Lena Dunham may not be doing press for Girls, but she’s at least giving her fans something to tide themselves over until the show’s Feb 21 premiere!
The actress and comedian stars on the March cover of Paper magazine, looking gorge as always!
Related: Lena No Longer Cares What You Think About Her!
Though it’s interesting to see her playing so many roles for one spread. The pictures just go on and on!
But her interview, done by Jane Fonda, is just as inspiring, with Lena talking politics, sexuality, feminism, and so much more! Read on for the HIGHlights…
On whether she thinks younger women are afraid of the word “feminist”: “Well, it’s interesting, I only interact with young women really on Twitter or on Instagram, but there are some who seem to have a terror of the word but then there’s also this amazing group of young teenage feminists popping up and being vocal and noisy. Rowan Blanchard, the star of a Disney Channel show called Girl Meets World, is an incredibly outspoken, thoughtful feminist who thinks about intersectional race issues and violence and she’s 14 years old.”
On whether she wants to have kids and a family: “I do. I really do. It’s something I think about a lot in terms of how I’m allocating my resources, because I think to myself, ‘okay, this is working for me now, running my newsletter, running my production company, and running Girls,‘ but I have to make sure that I’m surrounding myself — which I am — with really thoughtful people who can pick up the slack because I want to be able to be a mother and I want to be able to be present the way my mother was for me. Even though she was a working person, she was able to spend an extraordinary amount of actual face time with me and I know that is something that can’t be underappreciated, how essential that is. I’ve always wanted to be a mother as long as I’ve been on this earth, it’s something that has been important to me. And it’s funny, sometimes I don’t even know why I want it. I’ll be like, ‘our planet’s overpopulated, I don’t know’ but here I am desperate to do it. So that’s something that is an interesting contradiction that exists inside of me. It’s something that’s surprising to me.”
On raising a family with a partner — and would she adopt??: “Well, you know, it’s interesting — I have a boyfriend [Bleachers frontman and Fun. guitarist/vocalist Jack Antonoff] who I adore and I love him so much and I know he’s gonna be a really great father and that’s not the reason I love him, but it’s a reason I love him. But that being said, I’ve often said to him, ‘you know, I’m kind of getting towards the point in my life where I want to have children and whether I was with you or whether I wasn’t with you, that’s what I would want to do, but let’s find a way that you want to do it.’ And it’s interesting: I always knew that if I didn’t find somebody who made sense for me as a partner that it was something that I was going to do on my own. I had a lot of examples of that around me. My mom had a lot of friends who were gay in the ’80s and ’90s and were adopting or who were figuring out alternative ways to be parents and it just never seemed to me to be limited to something that you could only do if you were a happily married woman. Not at all. And in terms of adoption, I’m amazed by it. I have endometriosis, and I’ve said to my boyfriend, “If fertility ends up being a challenge for me, I’m not gonna be the person who spends six years in IVF” because while I’m really intrigued by the possibility of carrying a child in my body, and I don’t judge anyone else’s choices, for me, years and years of hormones and body manipulation wouldn’t work for my psychology and my body and it’s not important enough to me that my child come out of my body and it’s not important to me, really at all, that the child belonged to Jack and me on a genetic level. It’s important to me that we have the right child for us and take the right kind of care of them. There’s so much talk of infertility like, “Am I gonna be able to have a baby? Is my body broken?” and once that fear was gone, the whole prospect of having a baby actually got so much more exciting to me.”
On America reacting to female sexuality: “I think when people watch our show, it’s half excitement about seeing realistic sexuality reflected back at them and half gawking and I’ve decided to just not discriminate and to feel that anybody who’s watching for whatever reason, that is ultimately a net gain that they’re getting something that isn’t pornography or isn’t perfectly whitewashed, glossy sex piped into their brains. We live in a less puritanical society (but) the Christian Right is leading the minds of half of our country — I’m not statistically getting that perfectly correct, but it is really possible to sometimes feel like you’re living in Salem but then it’s also possible to feel like you’re living in Haight-Ashbury. It just depends on who you talk to!”
