Judd Apatow: 'You Shouldn't Have To Have Daughters' To Condemn Harassment

Shout it from the rooftops.
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Judd Apatow says there shouldn’t be prerequisites to finding sexual misconduct disgusting.

“My instinct is always to say the thing they say, ‘Don’t say.’ Which is ... it concerns me, as a father of two daughters. It concerns me. But you shouldn’t have to have daughters to get that it’s disgusting,” the director said during a Wednesday night appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyer.”

“You should be able to say as the owner of a bird, I’m disgusted. Everybody should be disgusted. It’s horrible,” he added.

In the wake of recent sexual harassment and assault accusations against numerous men, some celebrities have spoken out against the alleged behavior of people like Harvey Weinstein by using their daughters as moral compasses.

“Look, even before I was famous, I didn’t abide this kind of behavior,” mega-star Matt Damon said in an interview with Deadline Hollywood, in which he condemned Weinstein’s decades of allegedly abusive actions. “But now, as the father of four daughters, this is the kind of sexual predation that keeps me up at night.”

Ben Affleck also tweeted a statement denouncing Weinstein shortly after the allegations emerged. He echoed Damon’s thoughts, writing, “We need to do better at protecting our sisters, friends, coworkers and daughters.” (Shortly after tweeting, Affleck himself came under fire after actress Hilarie Burton tweeted about him grabbing her breast on a 2003 episode of “TRL.” Affleck subsequently apologized for the incident.)

But men — or women, for that matter — shouldn’t need to have daughters to understand why sexual harassment and assault are wrong.

As HuffPost’s Emily Peck noted in October, “You should only need to be human to understand that it’s wrong when a man sexually harasses and assaults a woman, grabbing her body without her permission, demanding she put her hands on his naked flesh, blocking her from leaving a room, or pushing her head down to his crotch.”

And as for the people who actually do the harassing, Apatow had some advice for them as well.

“It’s so easy to not be a sexual harasser,” he told Meyers on Wednesday. “You just literally do nothing. You do nothing.”

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