A recently revealed advice column Lena Dunham penned to Time Out New York‘s sex columnist, Jamie Bufalino, when she was just 19 reveals she’s always had a knack for writing — and for talking about sex!
“I’m a 19-year-old girl who has been reading your column since its inception, and I’ve always wanted to write in… I have a reasonable amount of sexual experience but somehow have managed to stay a virgin,” Lena wrote in 2005. “Once you’re 19, people seem to expect that you’ve done it six ways to Sunday. So it can come as quite a shock when a girl my age admits that she’s still on the v-team. In fact, I speak for all of my virgin friends when I say that confessing we are virgins has stopped more than one sexual experience from progressing further… What do you think is the proper etiquette?”
Eight years later, Lena is clearly unashamed of her teenage virginity. She was the one who shared pictures of the published columns on her Instagram!
The letter reveals Lena’s also always been goal-oriented: She had herself on a deadline for losing her virginity before the age of 20.
^Lena in college.
Columnist Jamie’s response to Lena was both awesome and appropriate.
“There will be no deadline-setting or peer-pressuring,” he responded. “You will simply live your Intermix-clad, iPod-accessorised, O.C.-obsessed life until you meet a young man who doesn’t give a whit about your sexual status… The last thing you need is some sly strategy for dropping the v bomb on someone. All you have to do is proudly announce your status and gauge a guy’s screw worthiness by how he reacts to the news… You’ll have plenty of time in your twenties and thirties to sleep with total bozos.”
This isn’t the first time Lena has opened up about her early bedroom experiences. She previously described the whole experience of losing her v-card in a short story for Rookie. Based on the timeline, that happened the year after she wrote the advice letter. (Although it’s unclear if she met her before-20 deadline.)
“I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and just went for it. I removed my shirt almost immediately, and he seemed fairly impressed… Jonah and I only had sex once, but it was enough to convince me that it wasn’t that hard to make it happen. I had, for the past few years, set my sights quite purposefully on boys who weren’t interested, because I simply wasn’t ready.”
With all that exploration out of her system, Lena is now in a stable relationship with Jack Antonoff from Fun. We can only bet they had a good laugh over her 2005 column!
