Lena Dunham may be 28 years old, but she's wise beyond her years.
To promote her forthcoming memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned," the creator and star of HBO's Girls answered fans' questions in a series of 12 YouTube videos. In the clips, Dunham addressed topics ranging from from feminism to how to handle unfunny friends.
Asked about how she learned to love the skin she's in, Dunham replied, "I went through all of college dressing like a lunatic, wearing neon and raving around and secretly hating myself. I know it's a really, really complicated thing because you sort of want to project the confidence that you don't have to sort of beat people to the punch and critique yourself before they can critique you." The two-time Golden Globe winner continued, "For me, confidence comes from feeling happy with my habits, feeling like I can be proud of my life, feeling like, 'I read a book this week, I ate food that I knew was going to give me energy, I slept enough and I know that I am the best version of myself that I can be.' And that doesn't mean losing 30 lbs. That means taking care of myself and treating myself like precious cargo."
"I've been a bunch of different weights, and being temporarily 135 lbs., I was so obsessed with food," Dunham admitted. "I was so obsessed with, like, counting almonds that I don't think I got laid that entire time, whereas when I was at my biggest and running around Brooklyn in a romper, it was raining men."
Dunham, who has been dating fun.'s Jack Antonoff since 2012, discussed bad sex.
"Before my current boyfriend, who's a lovely, lovely person, I had a train of the most disastrous, despicable, van-dwelling monsters in my bed and my bed and in my life," she recalled. "You have to love yourself to love someone who's going to love you. Let's take a moment to think about whether that made sense. An attraction to nice people is truly something that comes when you have an attraction to yourself. When you feel a lot of negativity towards yourself, you're almost sexually attracted to people who are going to reflect that back at you. When you learn to love and appreciate those qualities that you've tried so hard to suppress, suddenly that behavior's just not going to be charming to you anymore."
In fact, it wasn't until a few years ago that Dunham asserted herself in the bedroom.
"I don't think I even thought about whether I was enjoying sex until I was, like, 25, because 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," the author said. "And then what I realized was having good sex takes two people who want to make each other feel good. There isn't a person who's 'good at sex' because it's an alchemy, it's a thing that happens between two people."
Dunham acknowledged that some people "have atrocious sexual habits," saying, "In the book, I talk about a relationship I had throughout my early 20s with a guy who, I thought we were having good sex, purely because I came home covered in bruises and my leg was behind my head in ways that I didn't know it could go. 'I've never eaten my own stockings before! This must be great sex!' but I realized that the entire act was geared towards his fantasy life. None of it had anything to do with me leaving satisfied."
Not That Kind of Girl is available Tuesday.