There was some speculation in a thread yesterday that Lena Dunham had perpetrated a rape, much along the lines of the one described in Amy Schumer's "motivational" speech to a feminist audience, that was discussed a few months ago. Well, friends, I did the nasty legwork, managed to find her book, and today I have the excerpt in question, in its entirety. If you can stomach it, here it is:

“In May, Mike graduated along with his whole gang of merry bandits: Goldblatt, Kyle (an expert on Costa Rican culture), and Quinn, a textiles student whose senior project involved creating bathing suits with holes where the crotches should have been. The only one who was left behind was Barry. Barry would now be considered a super senior, a dubious distinction given to those with one more semester to finish. Barry, Audrey and I agreed, was creepy. He had a mustache that rode the line between ironic Williamsburg fashion and big-buck hunter, and he wore the kind of white Reeboks last seen in an ’80s exercise video. He worked part-time at the library, and I would often see him skulking along the aisles, shelving books in the wrong places. In social settings, he commanded attention with his aggressively masculine physicality and a voice that went Barry White low. There was a story about him punching a girl in the boobs at a party. He was a Republican. All reasons to avoid him and to wonder why they let him into the living room of Renson Cottage so much. In his super-senior semester, Barry seemed lost. With his friends gone, his brow had softened. You could see him smoking cigarettes alone, kicking at the ground in front of the student union and sitting in Mike’s old place in the computer lab like a dog without an owner. Who’s the big guy now?

There was a particularly raucous party in the loft above the video store. I wore Audrey’s fancy wrap dress, and we drank two beers each before we left and split a Xanax she still had from a flight to Boca with her grandma. It hit me hard and fast, and by the time we showed up I was possessed by a party spirit quite alien to me. Audrey, on the other hand, became dizzy and after much deliberation went home, making me promise to treat her wrap dress with the proper respect. I missed her keenly for a moment, then snorted a small amount of cocaine off a key, before kissing a freshman and dancing into the bathroom line, where I showed people how easily Audrey’s wrap dress opened and explained how “bogus” the creative writing department was. All my friends were gone. I looked for Audrey, even though she’d told me she was leaving, and I’d also watched her go. Finally, from behind, I saw my friend Joey. Sweet, oafish Joey—DJ and snugglebunny full of Michigan pride. There he was, in his Members Only jacket, tall and warm and ready to save me. I snuck up behind him and jumped on his back. When he turned around, it wasn’t Joey. It was Barry. Uh-oh played in my head like a loser’s sound effect on a Japanese talk show. Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh. “I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said. “Well, we don’t know each other,” I told him. “I have to pee.”

Barry leads me to the parking lot. I tell him to look away. I pull down my tights to pee, and he jams a few of his fingers inside me, like he’s trying to plug me up. I’m not sure whether I can’t stop it or I don’t want to. Leaving the parking lot, I see my friend Fred. He spies Barry leading me by the arm toward my apartment (apparently I’ve told him where I live), and he calls out my name. I ignore him. When that doesn’t work, he grabs me. Barry disappears for a minute, so it’s just Fred and me. “Don’t do this,” he says. “You don’t want to walk me home, so just leave me alone,” I slur, expressing some deep hurt I didn’t even know I had. “Just leave me alone.” He shakes his head. What can he do?

“Now Barry’s in my place. Now we’re on my floor, doing all the things grown-ups do. I don’t know how we got here, but I refuse to believe it’s an accident. Now he’s inside me, but he’s only sort of hard. I look onto the floor, by his pale bent knee, and see he’s taken off the condom. Did I tell him to wear a condom? The condom came from my first-aid kit. I knew where that was, he didn’t, so I must have crawled for it. A choice. Why does he think it’s okay to take it off? I come to a little, realize this is not a dream. I tell him he has to put the condom back on. He’s not hard, and now he’s going down on me, and he’s pushing his dick in my face. It feels like a finger without bones. I moan, as if to say, I like this, so much. He calls me baby. Or says, “Oh baby,” which is different. “Do you want to make me come?” I ask. “Hunh?” he asks. “Do you want to make me come?” I ask again, and I know that if I make these sounds and ask these questions, then it is, again, a choice. Now we’re across the room, our bodies in a new formation. I tip my head back as far as it will go. And up, in my roommate’s tree, I see another condom. Or the same condom. A condom that isn’t on him and maybe never was. Now I am pulling myself up messily like a just-born foal, throwing Barry and all his clothes out the sliding door into the parking lot. He’s clutching his shirt, struggling with a boot. The winter air seems to sober him up, and I shut the door and watch from behind the glass as he looks for the direction home. I wouldn’t want to run into him now. Now I am hiding in the kitchenette, waiting for him to be gone. Now I wake up. My roommate isn’t home. Later, I will learn she heard sounds from outside the door and went upstairs to sleep with a friend rather than interrupt me. Before sunrise, I diligently enter the encounter into the Word document I keep, titled “Intimacy Database.” Barry. Number Four. We fucked. 69’d. It was terribly aggressive. Only once. No one came.”

When I was young, I read an article about a ten-year-old girl who was raped by a stranger on a dirt road. Now nearly forty, she recalled lying down in a gingham dress her mother had sewn for her and making sounds of pleasure to protect herself. It seemed terrifying and arousing and like a good escape plan. And I never forgot this story, but I didn’t remember until many days after Barry fucked me. Fucked me so hard that the next morning I had to sit in a hot bath to soothe myself. Then I remembered.

