By Cesar Zafra
Widely known for her role as a Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series, Emma Watson delivered an inspirational speech representing the United Nations in New York to launch the HeForShe campaign. The campaign aims to urge one billion men and boys to become advocates for the inequalities that females face every day.
Watson formally invited not only women, but also specifically men to join the ambition of combining two genders onto the same gamut. By involving both genders, Watson hopes to get rid of the “men vs. women” mentality in which men and women are viewed as two opposing parties and not as a single race.
In her speech, Watson clarified that feminism is not synonymous with man hating. For that reason, she is also trying to push back against other campaigns like ‘Women against Feminism.’
“How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation,” Watson stated in her speech. “The more I have spoken about feminism, the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating.”
Watson has interacted digitally with her audience on Twitter by using the hashtag “#HeForShe.” Multiple videos of the speech have also been uploaded onto YouTube.
On Twitter, the amount of #HeForShe tweets reached over 1.2 billion, and several celebrities, including Harry Styles, Jared Leto, Prince Harry, Tom Hiddleston, and Joseph Gordon Levitt, have tweeted pictures of themselves holding the written out hash tag,
Though close to 200,000 men have joined the movement, Watson has received several threats from users on 4chan, an anonymous internet sharing forum. They threatened to expose her nude photos and “show that she’s as much of a tramp as any other woman.”
The posts have since been deleted, and no pictures were leaked. Watson, however, did not back down because of these threats.
Online articles say that instead of “HeForShe,” it should be “HeandSheforUs,” meaning that both genders work for equality pertaining to both genders rather than specifically for females. Others say that equality won’t be tangible until male inequality is just as depicted as female inequality.
Watson acknowledged male inequality, as her speech pointed out that nearly 30 percent of those who attended Hillary Clinton’s United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women speech were composed of men.
“Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender equality is your issue, too,” she stated.
The HeForShe campaign attempts to educate people with the viewpoint that gender inequality affects everyone, because of the ways women and men are forced to live their lives due to extreme accounts of bias.
