When Lena Dunham’s series Girls first appeared on our TV screens in 2012, it was a simpler time. Long before clickbait feminism and false female empowerment seemed to be everywhere, the series felt like a liberating, awkward, and ultimately honest portrayal of the female experience.

Repackaging sexual empowerment for the tumblr generation in all its messy, un-photoshopped glory, Dunham arguably managed to represent the thoughts and feelings of every self-obsessed twentysomething millennial struggling to make it work in a major city post-university degree with ever-tightening job prospects.

But as the fifth series hits our screens, (with the sixth set to be it’s last), Dunham’s show has had its fair share of controversy, from being labelled as peak white feminism to the lack of POC characters. But the question still remains, what does it really mean to be a girl in your twenties? Does it mean you have to watch Sex and the City religiously and ponder whether you really are a Carrie or a Samantha? Does it mean you have to avidly use Tinder while complaining about how pointless it actually is?

For all its faults, Girls still offers a catastrophic guide to femininity. So as we see in the penultimate series, here’s our Girls guide to being a girl, the modern alternative to finishing school.

YOUR HAIRSTYLE IS A GATEWAY TO EXPLORING TRUE IDENTITY

From side braids and doughnut buns to just plain pineapple-head, we aren’t sure there’s even a name for most of Shoshanna Shapiro’s hair styles but we are sure that despite much ridicule from her friendship circle, she rocks every single one of them. As her hair stylist says, Shosh is “ever-changing and never wants to be pigeonholed,” she’s her own woman and expresses every friendship spat and boyfriend breakup in a style change.

BE AT ONE WITH NATURE

Though the notion that nothing screams ‘girl power’ more than pulling down your pants and taking a piss on the street may be riddled with problemacy, there’s no denying the Girls gang are more than comfortable than applying the “if you gotta go you gotta go” philosophy. Legitimising every time you’ve needed to pee in the most awkward of places, Girls has it’s fair share of taking a leak on the street moments. Because, in the words of Hannah Horvitz, “all adventurous women do”.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO STEP OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE

In the momentous third episode of season two, Hannah’s editor asks her to write about something “out of her comfort zone.” With a promise of $200 per published personal essay she, naturally, decides dabbling in class A’s is the best way to go about her newfound freelance career.

Despite her usual unspontaneous nature, Hannah and ex-boyfriend-cum-gay best friend Elijah go on to snort a spectacular amount of coke off of a club toilet seat, declaring that they will have the kind of night where “it's like 5 am and one of us has definitely punched someone who's been on a Disney Channel show.” Unsurprisingly, Hannah ends up rowing with Marnie, kicking Elijah out her house, hooking up with her junkie neighbour and never filing the article anyway.

OWN YOUR SELF-OBSESSION

Girls in their twenties are probably the first to admit we can probably be a little too invested in our own lives. Whether it’s the #struggle of not reaching eleven likes on Instagram or questioning for hours whether you’re thin enough rock a crop top (you are), one thing we can all learn from the Girls girls is to own your own self-obsession.

These women, Hannah in particular, define self-absorbed; you often wonder whether she only has friends so that she has someone to talk about herself with. It’s easy to criticise Hannah’s narcissistic tendencies – or cheer on her friends as they bitch about it on-screen – until the slow realisation hits that you are more like Dunham’s character than you’d ever really care to admit.  

DANCE ON YOUR OWN

Is the most important life lesson Girls can teach us is to have the confidence to dance solo and own it, even if it’s embarrassing? The crude and often cringe-worthy depiction of sexuality in the show is, in many ways, freeing. It shows girls everywhere that you don’t have to look like a Victoria’s Secret model and that sex isn’t always perfect – and that that’s okay.

The fact that these girls are not role models is why we can relate to them. We see them making the same painstaking mistakes we’ve all made. As Dunham herself admits, it’s not a rulebook but “a commentary on what it means to be a white middle-class girl” – at best we can learn from them, at worst we laugh at them with the knowledge that we aren’t alone in our mistakes.