>Because I could counter with my anecdotal examples of girls
>who were angry at me for saying the show "doesn't interest me"
>and called Dunham "the voice of a generation."

you could, and I would agree with anyone and everyone who would want to call those girls obnoxious. but were we talking about the critique those girls were offering or the show Girls itself? it's a worthwhile distinction.

but as long as we're judging shows along the rubric "how does it make you feel?" then every single response is equally valid. it's The Problem with 'reader-response' critiques (it's also why so much modern pop criticism is intellectually bankrupt, so much of it has no real bearing in any substantive form of critical thinking -- and yes, the 'blogosphere,' twitter, message boards et. al. have only exacerbated this problem)

>Furthermore, the point made above how backlash against Dunham
>is less about her being a woman and more about the media's
>insistence of her brilliance is on the money. Anything that
>the media insists is amazing gets loved or hated on an equal
>scale. Anything the media generally ignores that was created
>by a woman isn't hated, or if it's hated, then no one accuses
>that hatred to be founded in misogyny.

right -- and while we bicker over exactly how we all should feel about some privileged white socialites in NYC, wholly exploitative, truly disturbing, unquestionably intellectually bankrupt shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo come to take over entire cable channels (not just buttress an already quality range of offering like HBO) and people let such actual creative atrocities pass without comment. if we're going to bicker over what a 'valid response' is to TV and its mainstream criticism, I would say the deafening silence over the moral bankruptcy and wholesale exploitation of a clearly sick state of affairs like Honey Boo Boo is much more damning than anything anyone has written about Lena Dunham and how much they like her show.

but that's just if we really want to take this discussion to a 'moral' place.

I'm fine leaving it as viewer-response, in which case telling someone else (we'll just leave gender out of it in this clause, even though it's obvious to anyone with eyes that gender is a key factor in this whole Girls phenomenon) what they should and shouldn't like is asinine, and you'd be better off focusing your energies on talking about what you like (i.e. Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Jim Brown, Muhammad Ali etc.) than 'hate-watching' and judging the tastes of others.