So Terry Gross interviewed Lena Dunham, the youthful creator/writer/star of the girls-in-the-city HBO show Girls.  Most of the attention has been on her response to questions about the show’s lack of diversity.  But whaddya know, they also chatted about boys who get their sexual education from pornography.

GROSS: So do you get a sense that a lot of guys your age have learned about sex through porn sites and have these unrealistic and sometimes ludicrous ideas of what sex is like or what a girl would like?

DUNHAM: I do get that sense. I get the sense that there’s a new kind of learned behavior. I had a conversation with Frank Bruni about this for The New York Times where he was asking me yeah, about the porn question it and I told that there’s certain things that you’ll experience when, you know, not like I want to make it sound like I’m all over town, you know, testing different guys’ sexual prowesses. But in my own personal limited sexual experience I’ve found that there are guys doing things where you go there’s no way that that is your own personal instinct. You learned that from somewhere and it wasn’t, you know, a birds and bees conversation with your mom and it also wasn’t taught to you by a high school girl you met in Michigan. Like that you’re your – that is something that you have, you know, learned through osmosis culturally and now A, want to try yourself, or even more insidiously, think that I will like. And I think that young people are really scared to tell each other what they actually want.

It’s funny. I mean not to get too personal but I just found a diary that I kept in college. I’ve been an intermittent diary keeper always, never a faithful one. And there’s some guy had done something. It wasn’t anything, you know, to dramatic, like he’d just been I think sort of we kissed in college and he’d been sort of rough with me and I asked him if he always acted that way. And he said no, I don’t. But with you I do because it’s clearly what you want.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

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