate had a keen sense for how to aspire to aesthetics, and before every semester she asked me what was on my semester mood board, a question to which I never had a good answer. She loved stories about young women in New York figuring out the world through sex. A picture of the four leads from Sex and the City had pride of place on her dorm room wall. That year, she taped up a picture of the bad boy bartender from the Starz adaptation of Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter and told me she wanted a man like him. “He looks like he eats cigarettes,” she said dreamily.
It was my roommate who introduced me to Sex and the City. I watched the show the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college, a year before I watched Girls. This is a fitting viewing order. While the shows appeal to similar demographics, they largely satisfy different itches. Sex and the City applies an aspirational gloss to the emotional realities underlying modern dating, whereas Girls strips away the gloss and lets the camera linger on the ugly parts of growing up.
It’s difficult to think of a better advert for New York than Sex and the City. Each episode details the highs and lows of the New York dating scene against the backdrop of the city’s panoply of delights. A product of the post-feminism ’90s, Sex and the City eschews any obligations to feminism even as the women owe their sexual liberty to the gains of the second wave feminist movement. With the exception of Miranda, the show’s strident token feminist, the women use their newfound freedoms to shop, gossip, party, and talk about men. It’s revealed in season three that Carrie doesn’t even vote. In Sex and the City, hyperfeminized consumption culture is rendered feminist by the fact that it is women doing the buying. For all the lifestyle porn, though, the show is also popular for conveying the agony of heterosexuality. Though the women are at the top of their professional fields, their mental energies are devoted to parsing the motives of largely indifferent men. Despite their financial power, they are subjected to waiting and wondering, and in doing so, playing out a tired dance: woman waits while man decides.
Time and time again, Sex and the City implicitly (and sometimes, via Carrie’s column, explicitly) asks if women can have sex like men. The answer is mostly no. While the women experiment with divorcing sex from feeling, it is only Samantha, a magnificent paean to feminine id, who succeeds. I have yet to meet a true Samantha. When my roommate had casual sex, she would describe herself as being in a “Samantha moment,” only to confess how much she wanted a boyfriend several months or even weeks later — as if I had been fooled by her blasé act. I didn’t try to play it cool; I knew I was a Carrie through and through, pathetic in my devotions. I didn’t fall in love often, but when I did, it was without restraint. My friends liked to say I lacked a self-protective instinct. Much of the series’ tension revolves around Carrie’s on-again, off-again relationship with a financier the viewer only knows as Mr. Big, or Big (in the finale, we learn his first name is John). Alternating between grand romantic gestures and astonishing coldness, Big keeps Carrie on the hook long after she should quit him. Many of the quartet’s brunches are spent hyperfixating on Big with questions like, “What if he never calls and three weeks from now, I pick up The New York Times, and I read he’s married some perfect little woman who never passes gas under his $500 sheets?” In season two, Carrie shows up at Big’s apartment with McDonald’s and a jaunty beret to try to convince him she can keep things casual — but she ends up asking, “Why is it so hard for you to factor me into your life in any real way?” The image of Carrie at Big’s door endures in meme-form as an example of the self-effacing pursuit of an indifferent partner. The masochistic element of their dynamic frustrated many viewers, but it was one of the show’s most adept moves; we hated Carrie because her insecurity, her ugly need, was true.
Around the time I first watched Sex and the City, I was seeing a guy I referred to as “my Big.” It didn’t matter that he was a nervous, gangly boy who wore a lot of stripes — by using the archetype, I could articulate a strength of feeling my friends would not otherwise understand. My roommate had a Big too, and then she had several. Whereas I liked nerdy, hyper-articulate guys (a strange number of whom have considered working for the CIA), she liked brooding guys who always seemed to be on the verge of flunking out. It comforted me that we liked different types of boys; without boys to tear us apart, I reasoned we’d always stay friends.
I’m tempted sometimes to write our friendship off as shallow, as if that would be a proper explanation for why it ended. For all my frustration with the insufficient intellectualism of my college’s student body, it embarrasses me to admit that boys occupied such a large space in our mental universe. But they did. In my defense, we attended a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere where there wasn’t much else to do but drink, write, and talk about how badly we wanted to fall in love.
