Lena Dunham is proud af to be a woman, and she’s not afraid to show it. At the New York Women in Communications annual awards luncheon, someone asked Dunham what she’d do if she woke up as a man during a game of “Plead the Fifth.”
“Kill myself,” she replied bluntly.
Dunham, however, wasn’t being completely serious.
“The reason I said that wasn’t because I’m subscribing to an old binary,” she explained. “I love that fact that we’re in a time where we get to determine what gender looks and feels like to us. It was not because I wouldn’t know what to wear. It was because I feel so passionately lucky to be doing the work of being female right now.”
Dunham speaks from a place of true pride in her gender. She is outspoken about women’s rights, specifically reproductive health and issues in the workplace. She wants to be—and, undeniably, is—a voice for change.
“I feel [progress] happening every day, and it gets me fired up,” she says. “It’s what makes me want to wake up in the morning. It’s what makes me want to live a really long time. It’s what makes me eat well. It’s what makes me do yoga.”
Dunham finished her acceptance speech with an anecdote from her college days: She looked in the mirror one day and realized that she was connected to all women, past and present. All women are in it together.
Lena Dunham wouldn’t change that for anything.