We Need To Talk About Jessa

OK, it’s been a while since Girls hit.  I’m not going to add to the looming Jenga-tower of words about Lena Dunham, much as I love her – and I do.  I really do.

No.  It’s been long enough now that I have been able to watch my Girls DVDs on a loop until my eyes bleed the tears of an over-privileged white girl who identifies far too much with these over-privileged white characters.

I now have but one thing to say.  We need to talk about Jessa.

My obsession with her has been building to epic proportions and it is not good for me or my life.

Jessa always looks amazing, when she is wearing a bathrobe in the street and red lipstick, or a multitude of feathers.  She comes out with catchphrases like ‘all adventurous women do!’.  She encourages her friends to do stupid things ‘for the story’.  She does stupid things all the time.  She gets married to dudes she neither knows nor likes!

It doesn’t matter that I have known girls like Jessa in real life and they are a bad influence on me – I never realised until it was too late that I was actually the only one who didn’t revise for my exams; everyone else just said they weren’t going to.  (There’s a metaphor for life in there, in case you missed it.)  Plus, those Jessa friends can get kind of annoying after a while.  It doesn’t matter that the actress who plays her, Jemima Kirke, is actually married with two children and a lovely house.

The more I watch, the more I start thinking it’s a good idea to do things ‘for the story’.  The more I start wearing my bathrobe outside the house.

‘What would Jessa do?’ I ask myself, whilst pondering hand tattoos.

It’s even more insidious than all those times I used to ask myself ‘what would Courtney Love do?’.  I don’t understand why I can’t be drawn to the good role models.  But then again: ‘what would Gwyneth Paltrow do?’.  Nothing fun.

I was disappointed in myself when I read Lena Dunham saying on Twitter that nobody’s really a Jessa.  According to her creator, we all like to think we are, but we’re not – ‘that is the sick power of the Jessa’.

It can’t be true.  I am totally a Jessa.*

* Aren’t I?  Is this like when suburban dullards all over the land started saying they were ‘a Carrie’?  No.  Please tell me it’s not.