‘All adventurous women’ aren’t employed

Do you ever find yourself questioning your ability to take a good naked picture? Or talking your friend’s ear off about how the guy that you hook up with isn’t showing any signs of wanting to commit? Or even Googling “stuff that gets up around the sides of condoms”? These are just some of the racy topics that Lena Dunham portrays in her hit HBO series, GIRLS.

As a 20-something that is just completing university I took to GIRLS with relative ease. Seeing these girls who are around my age, post-college and trying to make a living just seemed so relatable and it turns out my suspicions were true. Although I feel as if I’ve now seen Lena Dunham’s naked body more than my own, GIRLS presents issues that my friends and I deal with frequently in our own lives.  The situations may not be completely uncanny, but they do reflect a great deal of truth in them.

How about Marnie’s “struggle” of being over her boyfriend, but not wanting to see him with anyone else? I’m sure that every girl has felt that at least once in her life. Or Shoshanna’s curiosity about her virginity and the quest she sets out on to lose it. Perhaps you haven’t had the exact same experience as her, since she is wonderfully weird, but maybe you’ve been through something along these lines.

The scariest, if not most accurate, critique of the 20-something girls that this show portrays is the lack of employment that they suffer. Hannah wants to be a writer, but her internship is unpaid and she ends up quitting. Marnie gets fired from what she thought would be her career and is at a loss of where to go next. Shoshanna is still in school and Jessa chooses to settle down.

There is nothing scarier to me than graduating from university and having to venture out into the unknown and try to procure some sort of way to support myself. This is something that I’m sure that we are feeling like this at this point in our lives. What’s reassuring is being able to sit down on the couch every Sunday, turn on the TV and watch GIRLS to see these four characters somehow make their unemployment work and in turn our future becomes a little less scary. I think maybe that’s why we like the show so much.

In my opinion, your 20s are a time for you to have fun and do what you want before having to make the tough real-life decisions like where to live, how many kids you’ll have or  where you’ll find this husband in order to have those kids. Shows like GIRLS allow us to see that choosing to live this way is ok. It even encourages us to go for our dreams, make mistakes and have fun because after all, “all adventurous women do.”

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