
I remember how it felt to watch Hannah have rough sex on the couch with Adam that first time in Girls.
It felt jarring. And kind of exciting. It felt radical.
By season two, those sorts of sex scenes felt normal. And that was the magic of Girls.
For once, sex wasn’t something romanticised or hidden on mainstream television. It was messy and loaded and weird.
It was very, very familiar.

There he was on screen; the guy that didn't want anything serious.
There they were, my jiggly thighs.
When Girls season one first aired in 2012, I was 22, in my first full-time writing job at a women's magazine.
Hannah, played by series creator Lena Dunham, had embarked on her own entry-level position as an assistant at a book publisher. Her sense of entitlement over her career at such an early stage reflected my own: she was 24, desperately wanting to be seen as a writer, and doing everything possible to avoid writing.
She embodied the early-twenties struggle of trying to be taken seriously in your work, while having no clear idea of what work even is yet. Comparing yourself to the older, more experienced girls with management roles in their late twenties, so confident, while you fumbled around in the mailroom, not confident.
And then there was Jessa.
GOD I wanted to be Jessa, Jessa with the cool name who showed up late to her own homecoming party in that first episode and then proceeded to never apologise about anything ever.

Top Comments