On when she first started identifying as a feminist: “I grew up with a mother who had come of age in the ’70s and feminism was a huge part of her formative identity, and so for as long as I can remember words holding power in our household, that was one of the most powerful ones. She was really involved with a feminist group called the New York Downtown Women’s Action Coalition, and she spent an extraordinary amount of time getting in buses, traveling to protect abortion clinics that were being picketed by religious extremists and she was always so focused on those issues — and not just the big political issues but also the subtle issues of equality in the workplace, the subtle ways that we’re dismissed by men in creative fields. So I think that she instilled it in me so deeply and I sort of thought, Okay, she did the job and now the job is done and I just get to call myself a feminist and revel in what my mom did. And until I came to Hollywood and started witnessing the subtle but totally systemic sexism that pervades our industry, that’s when I really turned my attention to it again in a powerful way and it became a huge part of my adult identity and not just my inherited identity.”
On her thoughts if Hillary Clinton gets elected: “I think that with Hillary, having a female candidate in office, especially one who really does care about women’s issues as much as Hillary Clinton does, and who has historically been involved in issues concerning children and mothers and families and the welfare of underrepresented people in this country, is going to have a certain amount of concern for some of these issues and awareness for some of these issues that a male candidate is just not going to have. And despite the fact that I would be a Pollyanna to think that there’s not gonna be some regressive woman-hating if she were elected, I do think there’s a net gain of seeing a woman in the highest office in the country to remind us what is possible, and it’s the strongest symbol to our country and to the world that the lines of gender and sexuality are no longer what is preventing people from moving forward. And maybe that’s a sort of idealistic take, but my dream is that in the same way that having a black president has been such an important signal and has actually brought up so much conversation about the systemic racism that is still such a huge part of our national consciousness, I hope that a female president can start those same [types of] conversations, even when they’re painful.”
On sexuality and body image: “One of the reasons I started acting in my own stuff was because I knew that I wanted my characters to have a similar relationship to their own physicality that I do, which is that, despite a knowledge that my body didn’t necessarily meet a perfect norm, I’ve also always felt [comfortable] — and I think a lot of it does come from my parents and that even in our most challenging moments, they’ve always sent me the message that I was, at my very core, ‘enough.’ What I always say about the characters I play is that they have a lot of problems and none of them have to do with them being a little overweight. I think the reality for so many women is that they think so many of their issues have to do with, in some way, their inability to get to the physical ideal that they have in their head but that’s actually, as you said earlier, a ‘diversionary tactic’ from looking at what’s actually painful for them and what’s actually brewing inside them. And anyone that’s ever gone on a diet knows that losing 5, 10, 15 pounds isn’t the thing that sends you barreling towards a stronger sense of self. And so for me, I felt like I wanted to play these characters who were held back by things, but none of the things that were holding them back were from being chubby or being short, and they dressed in a way that didn’t hide it. All the characters I play always dress like they’re a size 0 when they’re actually a size 10. Some might call it ‘delusional’ and I like to think about it as this sort of rocket confidence that’s a little unearned but better than the opposite. I think that it was important to me also to announce that “this is what I look like. I don’t have an interest in changing unless it’s on my own terms” — I won’t say I’ll never lose weight in my life, but it’d have to be for reasons that made sense to me and weren’t to try to meet some industry standard. So many women — young women, older women, even men — have said to me that it was in some way empowering for them just to see someone who would allow themselves to go on TV looking the way they do… To hear people say that was so profound and made me actually feel less alone and made me feel things in me that I didn’t really even know were broken because even though I have a lot of the appearance of outward confidence, of course I have the same anxieties that a lot of other women do about their bodies, because how could we not internalize everything that’s being thrown at us every day?”
On what advice she would give her younger self: “And I love that question because it changes every day depending on what I’m feeling. Some days I think, ‘Oh, just chill out.’ And some days I’m like, ‘Be a little bit more serious.’ And you know I think the biggest thing is I have so much trouble saying no and I feel so consistently afraid to disappoint people, like my success has been an accident and if I don’t placate people, then somehow it’s going to go away. And I think that saying ‘no’ is actually a really powerful tool. I feel like I could’ve saved myself so much trouble by being a little more connected to that instinct. Do you have trouble saying ‘no’?
We’re sure that’s not everything there is to know about Lena, but we love that she was so honest about everything that Jane shot her way.
What do U think of it???
[Image via Paper Magazine.]
