this might not hurt, but close your eyes anyways

My chief beef is not simply that the girls in Girls are white. I’m a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember – which, in mixed people speak means biracial. But the problem with Girls is that while the show reaches — and succeeds, in many ways — to show female characters that are not caricatures, it feels alienating, a party of four engineered to appeal to a very specific subset of the television viewing audience, when the show has the potential to be so much bigger than that. …

Because the show (at least the first three episodes) is actually good. It gets So. Many. Things. Right. It’s on point again and again, hitting at the high and low notes about being in your twenties, about being on your own and still so far from grown. Getting involved with the wrong guys, saying the wrong thing to your boss at work, trying — and failing — to relate to your parents, flinging your arms around your best friend when Rihanna comes on in the club, pressing your lips into her sweaty cheek and feeling triumphant, thinking we’re going to make it through this year if it kills us. The show is painfully self-aware of its characters’ entitlement and tries to use the vantage of privilege as a mirror, intended to bouncing back their flaws and their potential for growth to those us at home watching, and nearly all of it works the way it’s supposed to. (Except for the tubcakegate. I have taken the following things into the shower with me: a beer, two beers, an iced coffee, and a mixed drink. Food? Never. Doesn’t it get wet? Where do you put it while you get undressed? The sink? The edge of the tub? The top of the TOILET?! Does not compute.)

At least that is a relief, as others have pointed out. Girls is good for girls. But which girls?