Gabriella Bower

Last September, Emma Watson shook the feminist movement with her HeForShe speech at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.  Since then, 365,618 men have joined the HeForShe movement and others continue to join daily.  The mission of Ms. Watson’s campaign is to encourage men to pledge their solidarity with women in an effort to gain equality between the sexes.

Watson’s speech was unprecedented, as is the campaign.  She formally invited boys and men to join women in this fight stating, “I want men to take up this mantle.  So their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice, but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too—reclaim those parts of themselves they abandoned and in doing so be a more true and complete version of themselves.”  She then went on to joke about her credibility as some ‘Harry Potter girl,’ but quickly followed with some serious facts on the state of gender equality around the world.

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UN Women Global Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson

With humor, anecdotes, and strong evidence, Emma Watson delivered a speech that sparked immediate agency for the feminist movement.  Celebrities of all sorts tweeted, posted to Instagram or wrote status updates on Facebook about her speech in the highest regard and took the pledge to join the movement.

Her speech struck a cord with people all over the world and has been watched over nine and a half million times on YouTube.  However, not everyone was in support.  Soon after her speech, a website threatened to release naked pictures of Watson and #RIPEmmaWatson started trending on Twitter.  Ironically, the backlash was giving more evidence to the need for vocal feminists.  If a woman cannot speak her beliefs without repercussions and objectification, our society is in serious need of a change.

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At this rate, it will take over 2,857 years for one billion men to join the HeForShe movement.

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The campaign calls for one billion men to pledge their support.  However, over a year has passed and we’ve only reached a fraction of that goal.  At this rate, it will take over 2,857 years for one billion men to join.  We do not have this kind of time.  If it only took Facebook eight years to reach one billion members, I surely hope this movement can, at the very least, match that timespan.

In order to do so, we need to continue to talk about the feminist movement and the HeForShe campaign.  Feminists are not man-haters and the campaign proves just that.   We need to appeal to all of the boys and men in our life and emphasize the necessity for gender equality.  As Watson stated in her speech, “feminism by definition is: ‘The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.  It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.’” -  It’s that simple.

You can find out more about the movement at HeForShe.org.  Solidarity is the key, and together we can do this.

 

You can read more of Gabriella's blog posts at readbetweenthehemlines.wordpress.com.

 

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