The day after Barry, Audrey and I meet up to do homework in the computer lab. We are both still in our pajamas, layers and layers to guard against the cold. In the bathroom we are washing our hands, letting them linger in the hot water, and I say, “I have to tell you something.” We crawl up onto the ledge above the radiator, and we huddle together, and I describe the events of the night before, finishing with “I’m sorry about your wrap dress.” Audrey’s pale little face goes blank. She clutches my hand and, in a voice reserved for moms in Lifetime movies, whispers, “You were raped.” I burst out laughing.

“That night I am Gchatting with Mike. He lives in San Francisco now, works at an ad agency, and dates a girl with a pill problem and what he calls “a phat ass.” Her Myspace name is Rainbowmolly. 12:30 AM me: fool i called you Mike: i know i’ve been hung ove r hungover me: me too 12:31 AM Mike: REALLY me: i got so drunked up Mike: nice i vomited on myself me: ew are you ok? Mike: yes 12:32 AM i haven’t left my house me: i did something so retarded you will laugh at me Mike: tell me 12:33 AM TELL ME me: i went home with you weird friend Barry Mike: -------------------- haha HAHAHA me: i know”

“I dial Mike on my hot-pink flip phone, not sure whether I want him to pick up or not. “How weird is that?” “Well, Barry called me today, said he woke up in the hallway of his dorm. Said he deep-dicked some girl, but he has no idea who.” He laughs, a mucusy exhausted laugh. “Deep-dicked” will never leave me. It will stay with me long after the sting inside me, like rug burn deep within my body, is gone. After I’ve forgotten the taste of Barry’s bitter spit or the sound of him cursing through the thick glass of my sliding door. Divorced of meaning, it’s a set of sounds that mean shame.>

The next week my vagina still hurts. When I walk, when I sit. I thought a hot bath the morning after would cure it, but it’s just getting worse. I’m home on winter break, freezing except for this hot place where nothing will settle down, so I go to my mother’s doctor, the one who delivered my sister. Gently, she examines me and explains it is getting better slowly. It’s like a scrape on your knee, a scab rubbing against jeans. “It must have been pretty rough,” she says without judgment. The next semester, after Barry is gone, my friend Melody tells me that once her friend Julia woke up the morning after sex with Barry, and the wall was spattered with blood. Spattered, she said, “like a crime scene.” But he was nice, and he took her for the morning-after pill and named the baby they weren’t having. Julia wasn’t mad. “But you should know,” she says, “that he lost his virginity to a hooker in New Orleans.” What will I do with this retroactive warning? Just sit on it, what else can I do.”

“I make a vow not to have sex again until it’s with someone I love. I wait six months, and the next person I do it with becomes my first serious boyfriend, and though he is sexually confused and extremely antisocial he treats me like the eighth wonder of the world and we are best friends. One afternoon, lying in bed in a way that is only acceptable during college or a deep seasonal depression, I tell him about Barry. I cry, partially from remembering it and partially because I hate the way I’m expressing myself. He’s really hung up on trying to remember whether he ever saw Barry around campus. I’m just angry that I don’t have better words.”

Even in the nicest television writers’ room, people say all kinds of terrible things. Confessions of the way we really feel toward our significant others. Stories from our childhoods that our parents wish we had forgotten. Judgments of other people’s bodies. It’s all fodder for A and B stories, motivations, throwaway jokes. I wonder how many loved ones watch TV looking for signs of their own destruction. We laugh a lot, at things that shouldn’t rightfully be funny—breakups, overdoses, parents explaining their impending divorce to a little kid with chicken pox. That’s the joy of it. One afternoon, I pitch a version of the Barry story. A sexual encounter that no one can classify properly. A condom winding up in a potted plant against the will of the girl being fucked. An Audrey-esque “ambulance chaser” response. Murray shakes his head. “I just don’t see rape being funny in any situation.” “Yeah,” Bruce agrees. “It’s a tough one.” “But that’s the thing,” I say. “No one knows if it’s a rape. It’s, like, a confusing situation that …” I trail off. “But I’m sorry that happened to you,” Jenni says. “I hate that.”

General Remarks:

The parallels with the Amy Schumer rape story are striking. An unattractive narcissist hooks up with a blackout drunk man who is well past the point of being able to consent. She feels entitled to his attention (sexual and otherwise), despite never being able to secure a satisfying relationship with a high-quality man before this opportunity presented itself.

She has her way, but in doing so, this invalidates her own constructed self-image. She got the physical attention she desired, but somehow it left her feeling empty. The guy did not go out of his way to make her feel special. "Maybe he's not worthy after all? YES, OF COURSE, THAT'S IT! I'm better than this. I'm better than him. Ha. All the boys want me and my prince is just around the corner." It restores her feeling of self worth. By reframing the guy as the villian that shamelessly took advantage of her (because, yes, all men are rapists! Or, at least, they can be interpreted that way by any woman's slightest of whims), she rationalizes that it was her who had value, after all. This is the magic of fake-rape. Rather than feeling bad about it, claiming rape, affirms her sexual value, and furthermore gives her others' sympathy, not to mention precious, precious SJW victim cred.

Note that this is such a tenuous case, that it must be presented in the form of a humble-brag. All her friends and writer's assistants, primed by rape culture hysteria, classify the experience as rape (perpetrated by him on her!), and she reluctantly allows the strong insinuation that their interpretation is the correct one to stand.

Is this phenomenon the living, breathing soul of the "sincere" (as opposed to opportunistic) false rape accusation? What would "Barry"'s perspective be on this ordeal? Was he a victim of rape? Discuss.