Some time last month, scrolling through my Facebook news feed had me running into the same video again and again. It was Emma Watson’s #HeForShe speech at the United Nations headquarters. Suddenly, my feed was filled with friends who “agreed completely” with her points about the experience of feeling silenced and policed, expected to act certain ways because of her sex. Suddenly, more people in my friends list sympathized with the feminist cause.
It is no wonder that the surge of feminists came about when, in her speech, Watson highlights how only women are called to stand up for gender equality. She shoots down the notion that only women are supposed to be feminists, and she asks, “How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?”
She goes on: “Men, I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation.”
This is where the problem in the #HeForShe campaign lies. It has noble intentions—it wants to make the feminist movement more inclusive. It wants to show that feminism is something that also concerns men and how they are “imprisoned” by gender stereotypes.
What is happening in the video is: Watson is framing feminism through the male point of view. Of course, there is definitely nothing wrong with telling men that they can be feminists—men (and those of non-binary gender identities) are very, very welcome to be feminists.
But this is what is happening: The #HeForShe campaign is making it look like the movement rallying for the empowerment of women has to be validated by men who can sympathize with the oppression of women through their own oppression.
We should not need to have to be directly affected by an issue in order to sympathize with it. To convince a man to be a feminist, is it not enough to say that (a little more than) half of the world’s population is systematically oppressed to be subordinate to men? Isn’t the need for feminism already demonstrated when we feel the need to justify feminism by saying that it is not enough for a movement to only serve to alleviate women’s oppression—it must work to alleviate men’s oppression, too?
Of course, in the end, this is what feminism does. It wants to address gender issues to ultimately attain equality. By no means am I saying that feminism does not work to address men’s issues: Today, a lot of people seem to think that boys cannot be victims of domestic violence. Today, boys are still taught that they cannot cry, that they must pay for their dates’ meals. These are all ideas that are effects of the patriarchy, and because feminism wants to dismantle the patriarchy, then it also works to correct these ideas. By no means am I also saying that feminism does need boys to believe in it, otherwise—as Watson implies—change may never be attained.
What I am saying is that the burden to be more “inclusive” should not rest on feminism—it should rest on the people who believe for whatever reason that feminism is not the answer to gender inequality. It is. Whether or not “he” is really “for she” because he can, all of a sudden, relate to her problems, it is.
The #HeForShe campaign tries to show that you don’t have to call yourself a feminist in order to actually be a feminist, because “feminist” is not an inviting word—the “fem” already goes to show how one-sided the ideology is. Watson says, “We are struggling for a uniting word but the good news is that we have a uniting movement. It is called ‘HeForShe.’”
In truth, it is called feminism. We should not try to dress it any other way, and we must understand that “he” should have always been “for she” before Watson even tried to convince him to be.
