https://blog.sweetyhigh.com/girl-power/emma-watsons-heforshe

Yesterday I was having a normal, relatively casual conversation with one of my friends and the topic of Emma Watson’s trending U.N feminist speech came up. I commented that I hadn’t seen it but very much intended on doing so because it was so relevant to my Women in Film class. My friend, who is female, immediately said “Oh, I’m not a feminist so I don’t really care about stuff like that.” I (easy-goingly) tried explaining to her that feminism is simply the idea of gender equality in every aspect of life, and that unless she believed women (or any gender) were actually lesser than men in value, she was a feminist. Though she nodded along and pretended like she understood, I could tell by the dulled look in her eyes and urgent change of topic afterwards that I hadn’t made much of an impact. (Sorry guys– I tried!!)

But then something interesting happened — later that day I was online and came across a picture of Harry Styles holding up a sign with the hashtag “#HEforSHE,” which has now become the trending response to Emma Watson’s feminist speech. This friend is an avid and somewhat obsessed Harry Styles lover (aren’t we all), so I snapped a picture of it and sent it to her with the message: “So Harry Styles is a feminist…does that change anything for you?” Within 5 seconds she responded back a very enthusiastic and all-caps “YES.” She then proceeded to research feminism out of curiosity and found that it was much simpler than she’d thought.

I posted said picture of Mr. Styles above so if you haven’t seen it yet and want to take a gander, I don’t blame you. (I’ve glanced at it once or twice and definitely did not hate it). But my point is this— since we were talking about if feminism can be impactful for men at the end of class on Wednesday, I think this is a powerful example of how men can actually influence women to embrace feminism. It is widely assumed that the women are the ones trying to convert others, particularly men, to “join the cause,” if you can even phrase it that way. I guess the thought process behind this is, if men can be unabashed feminists and educate others on what it actually means to be feminist (and/or postfeminist, but I won’t get into that whole thing now), they clearly have just as much to do with feminism as anybody. If all it takes a hot picture of Harry Styles to spread feminist awareness to young girls (and apparently even college girls) who don’t yet understand feminism, I’ll take it.