Ten days have passed since Emma Watson took the internet by storm with her speech launching HeForShe, “a solidarity movement for gender equality.”
Videos of her speech no longer blanket my Facebook feed, and its trending presence has considerably died on Twitter.
Ten days have passed since that 13-minute speech to the UN gave me chills, but with every additional day that passes, I grow more and more confused about what the campaign wants from me.
Because as a woman, I’m not sure HeForShe wants anything from me at all.
Press reactions have dubbed Watson’s speech a “game-changer” because it centers a conversation about feminism around men. The HeForShe commitment pledge asks for signatures from men, and Watson herself calls for men to support women – to be “for” us, as opposed to “against” us, and even more interestingly, as opposed to “with” us.
There is a place for men in the gender equality movement, but HeForShe has to decide what that place is. On one hand, HeForShe calls for men to join the gender equality movement to fight for themselves – to destroy the patriarchal dynamic that sometimes damages their freedom to be human as well. On the other, it calls for men to fight for their daughters, sisters and mothers’ rights as women.
So I don’t know if HeForShe wants men to fight for men, or men to fight for women. And if they’re doing both at the same time, I want it to be clear that just because men were extended a formal invitation to the gender equality conversation by a famous and universally admired celebrity does not make them entitled or privileged to be there. It certainly should not imply that, in asking for support in feminism, women need men to empower them.
Men and women can be there for each other without implying dependence on one another. That’s what HeForShe fails to make clear when it suggests a need for male participation in the gender equality movement – that gender equality can be about solidarity without being about dependence.
Anyway, I don’t need the men in my life to post a selfie with “#HeForShe” scrawled across their face, tweeted to Emma Watson. I need them to adopt the ideals and practices of gender equality into their own lives, and understand them.
If we want to claim ourselves feminists, if we want to practice the gender equality we so eagerly preached ten days ago, we cannot have a temporary shining moment, accomplished with a Facebook share and decorated by a politically trending hashtag – the hyped-up ALS ice bucket challenge of August.
I’ll admit – I’ve shied from conversations about feminism before in the fear that my understanding of the movement isn’t up to par with others’ expertise. “Feminist” can be a dirty word to people who have had negative experiences. So the best thing that has come so far from HeForShe is the cleansing and un-shaming of self-identifying as a feminist, from the celebrities who have shown support to your friends on Facebook.
But if we let the momentum end with this campaign that seems to displace women in an attempt to find a place for men, then the worst thing that could come from HeForShe is that we still won’t understand what being a feminist is.