Apatow: It's sexist and mysoginistic that you question why we're always showing Lena Dunham naked

If you have HBO and you've seen Lena Dunham's show Girls, you've got something on me. Maybe not something good, but something. I don't really know a lot about the show and I have no interest in learning, but apparently it's par for the course that Dunham's character is seen walking around naked a lot - often when there is no particular reason the story requires it.

Sometimes when you hold press events, people ask about stuff like this. This was none too pleasing to Girls producer Judd Apatow, nor to Dunham for that matter, when the issue was raised on Thursday by a reporter at a Television Critics Association event. People reports:

"I don't get the purpose of all of the nudity on the show ... Your character is often naked just at random times for no reason," the reporter remarked, which prompted a pointed response from Dunham. "It's because it's a realistic expression of what it's like to be alive, I think, and I totally get it," the actress, 27, said. "If you are not into me, that's your problem, and you're going to have to work that out with professionals."

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Immediately, show producer Judd Apatow, who was also on hand during the panel talk, jumped in to defend Dunham and took the journalist to task, Entertainment Weekly reports. "That was a very clumsily stated question that's offensive on its face, and you should read it and discuss it with other people how you did that," Apatow added. "It's very offensive." Apatow later discussed the question after the session, calling it "sexist" and "misogynistic."

Several thoughts here. You may be of the opinion that nudity should never be shown on TV or in movies for moral reasons, and there's a case to be made for that, but the general thinking in the creative community is that you show nudity when it's integral to the story. When you've got someone walking around naked while doing something that they could just as easily be doing clothed, and the nudity really has nothing to do with what's happening in the story, that has usually been seen by the entertainment industry, critics and fans as gratuitous. So let's first deal with Dunham's answer - that it's "a realistic expression of what it's like to be alive." I suppose it's true in a certain sense that people have been known to walk around their own homes naked doing random things. Maybe they just got out of the shower and they had to answer the phone before they had a chance to put some clothes on. Sure, stuff like that happens. But when you're writing fiction (and I don't come from no experience on this having written three novels myself), you generally put things in a scene for a reason. You don't just say, "Let's make her naked because sometimes people walk around naked." There is something you are trying to establish or assert by making her naked. Apatow does not show us Lena Dunham walking around naked in random situations just because, hey, sometimes people walk around naked so why not? He has a purpose in doing it. So what is that purpose? I would guess that it's to create the very type of question and resulting controversy that has happened here. In a broad sense, there is a faction within the entertainment industry that wants to shove stuff like nudity down the throats of the nation. But they seem especially determined in this case to shove nudity as practiced by those who are - how shall I put this? - not exactly beauty queens. That's what Dunham implies in her answer, isn't it? "If you are not into me . . ."? What is that supposed to mean, Lena? Since it's not usually considered sexist and mysogonistic to quesetion excessive on-screen nudity, Apatow and Dunham must believe there is something else at play here. So what's the variable? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? They mean to imply the objection is not to nudity per se, but to Lena Dunham nude because she's ugly. And starting that controversy is the reason they're showing her naked in the first place in scenes where there is really no reason for it. Take off your clothes and show us your frumpy body, then express your offended outrage when we ask why exactly we need to see it. Sadly, it seems to have worked pretty well.