The only clip from Sex and the City that lives on a loop in my brain comes near the end of season two, when Carrie learns Big has started a serious relationship with a beautiful, 20-something girlfriend. Naturally, they’re in the Hamptons, so a heartbroken Carrie heads for the sea. Miranda approaches and asks if she’s okay. In answer, Carrie throws up in the sand. This is the image that came to mind when I learned my Big came back from Chinese language school with a blue-eyed girlfriend who had perfect boobs. That it was 4 p.m. in the arts center parking lot was the only thing that prevented me from throwing up on the asphalt. My roommate and I had just come back from a run to the liquor store, and she ushered me into her room as I blubbered and sobbed. Later that night, my women friends gathered in my room with the solemnity of a wake as I drank and readied myself for a party that my heartbreak had decided was a necessary proof of strength. In the episode Carrie gets her heart broken by the sea — “Twenty-Something Girls vs. Thirty-Something Women” — she wears one of her best outfits: a snakeskin bandeau with a red midi skirt and a red cowboy hat. I thought a lot about my outfit for the party, eventually settling on low-rise mini shorts I can no longer fit into, a green bandana top, and my pièce de résistance, red cowboy boots. I looked about as beautiful as I ever have and was just as miserable. Predictably, I ended up sobbing in the bathroom, another night spent reveling in the best years of my life.
My injury was compounded when this boy, through some combination of guilt and awkwardness, decided to ignore me. On such a small campus, this move was as difficult as it was obvious. But through every tortured glance, every sob, every terrible party, my roommate stood by my side. When I think of that semester now, I remember us talking on treadmills positioned next to each other, propping up her JBL speaker in the communal showers so we could listen to the same music while we shampooed, getting ready to go out by rubbing the coconut oil she read porn stars used on our chests, and talking, always talking.
In Sex and the City, the foursome’s friendship is inviolable. Throughout all the noncommittal boyfriends, impotent husbands, and surprise pregnancies, Sex and the City tells us the one thing we can count on are our girlfriends. The show upholds this ideal of female friendship even as it makes it clear the most important relationship is the romantic partner (as proven by the series finale, which rounds off the series with a montage of the quartet in happy heterosexual relationships).
Girls, on the other hand, boldly destroys the central quartet. Across six seasons of television, the four main characters only appear together 12 times. So it makes narrative sense when Shoshanna, the most Sex-and-the-City-worshipping of the girls, ends the series by saying, “I have come to realize how exhausting and narcissistic and ultimately boring this whole dynamic is…Notice all of those really pretty girls out there who have, like, jobs and purses and nice personalities? Those are now my friends — not you guys. I think we should all just agree to call it.” In other words, Shoshanna has tired of dysfunction and prefers the girls who gossip over brunch over those who accidentally smoke crack at a Bushwick rave. She’s traded up.
In preparation for this piece, I decided to rewatch Girls from start to finish. Despite the fact that I have a massive Girls poster hanging over the foot of my bed, I had only ever seen the show in bits and pieces. Then I remembered why my first watch of Girls had precipitated so much nausea, watching the biting comedy of season one shift into a relentless carousel of everything that can go wrong in your 20s: mental breakdowns, rehab, bad sex, sex that borders on rape, disastrous girls’ trips, quitting grad school, attempted assisted suicide, flashing your boss, breakups, coked-out fights, divorce, and singing Kanye West at your ex-boyfriend’s work function. Yet for a show designed to disturb, it’s the absolute paucity of the friendships I find hardest to watch.
The friendships depicted on Girls are often defined by a baseline of unrelenting narcissism — genuine kindness is the deviation from the norm. The girls routinely skip each other’s calls, fuck each other’s boyfriends, fight about fucking each other’s boyfriends, demonstrate little interest in each other’s lives, ruin countless birthdays, and sacrifice greater self-fufillment in favor of centering their lives around men. When the show’s lead Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham, decides to leave the city for good, her roommate and gay best friend Elijah protests, “But Hannah you’ve made so many wonderful friendships here.” Then they both crack up with laughter. I don’t think it’s an accident that Hannah’s most stalwart friendship is with Elijah; on Girls, the deepest relationships often occur between women and men. For this reason, watching Girls can often feel like an exercise in (very witty) masochism. Why do so many of my generous, insightful women friends enjoy watching other women enact breaches of friendships they wouldn’t accept in real life? Is it cathartic to see women be mercilessly mean, to observe ventriloquists express words and feelings we don’t dare voice? Is it simple schadenfreude?
