Lena Dunham's IRL Sex Life: 25 Things We Learned from "Not That Kind of Girl"

This week Random House released Girls creator and star Lena Dunham's first book, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She "Learned." It's part memoir and part how-to, but the most interesting moments are those in which Dunham writes candidly about her sex life. Could it be as fucked up and weird as Hannah's, the character she plays on her HBO show, or are Ms. Dunham's real-life sexy time adventures pretty regular? We combed through the book to find out, and here's what we learned.

1. She thought she broke her hymen in high school.

“I was sure I had already broken my hymen in high school while crawling over a fence in Brooklyn in pursuit of a cat that didn’t want to be rescued.”

2. This is what sex feels like, according to Lena Dunham:

“… like shoving a loofah into a Mason jar.”

3. She learned to masturbate in third grade.

“I read about it in a puberty book, which described it as ‘touching your private parts until you have a very good feeling, like a sneeze.’”

4. She discovered arousal early on.

“My earliest memory sexual arousal is watching Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly Leak in Bad News Bears. He wore a leather jacket, rode a motorcycle before the legal age, smoked, and treated his elders with a kind of disrespect I had never seen executed by any of the boys at Quaker school. 

5. Her sexts are unconventional. 

“I attempted to engage in a ‘sext’ session, starting off with ‘I want to fuck you above the covers.’ … He responded with texts that read, ‘I want to fuck you with the air conditioner on’ and ‘I want to fuck you after I set my alarm clock for 8:45 A.M.’”

6. The first time someone went down on Lena Dunham was not enjoyable.

“I felt like I was being chewed on by a child that wasn’t mine.”

7. Lena Dunham keeps track of her sexual encounters. 

“Before sunrise, I diligently enter the encounter into the Word document I keep, titled ‘Intimacy Database.’ Barry. Number Four. We fucked. 69’d. It was terribly aggressive. Only once. No one came.”

8. She was convinced she would die of AIDS. 

“I had ill-advised intercourse with a petite poet-mathematician who, afterward, removed the condom, placed it under his pillow, and wiped his penis clean on his own curtains.”

9. Her boyfriend, Ben, gave her HPV.

“He called me terrible names when I broke up with him for a Puerto Rican named Joe with a tattoo that said MOM in Comic Sans.”

10. The first time she slept with Jack.

“I have written sentences about how the first time we made love it felt like dropping my keys on the table after a long trip.”

11. She’s been comfortable with being naked on screen since college. 

“Later, looking at the footage in the Oberlin media lab, I didn’t feel shy. I didn’t love what I saw, but I didn’t hate it either. My body was simply a tool to tell the story. It was hardly me at all, but rather a granny-panty-clad prop I had judiciously employed. I didn’t look elegant, beautiful, or skilled. This was sex as I knew it.”

12. Someone in Barnes and Noble gave her a business card with a message that said, “I just want to go down on you.”

“Later, dying of morbid curiosity, I pressed *67 and dialed. “Hello?” He sounded like Bruce Vilanch. I could practically sense his dying mother in the background. I ripped the card into tiny pieces, afraid of what might happen if I kept it in my possession. I so badly didn’t want that guy to eat me out that it seemed destined to happen.

13. She didn’t want to join in on her friends’ sexual moments during their eighth grade class trip.

“I was a shelter dog, frozen with fear. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join in. I sort of did. But what if I liked it? What if I started and I never stopped? How could I turn back? I had no issue with gay people. I just didn’t want to be one. I was fourteen. I didn’t want to be anything yet. I curled up and, like our math teacher in the room next door, pretended to be sleep.”

14. She had a slightly sexual moment with her friend, Sofia.

“When I was fifteen my friend Sofia taught me her favorite trick, one that she said drove the boys crazy. he presented it like it was a complex act that required expert instruction, but really it was just sucking someone’s earlobe. She was ahead of me in the sex game, and I tried hard to act like this was something I’d gotten up to before...She demonstrated on me, on the mattress in my “office”...I could feel the tips of her teeth and then my pulse in my vagina.”

15. She kissed girls in college.

“I kissed three girls in college. All at once. Three straight girls were experimenting with universal love in a corner at a party to benefit Palestinian rights and, when they offered me membership, I took it. We went around in a circle, taking turns, kissing for just long enough to get a sense of one another’s mouths...None of my eighth grade fears had come true.”

16. She had sex with a college friend after attending his neighbor’s funeral.

“He responded with a sad smile, and we fucked in the blue light of a documentary about police brutality. We didn’t speak for a year, but I thought of his house all the time."

17. She can’t wait until she’s 80 years old so she could stun them with sexual language.

“So I can shock people by saying ‘rim job’ in casual conversation.”

18. She’s had numerous dates with filmmakers (that turned out to be duds).

“...the person who believes that life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props, that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s grand plan to promote your agenda. How painful that must be, how suffocating.”

19. She’s said “I love you” to four men. 

“I have uttered the words ‘I Love You’ to precisely four men, not including my father, uncle, and assorted platonic neurotics I go to the movies with.”

20. She had a massive crush on her camp counselor, Johnny.

“That night in my bunk, I imagined shedding my clothes, approaching Johnny, and letting him put his hands all over my body. Maybe we would meet outside, in a tent, down the path in the woods. I was practical enough to imagine that he would bring the condom.”

21. She suffers from dissociation.

“‘You know that thing, when you’re having sex, but instead of feeling it you can see yourself from above, like you’re watching a movie?’ you ask your friend Jemima one day as she’s painting you nude on her couch.”

22. Her PMS is very intense.

“Once, while in the throes of PMS, I became convinced a man in a black overcoat was following me down La Cienega Boulevard. ‘The police will never believe me,’ I sighed, and began hatching a plan for losing him on my own.”

23. Her first post-college boyfriend was a total jerk.

“This relationship culminated in the worst trip to Los Angeles ever seen outside of a David Lynch film...Highlights included him never touching me once, me falling asleep wearing only a thigh-high boot that belonged to my mother, and his confession that he didn’t think he knew how to care about another person.”

24. Her explanation for the working title for another memoir she plans to write is hilarious.

“I Didn’t Fuck Them, but They Yelled at Me. This is the name of the memoir I’m going to write when I’m eighty. You know, once everyone I’ve met in Hollywood is dead.”

25. She’s not that comfortable with sex.

“The fact is, since that first blow job, you haven’t gotten any more comfortable with sex. Every sexual encounter has felt like a first visit with a new general practitioner. Awkward, burdensome, a little chilly. Eventually you learn some buzzwords and positions that make the whole thing flow more easily, and you always go into it with the best intentions of not watching yourself from the doorframe like a not-very-incognito detective.”