There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I’m going to begin with the sex scene in the second episode that most critics have mentioned and described with some amount of repugnance or lament. It’s one of the most complicated and intelligent sex scenes I’ve seen. The fact that it’s part of a funny, winsome, half-hour television show makes it all the more astonishing and exhilarating a thing to see. In reviews and profiles of Dunham, journalists, most of them admirers of the show, have broadly characterized what’s happening in the scene as an example of “bad” sex—not mutually satisfying, awkward, degrading, distasteful. This is not necessarily untrue, but it is a limited and literal reading, a set of familiar words and ideas unequal to the virtuosity and novelty of the scene.