The very ugliness of female friendship is central to Girls’s appeal. In a confrontation at the end of season one, roommates Marnie and Hannah air their long-simmering grievances by yelling, “You are the wound” back and forth. And when Marnie accuses Hannah of being a bad friend, Hannah says the ugly thing out loud: “Maybe that’s not what’s important to me right now. I don’t really give a shit about being a good friend. I have bigger concerns.” It’s such a fantastic line because it violates the inviolable tenet of female friendship: that we must always care about being a good friend.
In season three’s “Beach House,” the rare episode where the foursome is actually together, a trip to the North Shore culminates in a blistering fight that leaves the girls wondering if they are really friends. Hannah leaves the confrontation saying, “I really miss my boyfriend, who asks me for nothing, so I give him everything.” While this isn’t strictly true, it drives home the thesis of Girls — that female friendships are often thornier than heterosexual relationships because women demand more of each other than they demand of men. As a self-involved 20-something, this doesn’t strike me as totally off-base. Historically, my friendships have been peppered with painful, earnest — sometimes painfully earnest — conversations about the health of the relationship itself. To date, the cruelest conversation I’ve ever had was an hour-and-a-half verbal assessment of my flaws by a former friend who told me — in the middle of the pandemic — that I should spend more time alone to work on my self-development.
For all my feminism, it is women whom I hold the longest grudges against. With time, I forgive all my exes, rationalizing their flaws with the sanguine confidence that the relationship just wasn’t meant to be — not so with ex-girlfriends. When the name of a girl who wronged me in my freshman fall comes up, I’ll say, “That girl’s a snake,” with all the bitterness of fresh injury. I’m opposed on principle to using feminine slurs against other women, and this is about the worst insult I can manage (that creature slithering through the garden…).
I can’t pinpoint exactly when my roommate and I grew apart, but I remember the first time I realized we no longer looked at the world the same way. It was the fall of our senior year, and I had drafted an article for our college newspaper about my shame at not having a college boyfriend, a feeling we often commiserated over. When I asked her what she thought of the piece, she said publishing something so intimate would have been her nightmare. Usually so effusive, she started moderating herself on our radio show in case her crushes were listening and holed up in her room to work on law school applications.
I didn’t blame her for wanting a plan. I wanted one, too. Against the advice of my advisor, I applied to the 10 most competitive MFA programs in the country. My advisor believed young writers would ruin their voices by matriculating to MFA programs too young, and though I recognized the truth in what he said, I wanted a Hail Mary to rescue me from the messiness of adult life. School had always come easily to me, and I wanted things to stay easy — I was rejected from every single program.
My roommate began hearing back from law schools around the same time she started seeing the guy who would become her boyfriend. I counted my MFA rejections in silence. It was my first big failure, and I walked around stunned. But instead of demoralizing me, the rejections fortified my conviction. I spent more and more time alone in the library, working on my novel and not applying to jobs. At that point, my roommate was most conspicuous in her absence. Whereas it had once been strange to go a day without seeing her, running into her was now a surprise. I still don’t know if she recognized what was, to me, a brutal drift apart. There was no blow-up moment, no viral monologue; I couldn’t even tell if she noticed. The sharpest words we ever exchanged were in February, after our Winter Carnival. I told her I had been sad. “Well,” she said with unmistakable reproach, “that seems to happen to you a lot.” She continued applying her makeup while I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice.
It was true, my senior year, that I had taken up the mantle of sad drunk girl with unusual verve, but I would have expected this kind of critique from my less emotional friends — not from a girl whose tears I had dried more times than I could count. Worse than that, she was annoyed by my pain. I held all these accusations on my tongue, ready to charge her with that cardinal girlhood sin of girlhood, of being a bad friend. The only thing that kept me from firing was my fear she would voice the unforgivable thing: “I don’t really give a shit about being a good friend.”
That spring, I resumed my former antics — talkative and giggly when drunk and prone to kissing my friends on their foreheads — only my roommate didn’t get to see them; she spent most nights in the glow of her stoner boyfriend’s fish tank. When, on graduation day, she said I would always have a place to stay in Boston, I knew she meant it as much as she could and that I would never take her up on the offer. “Thanks,” I told her. When I texted her and asked if she would talk to me for this piece, she told me she wasn’t in a “digital footprint sharing mode,” though she thanked me for thinking of her.
A part of me longed for a confrontation equal to the scope of my grievances with her. That there had been no definitive break in our friendship frustrated me. I realized that is why so many of my supportive female friends love watching the awful friendships on Girls: because it’s cathartic to watch female friendships explored to their true operatic potential.
