At the time of the show’s release in 2012, journalist Jenna Wortham, now a culture writer at The New York Times, responded with a viral piece titled, ‘Where (My) Girls At?’. In it, she wrote, “Buried within that oversight is a kind of uncomfortable exclusivity, an othering of the people who are not included, by default.” Were white women like me aware of the lack of diversity in Girls, or even the conversations surrounding it? In large part, no.

Of course, this problem long precedes Dunham. Right now, nostalgia for the ‘90s is more prominent than ever. Not only are designers embracing the decade (so much so that there’s no longer any point pretending low-rise jeans aren’t making a comeback), but TikTok teens are using the platform to discover everything from music to movies that millennials grew up alongside.

While it’s comforting to rewatch the romance films and comedies that saw us through our teenage and early adult years, it’s hard to do so with the same enthusiasm once you’re awake to just how exclusive this content is, and, moreover, the knockon effects that exclusivity has in almost every facet of society today.

When you think of romantic comedies, movies like She’s All That, You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, Never Been Kissed and 10 Things I Hate About You pop to mind. Not only are these films all focused on white stories (made by and starring white people), but for the most part, every ‘90s rom-com focuses on a man saving a woman by transforming the ‘ugly duckling’ into someone worthy of dating —”Given the right look, the right boyfriend, in six months she could be prom queen!” (She’s All That)—harassing a woman until she gives in and falls in love, or until she realises she can’t possibly survive without a man in her life.

The result is women subconsciously defining romantic love in unhealthy ways, and feeling less than should they lack it (hello, Bridget Jones).

The first time I realised the severity of how whitewashed our screens are was (embarrassingly) in 2017, when I read Renni Eddo-Lodge’s book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. In it, Eddo-Lodge details, aged 4, asking her mum, “When am I going to turn white?” When Eddo-Lodge’s mum informed her that wasn’t going to happen, she was disappointed. She wanted to look like the princesses she watched on TV. She wanted to be the hero, not the villain. “Reading novels and watching films, you see that Black people have from birth had to empathise with white people, whereas white people have never had to empathise with Black people,” she said when reflecting recently on the impact of media.

The issue is, of course, not having diversity where it really matters: not only on screen, not only behind-the-scenes, but in the boardroom, in the director’s chair—at the top.

A 2017 study by the USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism found that only 4 percent of the highest-grossing films of the past decade were directed by women. This means white men have created 95 percent of mainstream Hollywood films. Instead of expecting these men to be able to understand and empathise with experiences outside of their own, it makes far more sense to instead employ people who have lived them.

At this year’s Academy Awards, Chloé Zhao became the second woman in history to win Best Director at the Oscars, and the first woman of colour ever. This history-making moment proves that change is happening, but it is too slow. Its pace affects the culture we live in: the stories we highlight, the people we are told matter.

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^{SIDE-NOTE acknowledges the Eora people as the traditional custodians of the land on which this project was produced. We pay our respects to Elders past and present. We extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples reading this.}