First-World Problems

Do These 'Girls' Have 'First World Problems'?

There's a scene in an early episode of Lena Dunham's "Girls" where Dunham's character, Hannah, openly fantasizes about testing positive for HIV. That way, she says to a gynecologist examining her, people will congratulate her just for staying alive rather than expect her to accomplish something, and she'll have a reason to be upset besides just a boy not texting her back. "That's an incredibly silly thing to say," the doctor, one of the show's few brown faces (at least in initial episodes), says gently, citing infection and fatality rates for young women - mostly young women who don’t have much in common with Hannah, though the doctor doesn’t say so.

That's also around the time the gynecologist says, in a scene clipped for the trailer, "You could not pay me enough to be 24 again," and Hannah says, "Well, they're not paying me at all."

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