I used to envy my friends with boyfriends, feeling sad because they had a special someone to share their lives with, and I didn't.
Sara (Katya Campbell), a young-thirties dot-com millionairess, spends her early retirement firing her maids, tormenting her interns, and, along with her live-in boyfriend, Mitchell Geoffrey Arendd), feeling depressed.
"The point is to allow access to the content, but zero access to the meaning," she says, citing the example of a teenage girl she recently interviewed who had just broken up with her boyfriend, was feeling truly awful, and badly wanted to say so – but without her mother finding out.
That made me think of the time my ex-boyfriend said feeling up a girl was like sticking your hand between two pieces of ham.
"Even with Selena, when I was talking with her boyfriend, I remember feeling truly angry.
Don't make your boyfriend feel like you're only hooking up because he wants to, but because you're really feeling it, too.
I felt angry at society for making me feel this way, for telling me that I can't hold my boyfriend's hand without feeling fear, without feeling trepidation, without feeling a niggling sense of shame.
But it's the rarer moments of tenderness and thoughtful prose – like when she describes the first time she made love to her boyfriend as feeling "like dropping my keys on the table after a long trip" – that made me wish Dunham didn't hedge her earnestness quite so much.
The N also refused to broadcast two episodes from the second season that featured a storyline about date-rape until suitable edits could be made, and withheld other episodes from season three that showed a fourteen-year-old character having an abortion after having consensual sexual intercourse with her boyfriend, and feeling no regrets.
We got home late that night, and I told Boyfriend how I was feeling.
