In the altered – and still altering – political landscape of American politics, Dunham says the culture of protest and the way in which art speaks to it has never been more important.

"It has never mattered more to show up with your money, with your body, with your time, with your voice, than it does right now," Dunham says.

"And even if right now we are not seeing the result we want, the government has been warned. They understand the majority does not support them and they are fighting an uphill battle against allies of equality in all of its forms."

But Dunham concedes the conversation must evolve.

"I don't think another season of us rallying against Donald Trump would be helpful to the cause," she says. "Nobody needs any more pissed off millennial white girls explaining the problem with Donald Trump. That's been handled."

Girls has never shied away from tackling contentious social issues. And before Trump's election Dunham campaigned heavily for his rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The expectations the electorate had of Clinton, Dunham says, are closely connected to the way television has historically portrayed women.

"So much is expected of women, they are expected to be both docile and strong, funny but endearing, powerful but not isolating, honest but not whiny," she says. "And we put those expectations on Hillary Clinton manifold because she was a presidential candidate."

As Girls enters its final season, Dunham hopes the series is remembered as one which "allowed complex and messy women to exist on television the same way that men always have,so the perfectionism of days gone by gets to be dismissed a little bit".

Our conversation takes place after the death of actor Mary Tyler Moore and Dunham says she has been thinking a lot about Moore's groundbreaking series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and its spin-offs, Rhoda, which starred Valerie Harper, and Phyllis, which starred Cloris Leachman.

Those shows, which aired between 1970 and 1978, were trailblazers of their era. "I really loved those shows but I really think they still required their female characters to have a certain level of inherent innocence that I never fully related to," Dunham says.

"So [Girls is] picking up where some of those comedic geniuses left off but saying we are allowed to be a little messier, we are allowed to be a little angrier, we are allowed to be a little more f..ked up," she says.

Consequently, there were many moments in which Girls courted headlines with controversial storylines; Dunham says those headlines rarely altered her approach to the writing, though she wonders for a moment whether they ought to have.

"I probably should have been [more affected] but I have no impulse control, so I kind of just write what I write and say what I say," she says. "That is one of the reasons I seem publicly not to learn the lesson, because I really am, for better or worse, very committed to my authentic voice."

She concedes that criticism hurts.

"No one likes being criticised, it sucks," Dunham says. "I am glad for the dialogue the show created around issues of representation, issues of feminism, but no one likes [being criticised] even if you don't think it is affecting you.

"You can't have that much negative energy directed at you without there being some cost to your personal and emotional life."

That said, Dunham adds, criticism of celebrities in a public forum pales in comparison with the impact of online bullying on less powerful targets. "The internet can be an incredibly dangerous place and, frankly, I really don't care what happens to celebrities on the internet, I care what happens to people on the internet," she says.

Part of Dunham's ambition with Girls stemmed from a childhood in which she grew up watching people on television who bore no resemblance to her.

"I had so much self-consciousness about my body in high school," Dunham says. "The shows that I loved, Ally McBeal, Felicity, Popular, those were shows that showed complex women but they still all looked like sticks.

"I wanted to see someone who was representative of me. And [the Girls cast members] Jemima, Zosia, Allison, they're by no means overweight but they don't have the obsessively worked out bodies of television stars. It was really important to us that everyone looked like people."

We turn to the show's title – Girls – and what it means in terms of who the series hoped to shine a light on, and where the line falls between girls and their graduation into womanhood.

"I don't know if we ever graduate into womanhood," Dunham says. "It probably depends on the day.

"My grandma died this year at the age of 96 and I think sometimes she felt like she was 17 and sometimes she felt like she was as old as time. One of the cool things about being human is how fluid we are."

Perhaps the most challenging thing about signing off a series like Girls was giving it an appropriate conclusion while still observing its authentic sense of life in New York, where television series-style finales are not part of actual life.

"It was the hardest job," Dunham says. "The show has never been about tight, clear conclusions so it would not make sense for our season finale to be this sort of perfectly formed thing.

"We really needed to speak to the reality of the characters, but also give some satisfaction to our audience who have committed six years of their life to watching this show. I think we were able to kind of tell a story that was real and honest without betraying the values that we've created."

And there is one delicious bulb of light at the end of the tunnel for fans of the series. Asked where she sees the characters being a decade on from the present day, Dunham's answer is sharp, short and ambitious.

"Hopefully we are going to be making a movie in 10 years, so I can't tell you."

WHAT Girls (final season)

WHEN Showcase, Wednesday, 8.30pm