Feminist writer, director, and actress Lena Dunham recently revealed she was date raped in college.
In her latest book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” Dunham got candid about her experience. During an interview with NPR, the GIRLS writer/star told Terry Gross it wasn’t easy to share her story.
“The chapter about date rape in the book was a really, really terrifying thing for me to put into the world.” But she says she now feels “less alone.”
Since bursting onto the scene with her hit HBO series, Lena has become a force to be reckoned with, both in the world of film and outside of it. She’s used her platform to champion for women’s rights, speaking out and educating her fans on important issues.
During her sit-down with Gross, Lena shared a little bit of her heartbreaking story.
“It was a painful experience physically and emotionally, and one I spent a long time trying to reconcile. At the time that it happened, it wasn’t something that I was able to be honest about. I was able to share piece, but I sort of used the lens of humor, which has always been my default mode, to try and talk around it.”
Dunham says she, like many women, didn’t fully understand what had happened to her.
“I think I had just felt that something was very wrong. I had felt that something had happened and I remember thinking, ‘Can I ever be the same?’ 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. 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 time 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.”
Dunham told Gross the experience changed her; she no longer felt like going out or being social.
“I didn’t really go to anymore parties. I just stopped going. I basically didn’t have a drink for the rest of college. I really removed myself from that world. I don’t know if I would’ve told you at the time, ‘Oh, I”m doing this to keep myself safe,’ but obviously in hindsight I basically removed myself from the social world as I’d known it. 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.”
Her book focuses less on the horrific story and more on her recovery process.
“I said 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 still eel like myself and I feel less alone.”
Check out Lena’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” in stores now.
SOURCE: Celebuzz | PHOTO CREDIT: WENN.
