A little while back, when Lena Dunham made the cover of Vogue magazine, Jezebel decided to put a bounty on the raw images because … honestly, I’m not really sure why. I mean, I get that photoshop has gotten out of control, but purposely going for singling out Lena in such a public way just seems odd. Anyway, after getting the raw images and seeing just how little they actually were retouched, they kind of ended up eating crow, and Lena still has a bit of resentment over the whole kerfuffle.
“That was messed up,” Dunham, 27, told Grantland‘s Bill Simmons in an interview posted Thursday, Feb. 20. “I think Jezebel is really smart and funny, I think it’s just like once you’ve been attacked that way it’s hard to enjoy. It’s hard to enjoy once you feel like they’ve made such a monumental error in their approach to feminism.”
At the time, at least one reader gave in to the site’s request, and hours later six untouched images of the Annie Leibovitz spread went live. Jezebel editor Jessica Coen claimed that they didn’t mean to “shame” the Girls actress with the expose, but the plan ultimately backfired.
“For me it was just sort of — I can’t be half-in. It felt gross,” Dunham continued. “I didn’t talk to [Coen] who did it directly, but I can’t imagine the reaction made her feel particularly great.”
Dunham had “sympathy” for Coen’s backlash initially, but “once they did post the unretouched images of me that looked so similar — I was kind of scared to see the unretouched images of me,” she continued. “I was like, ‘maybe I’m delusional in this and I don’t look how I think I look.” SOURCE
Look, I actually appreciate what Jezebel does. Sometimes, I get the feeling they go overboard, but they have good intentions. That being said, they have a habit of steamrolling the people they claim to help in order to make the narrative fit their point of view. Like that one time they tried to call out the slut-shaming in the world of beauty pageants by slut-shaming a leather title-holder. And this is the problem I have with Jezebel: When your agenda takes credence over the people you claim to represent, you need to take a step back and reevaluate what you’re doing.