I've never watched that show. Is it trash? It seems like trash.

So what if Dunham doesn't write men well? What about the hundreds of shows that portray women as one-dimensional? Does it only matter now that it's men that are being portrayed unfairly? I see this as a non-issue being made into something bigger than it is. The writing of the male characters in Girls isn't some form of misandry as the author of this article insinuates, it's just a short-coming of one writer. The fact that the male characters are less complex than the protagonists is no more a problem than the lack of complexity of women in most other television shows and movies.

I'm reminded of Samuel Butler's book The Authoress of the Odyssey, where in the first chapter he uses the point that men have difficulty writing from a woman's point of view and vice-versa as a point to strengthen his argument that the Odyssey was written by a woman, because the female characters in the Odyssey are better written.

When I came to the Phæacian episode I felt sure that here at any rate the writer was drawing from life, and that Nausicaa, Queen Arēte, and Alcinous were real people more or less travestied, and on turning to Colonel Mure’s work * I saw that he was of the same opinion. Nevertheless I found myself continually aghast at the manner in which men were made to speak and act — especially, for example, during the games in honour of Ulysses described in Book viii. Colonel Mure says (p. 407) that “the women engross the chief share of the small stock of common sense allotted to the community.” So they do, but it never occurred to me to ask myself whether men commonly write brilliant books in which the women are made more sensible than the men. Still dominated by the idea that the writer was a man, I conjectured that he might be some bard, perhaps blind, who lived among the servants much as the chaplain in a great house a couple of hundred years ago among ourselves. Such a bard, even though not blind, would only see great people from a distance, and would not mix with them intimately enough to know how they would speak and act among themselves. It never even crossed my mind that it might have been the commentators who were blind, and that they might have thus come to think that the poet must have been blind too.

The view that the writer might have lived more in the steward’s room than with the great people of the house served (I say it with shame) to quiet me for a time, but by and by it struck me that though the men often both said and did things that no man would say or do, the women were always ladies when the writer chose to make them so. How could it be that a servant’s hall bard should so often go hopelessly wrong with his men, and yet be so exquisitely right with every single one of his women? But still I did not catch it. It was not till I got to Circe that it flashed upon me that I was reading the work, not of an old man, but of a young woman — and of one who knew not much more about what men can and cannot do than I had found her know about the milking of ewes in the cave of Polyphemus.

So, I guess if this idea, that men and women in general seem to have trouble writing from the point of view of the opposite sex, holds any merit, it's no surprise that she'd have a terrible time writing male characters, as things like this seem to be the norm. Or something like that; I was just reminded of that part of the book.