It surprises me how unanimously my friends see themselves in Girls. They told me that while Sex and the City was fun to watch, the women on Girls reminded them of their friends. “It’s a little bit voyeuristic almost,” my current roommate told me, “Lena Dunham gave us an excellent show that I could watch while I was being messy and while I was pining over boys and while I was like, ‘Ugh all I wanna do is be a writer and live in New York.’”
I belong to that rarefied demographic that Girls speaks for and skewers in equal measure: graduates of elite colleges who feel vaguely guilty about their privilege, who are listless in their liberalism. But unlike the women of Girls, my friends largely work the entry-level, white-collar jobs our education promised us. It is I who have failed to fulfill the promise of my education, I who work the kind of ad hoc job that sometimes results in being paid in cash, I who wonder before I fall asleep if I will ever be able to sell my novel. Yet even my friends with enviably stable careers feel represented by Dunham’s portrait of post-recession dysfunction. Instead of staying out at night, they meal prep, study for the LSATs, and save for retirement. Instead of getting picked up in a bar, my friends scroll through anemic Hinge profiles. “It was okay,” a friend recently said of sex. “It’s Hinge,” she explained, like she was talking about grocery store sushi — there’s only so much accounting for quality.
I moved to Williamsburg in the winter of 2025, and a few months later, I began working as a hostess at an expensive steakhouse. Naturally, there was a brooding server, a 32-year-old nightmare with sharp cheekbones who doused himself in cologne to cover up the smell of his cigarettes. If I was in Girls, he would have fucked me in the handicapped stall where the servers did coke, and I would have learned a lesson about male callousness. If I was in Sex and the City, I would have gotten any of the countless media jobs I’d applied for and wouldn’t have needed to scrape the wax some 12-year-old had decided to drizzle on the menu. Instead, I mulled from May to July over whether I wanted to fuck the server until I decided if I had to think that hard about it, I probably didn’t want to fuck him. I spent my shifts trying to come up with metaphors to describe how he used his fading beauty to manipulate the other servers into doing his work for him. Currency is to what? When the opportunity came to quit working at the sexy, low-lit restaurant and do the restaurant’s administrative work instead, I took it because the sleep schedule was better for my writing.
On Girls and Sex and the City, every heartbreak and humiliation is elevated to a crucial step in female becoming. For the characters who are writers, these indignities are not only formative but generative; they make for good material. Toward the end of season five, a character tells Hannah, “You’ve had all these, like, boyfriends and jobs and moments. And you’ve lived all this truth…And you have so much to say.” Girls ultimately decides that Hannah’s mistakes (some of which are truly egregious) are to the benefit of her person and career; it is because she has had so many experiences that she is able to write something worth reading. It is comforting to believe all of our pain serves a higher principle, but is it true? What if it’s only pain? I think of those college parties in which I chased misery. Wouldn’t I have been better off without my cowboy boots, consoling myself with a good book?
As part of a recent Q&A column on her Substack, Dunham wrote that “long term friendships — ones that stand the test of time and continue to bring both delight and deep, steady support — have one thing and one thing only in common, and that thing is: a willingness to let the other person grow.” This was in response to a young woman who had written in to describe a rift with her college best friend. Could they stay friends? she asked Dunham. Was she the bad friend for making her friend feel insecure?
My expectations for friendship are different than they were in college. It is normal for me to go weeks without seeing some of my closest friends in the city because they need to work, or go to the gym, or see their boyfriends. I don’t take this personally because I am a person who routinely forgets about text messages and now refuses plans in order to write. I understand now that sometimes there are more important directives than being a good friend.
It would be easy to tell a story in which my roommate and I grew apart because she became a lawyer and I became a writer, but in the grand scheme of the human condition, these are negligible differences. A full accounting of our grievances would obscure how we needed to sever our togetherness so as to allow for the development of two independent selves. If we had been less close, or if our closeness had not been forged in the mutual agony of being heartbroken girls in college, then we might have borne this natural self-differentiation with more grace. It strikes me now that the intensity of our friendship was only possible because neither of us were in love.
And if I sometimes miss the fevered closeness of that friendship, I know I am no longer capable of sustaining such an intimacy. For one, I am no longer in agony. In this city of endless delights and cruelties, I have chosen to embrace an approach to my mid-20s that is not built on the worship of experience or ritualistic pain. It would make for pretty boring TV.
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