What ‘Tiny Furniture’ and ‘Girls’ Taught Me About My Body

There’s a scene toward the end of Lena Dunham’s 2010 indie Tiny Furniture in which we see the lead character, Aurora—played by Dunham—naked in the shower. At this point, we’ve already seen her exposed body in a cutaway to a film she made in college, which shows Aurora brushing her teeth in a campus fountain while clad only in two tiny scraps of bikini material, and we’ve heard how the world reacts to the sight of her nude (“Put on some pants, or a burlap sack,” writes one Internet commenter), but this scene is more intimate. She’s on her hands and knees, tattooed flesh just barely visible through the fogged-up shower door, murmuring the words she wished she had said to a disappointing lover earlier in the night.

I watched Tiny Furniture for the first time in a dorm bed in rural Ohio, on a college campus just over an hour from where Dunham went to school, and I instantly felt uncomfortably seen. I am—like Dunham—a cis, white, New York City-raised private-school girl, which should signify less that her work is inherently universal and more that I was its target audience, but at the risk of undercutting my point with an exhausting privilege disclaimer, I’ll just say this: When I saw a glimpse of Dunham stripped bare on her shower floor in Tiny Furniture, something happened in my brain that I still think about to this day.

I wish I could say that was the moment I accepted my body in all its worldly glory, but nothing could be further from the truth. I was terrified of being seen the way Dunham was showing herself, so afraid of being perceived that I had ill-remembered, compulsory hetero sex with the lights off and even brought a book into the dorm shower to avoid being alone with my naked body (earning me endless good-natured mocking from my friends, to whom I passed off the habit as a mere ADD quirk). I didn’t want Dunham’s body—early into freshman year of college I’d more or less stopped eating full meals, replacing them with vending-machine candy bars and Pinnacle whipped cream vodka—but I wanted her ability to show it to the world, to capture herself vulnerably for the sake of art without letting the need to be seen as thin come first. I couldn’t seem to get there, and when I was rejected from an Advanced Fiction workshop because the professor felt the story I’d submitted “wasn’t open enough,” it seemed like a confirmation of what I already knew: I was trapped within the boundaries of my body, physically and creatively blocked by my shame.

Dunham was far from the first artist to use her body as a canvas—Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, and many more paved the way for her—but she was the first person I saw onscreen whose naked physical contours reminded me of my own, at least before my dramatic freshman-year weight loss; and while her nude body didn’t instantly transform me, it taught me something about the kind of story I was allowed to tell (even just to myself) about the way I looked.