I have a theory, humor me here, that unless and until Jezebel.com address the Dunham issue, they will start a low downward spiral into irrelevance. If this site fails, mark the day that fiasco came out as the official start. Jez, ball is decidedly, squarely in your court.

The piece in the original post is a Bjarne Melgaard sculpture in imitation of Allen Jones' furniture pictured in your comment. Melgaard's schtick in these pieces was to change the skin color; they were exhibited with paintings that also swapped the subject's race. He is most definitely courting racial offense.

It's a line of sculpture/furniture that was very popular at "hip" restaurants in the 80s. Not the best timing with today being MLK Day, but I'm not sure it's racist.

I think that once she based her career on a falsified autobiography, the rest of her life, unfortunately, became fair game.

If you're trying to scam people and commit fraud, you don't get to complain when your life receives the barest of scrutiny.

I don't see the problem here. Really. Which isn't to say I'm not sympathetic with the woman featured in the story, or the unique problems she faces as a trans woman. But ultimately, she represented herself as something she was not, and her status as a trans woman became a necessary part of the reportage as a…

Yeah, but I imagine the counterargument is: a PR person should have known that having an affair (the divorce was only filed a few days ago) with a well-know politician who had previously solicited prostitutes in a high-profile case was going to attract undue attention to her employer.

Respectfully, if you guys have something specifically against Vogue then it would be great if you would just write up a big retrospective piece. The more you make this about Lena Dunham and effectively force her to respond to this—which no matter how you slice it is a direct discussion about her body that invites a…

Jez,

Actually, her twitter response was much better: "Way cooler when people do things out of pure blind spite than out of faux altruism". Faux altruism describes this whole shitshow perfectly.

Best media roundup every week of what you need to read, too. Read it and weep, Jezebel — oh wait, Jezebel is too busy picking celebrities appearances apart from the last red carpet event.

Sorry, Jez: thrwarted again. Dunham looks great in both images with minimal trickery. Looks like Vogue wins this round.

I wanna hug you so much for saying that. You made me LoL my cough drop out of my mouth.

I might enjoy these (she does look fine in the befores) if it weren't for the shitty way Jezebel went about targeting Dunham to obtain them. It still sucks, and you still owe your readers and Dunham an apology.

I love how you guys are basically having to admit that you're assholes and they didn't actually change much and Lena Dunham actually *does* look that fantastic without Photoshop. So YOU are the ones who are jerks for saying, "Lena Dunham couldn't possibly look this pretty or thin without the magic of photo editing!!!"

Welp, I hope you consider 10K a reasonable price to pay for losing the respect of a great deal of your readers with this utterly pointless exercise.

Shocking, truly shocking. Great reporting! And think of all the clicks!

so who got the 10k? the photoshopping isn't all that drastic.

Was any of this really necessary? What did we learn here?