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Lena Dunham says a male healer told her that reproductive issues were because of her feminist work

‘You put complicated messages about women into the world,’ healer told Dunham before her hysterectomy

Friday 09 August 2019 08:02 BST

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Lena Dunham has outlined how a male healer once told her that her feminist work was causing her “feminine organs” to “eat themselves”.

In February 2018, Dunham revealed she underwent a hysterectomy in order to alleviate the pain caused by her endometriosis.

However, prior to the procedure, the Girls creator visited several spiritual healers in order to try to understand what was happening to her body.

On Thursday, Dunham appeared on activist Scarlett Curtis’ podcast Feminists Don’t Wear Pink, where she spoke about an unorthodox interaction she had with one particular healer.

“I was seeing all these healers, and somebody said to me – obviously it was a guy – ‘Because of your work, and you put complicated messages about women into the world and your feminine organs are eating themselves, you’re attacking yourself’,” Dunham told Curtis.

The 33-year-old added that the healer’s sensationalist statement initially led her to question the cause of her condition.

“At the time I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s too much of a coincidence that I make all this work about being a woman’. Even though one in 10 women have endometriosis,” Dunham said.

Endometriosis is a debilitating condition which causes tissue similar to the lining found in the womb to grow in other parts of the body, such as in the ovaries and fallopian tubes, the NHS states.

While there is no cure for endometriosis, some women with the condition choose to undergo a hysterectomy – the surgical removal of the womb – in order to remove parts or all of the organs affected.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

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1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

During the interview on the Feminists Don’t Wear Pink podcast, Curtis also spoke about her personal experience of chronic pain during her teenage years.

The 23-year-old explained that she had been told the pain she was experiencing was the result of attending a “pressurising school” and having a close relationship with her parents, and so her brain had “invented pain”.

When she was 14 years old, Curtis underwent an operation for scoliosis, which resulted in her experiencing a two-and-a-half-year period of chronic pain and having to drop out of school.

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In October last year, the actor revealed she suffers from fibromyalgia, a long-term condition which causes pain across the whole body.

In a post shared on Instagram, Dunham said that it is “hard to shake the feeling” that she’s “crazy” because the condition is so “little understood”.

“I believe you when you say you hurt. I have learned time and time again how important it is to believe,” the producer added.

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