The 'Girls' creator says she's struggling to come to terms with the assault for years but is now finally able to address it in her book.
- Oct 2, 2014
AceShowbiz - Lena Dunham opens up about a dark chapter in her life. In an interview with Terry Gross to promote her memoir "Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned", the "Girls" creator recounts a date rape in college.
"There were a few things in this book that I was terrified to put into the world," the Oberlin College graduate revealed. "The chapter about date rape in the book was a really, really terrifying thing for me to put into the world."
"It was a painful experience physically and emotionally, and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile," she said. "At the time that it happened, it wasn't something that I was able to be honest about. I was able to share pieces, but I sort of used the lens of humor, which has always been my default mode, to try to talk around it."
But with her book, she found her voice. "I spent so much time scared; I spent so much time ashamed. I don't feel that way anymore and it's not because of my job, it's not because of my boyfriend, it's not because of feminism, though all those things helped. It's because I told the story. And I'm still here, and my identity hasn't shifted in some way that I can't repair. And I still feel like myself and I feel less alone," she said to an old friend in an email.
"I had felt that something had happened and I remember thinking 'Can I ever be the same?'," she went on. "I was at a party, drunk, waiting for attention - and somehow that felt like such a shameful starting-off point that I didn't know how to reconcile what had come after. But I knew that it wasn't right and I knew in some way that this experience had been forced on me."
"When I shared it with my best friend and she used the term 'you were raped' at the time, I sort of laughed at her and thought like, you know, what an ambulance-chasing drama queen," she added. "[I] later felt this incredible gratitude for her for giving me that, giving me that gift of that kind of certainty that she had. I think that a lot of times when I felt at my lowest about it, those words in some way actually lifted me up because I felt that somebody was justifying the pain of my experience."
"I didn't really go to anymore parties," Dunham said. "I just stopped going... I basically didn't have a drink for the rest of college ... I really removed myself from that world."
"I spent a lot of time, which I talk about in the book, trying to figure out what my sexual preferences were and whether they in any way aligned with this experience I had had, whether there was any part of me that had, in quotes, 'wanted that.' It took me a long time of self-examination, hearing about other people's sort of sexual evolutions and realizing, oh, that's not something that happens to everyone. And when it does happen, they're allowed to mourn it and feel pain about it - hearing that helped me."
Also in her book, Dunham revealed that she didn't enjoy sex until she was 25. "I was so worried about whether other people were enjoying sex with me that it never would have occurred to me that it was an act I was supposed to receive any pleasure from," she said. "Before my current boyfriend (Fun. guitarist Jack Antonoff), who's a lovely, lovely person, I had a train of the most disastrous, despicable, van-dwelling monsters in my bed."
During the interview, she also responded to critics who accused her of oversharing. "The term 'oversharing' is so complicated because I do think that it's really gendered. I think when men share their experiences, it's bravery and when women share their experiences, it's...'TMI,' " she shared her thoughts on the matter.
"Too much information has always been my least favorite phrase because what exactly constitutes too much information? It seems like it has a lot to do with who is giving you the information, and I feel as though there's some sense that society trivializes female experiences. And so when you share them, they aren't considered as vital as their male counterparts' [experiences], and that's something that I've always roundly rejected."
