Hey Lena Dunham is now a blonde! And she just dumped a whole bucket of ice water on her head as part of the Ice Bucket Challenge. Seems that Jaime King and pop star Taylor Swift took part in the controversial fund raising daisychain and challenged Dunham to do it next.
Here’s Brooklyn Heights resident Dunham soaking herself.
Not everyone is greeting this publicity stunt – meant to raise funds for ALS – with sunshine and lollipops. Take this piece from Vice:
There are a lot of things wrong with the Ice Bucket Challenge, but most the annoying is that it’s basically narcissism masked as altruism. By the time the summer heat cools off and ice water no longer feels refreshing, people will have completely forgotten about ALS. It’s trendy to pretend that we care, but eventually, those trends fade away.
This is the crux of millennial “hashtag activism,” where instead of actually doing something, you can just pretend like you’re doing something by posting things all over your Facebook. Like the Ice Bucket Challenge, good causes end up being a collective of social media naval gazing. We reflected on our favorite social-movements-gone-viral and found out what happened to them after the fell off our Twitter feeds. Because, yes, social problems continue even after you stop hashtagging them.
