Girls’ Jessa, AKA Jemima Kirke, opened up to BUST correspondent Sarah Sophie Flicke for an intimate look into the star’s thoughts on everything from motherhood to porn. Here are ten quotes from her interview with BUST — catch all the details here.
1. On Confidence: “I inherited that air of adulthood, where you just feel smart because people are talking to you like you’re a real person. It made me adaptable. I carried that over into my teens when I became a cocky, annoying, confident teenager who was too sexy and too smart for her own good.”
2. On Intimacy & Her Role as Jessa on Girls: “[Jessa] seems so authentic and so free and so loud and so opinionated. But you don’t know how much of that is just smoke and mirrors… Intimacy is hard for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t do it. It’s just hard.”
3. On Being In Your Own Skin: “Walking around my house in my underwear, I’m not thinking about my body or myself. When I was younger, I walked around thinking about how everything looked, not just my body, but how everything I said seemed. When you don’t think about those things anymore, it’s such a relief.”
4. On Porn: “Porn scares the shit out of me, for boys and girls. I just don’t want any kids to get any “shoulds” of how sex is supposed to look.”
5. On the Responses to Girls: “I still don’t take responsibility for the show or the writing. I don’t think of it as my show. I’m a spoke in the wheel of this machine. So when I first saw the reaction to the show, I was blown away by how angry people were at Lena.”
6. On Juggling Motherhood with an Art Career: “I got embarrassed when I had kids. I felt like when I did it, and then I was complaining that I didn’t have time to paint, people thought I’d fucked up. Like, I should’ve chosen one or the other. Women are not allowed to have both. It feels like a personal failure.”
7. On Attitudes towards Working Moms: “And also [we need to be] not telling women how they should behave or act or feel toward their kids or their work. If you’re a woman spending more time doing whatever you do—paint, be in the office, whatever—than parenting, that shouldn’t be scowled upon.”
8. On Her Abortion: “I’m trying to normalize an experience that’s been demonized—to take away the stigma. I wasn’t trying to do a good deed, necessarily. I was really just trying to make [abortion] unemotional and normal, which is how I feel about it. I don’t regret it, and I wanted to convey that as best I could. I did not want to be a mom. Was I irresponsible? None of your fuckin’ business.”
9. On Fame: “I miss meeting someone anonymously and having intimacy grow naturally rather than them thinking they know something about me.”
10. On Feminism: “Of course I’m a feminist. I think everyone in their right mind should be a feminist. It’s just about equality.”
Photographed by Annabel Mehran; Styled by Benjamin Sturgill; Hair by Sherry Heart; Makeup by Dani Levi; Props by Taylor Patterson at Fox Fodder Farm; Stylist Assistant: Candy Jaycee Williams
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Lena Dunham To Tackle ‘Mad Men,’ Era Feminism In New TV Show ‘Max’
Top 5 Moments From Lena Dunham’s Hilary Clinton Interview
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