British actress Talulah Riley has criticised Emma Watson for creating “confusion” with her campaigning for feminism.
The St. Trinian’s star, 31, thinks the HeForShe campaign Emma, 27, launched with the United Nations in 2014 distracts from the real issues facing women due to its uncompromising focus on gender equality.
“The HeForShe campaign creates a lot of confusion when it comes to gender equality, because people are getting stuck in a semantic argument, rather than addressing the actual issue,” Talulah tells Britain’s Daily Mail.
“People are associating gender equality with being exactly the same and, of course, that’s not what it means.You lose the real issue when you have that confusion.”
The HeForShe campaign, which is also backed by Anne Hathaway and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, asks men and women to join forces to demand policies promoting gender equality are adopted across the world.
Earlier this month (May17) Emma praised bosses at MTV for abolishing gender specific prizes at their annual Movie and TV awards ceremony. The Beauty and the Beast star went on to win the first ever gender neutral best actor trophy.
Talulah, who has married and divorced technology mogul Elon Musk twice, says that although she believes in equal rights, treating men and women the same is not the right approach.
“Men and women should have equal rights, of course, but (they) are also different and there’s nothing wrong with that,” she adds. “We don’t have to start unifying gender in order to establish political equality.”
