He For She

Submission 30,396

Overview

He For She is a worldwide feminist campaign launched by the U.N. Women with an aim to promote gender equality by encouraging men to openly speak out against sexism in solidarity with the women's rights movement. The campaign was announced by Emma Watson, the British actress from the Harry Potter film franchise and newly appointed U.N. Women Global Goodwill Ambassador, during a special event at the United Nations Headquarters on September 20th, 2014.

Background

The campaign was officially launched by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, also known as U.N. Women, in collaboration with Emma Watson and American journalist Wolf Blitzer as the spokespeople. According to the website, the global initiative seeks to "put men at the center of activism and dialogue to end persistent inequalities faced by women and girls around the world" with a goal of recruiting 100,000 men and boys to combat gender inequality over the course of the next 12 months.

Real-Time Map

In less than 48 hours of the campaign's launch, He For She accrued nearly 85,000 signatures from male supporters around the world.

Notable Developments

Emma Watson's U.N. Speech

On August 18th, 2014, Emma Watson sent out a tweet in advocacy of women's rights movement with the hashtag #heforshe. Within a month, the tweet was retweeted over 27,000 times and the hashtag^[4]was tweeted out over 160,000 times.

Then on September 20th, Watson attended a special event at the U.N. Headquarters in New York City to deliver a speech on the current state of gender inequality across the world, during which she announced the launch of the He For She campaign:

“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.”

On the following day, YouTuber normaljean2^[2] uploaded a full-length video of Watson’s U.N. speech, which gained more than 2.5 million views in less than 48 hours.

4chan's Alleged Response

On September 22nd, a 4chan user created a single serving site titled “EmmaYouAreNext”^[6] with a picture of Watson and a countdown clock,^[5] which seems to imply that Watson has been targeted as the next victim of the ongoing leaks of celebrity nude photographs by hackers in affiliation with The Fappening, presumably in retaliation for delivering the speech at the U.N. Headquarters.

Users also introduced^[9] the hashtag #RIPEmmaWatson^[10] to create a Watson death hoax. Within a week the hashtag was tweeted out over 500 times.

On September 23rd, The New Statesman^[11] published an open letter to Watson titled "Dear Emma Watson, it’s great that you’ve come out as a feminist. Here’s what to expect," which explains:

"All I can say Emma, is: fuck them. It makes me furious that these men, these boys, are attempting to grind you down, in the same way that similar men have tirelessly attempted to grind down the emergence of our gender as a viable political threat for generations now. Fuck them. I know that you will not let them stop you, just as we other feminists will not let it stop us."

Debunking

Within hours of the articles claiming that 4chan users threatened to release nude pictures of Emma Watson, some of them tracked back the single serving site's server status revealing that it belongs to a marketing site called Rantic. They were also able to provide sources to assert a suspicious link between Rantic and the first news website to account for the threat, Fox Weekly^[12].

After the countdown reached 00:00, the website now redirects to Rantic.com stating the true intentions behind the event, which are to shutdown 4chan because of The Fappening:

Dear Barack Obama,

" We have been hired by celebrity publicists to bring this disgusting issue to attention. The recent 4chan celebrity nude leaks in the past 2 months have been an invasion of privacy and is also clear indication that the internet NEEDS to be censored. Every Facebook like, share & Twitter mention will count as a social signature -- and will be one step closer to shutting down www.4chan.org. "

Sincerely,
Rantic.com