Tireless gender equality advocate Emma Watson has found herself the target of the very scourge she’s campaigning to end.
After delivering another inspiring speech to the UN in her role as a Goodwill Ambassador, the Harry Potter star’s message was dismissed by one columnist as “whining, leftie and PC crap”.
“Hermione Granger has been addressing the United Nations General Assembly,” The Sun columnist Rod Liddle began his wrap of her latest speech. “Nope, not kidding.”
In the rousing address, Emma pushed for intersectional equality, asking universities to provide equal opportunities for women of all classes and races.
With sexual assault a huge issue on campuses across the globe, Emma also stated that safety is a “a right and not a privilege.”
But Liddle was underwhelmed: “Anyway, instead of telling them all the rules of quidditch or how to turn someone into a frog, she bored them all rigid with whining, leftie, PC crap.
“Just like all actresses do if people are stupid enough to give them the chance.”
“I suppose they got Emma in because Angelina Jolie is a bit tied up with other stuff at the moment,” he wrote.
It seems that Liddle forgot to do his research before lashing out.
Not only did Emma graduate from Brown University, but she’s also been an ambassador for the UN for two years, working on initiatives for the HeForShe campaign to raise awareness and promote gender equality and women’s rights.
She’s given educational and respectable speeches on the subject countless times, and has become a major face in Hollywood to battle against its lack of gender equality and sexism.
Amid maintaining her career and her work with the UN, she also started a feminist book club called Our Shared Shelf and has fully participated in it, using the opportunity to further her own feminist education.
Continuing her role as one of the world’s most visible women’s rights activists, Emma has also just debuted a short film called Hurdles—which she both narrated and helped produce—that addresses the fifth goal (gender equality) of The Global Goals for Sustainable Development.
https://twitter.com/EmWatson/status/779709268765310976
The short weaves together footage from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo with a rather stirring PSA script about the hurdles women have fought to get to where we are today. Essentially, it makes the point that it just takes one—one country, one movement—to cause change (in 1893, for example, New Zealand gave women the right to vote; now, 192 others have).
Amid the vintage footage the film also makes note of how far we need to go: There are 15 million child brides every year; 62 million girls are out of school; and a staggering one in three women experience violence.
