The modern face of feminism, Emma Watson revealed in an interview released this week with Porter magazine that she was strongly discouraged from using the word ‘feminist’ in her widely praised speech for the UN’s HeForShe campaign last year. Luckily, she went ahead and did it anyway – but why is feminist a dirty word?

'I was encouraged not to use the word ‘feminism’ because people felt that it was alienating and separating and the whole idea of the speech was to include as many people as possible. But I thought long and hard and ultimately felt that it was just the right thing to do. If women are terrified to use the word, how on earth are men supposed to start using it?’

Essentially, as far as I can see, a lot of the opposition to the word comes because people are fearful of turning off the people who don’t understand what the word means. Those people who hear the word ‘feminist’ and still picture an angry, man-hating person set on a future where we rid the world of Y-chromosomes entirely.

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