Responses to a recent photo-shoot:

Phwoar! That Emma Watson’s got her tits out!

No, she hasn’t ‘got her tits out’. ‘Got her tits out’ along with the associated chant ‘Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads!’ is a pretty ridiculous phrase. Tits are like toys, the idea seems to be, which have been hidden away from naughty boys by spoilsport women, and if they want to give men a treat for being good boys, they ‘get them out’ like indulgent mothers or big sisters, giving back to them what they should always have been allowed to play with in the first place.

In any case, look carefully at the pictures. She has something draped over her shoulders. This thing and her arm are covering a large part of her right ‘tit’ and her left ‘tit’ is more covered up than it was at the Shanghai Premiere of ‘Beauty and the Beast’.

Yeah, but blimey, she’s that Hermione off of Harry Potter!

Your point being what exactly? That recently she was a child actress and now, after the passage of – oh what’s that abstract concept? Oh yes, the passage of time, she seems not to be a child any more. As a result of the action of puberty, she has breasts. As a result of attaining the age of majority (quite a while ago actually) her breasts can be shown in public, in most civilised parts of the world. Frankly, I’m a bit uncomfortable with your association of the present Emma Watson with her child persona. But I suppose you’re only following the Daily Mail.

Yeah, but wait a minute, isn’t she meant to be one of them feminists?

I think she does describe herself as a feminist, yes. In fact, she was instrumental in spearheading a UN campaign called ‘HeforShe’ which proposed the outrageous notion that actually not only ought men to be feminists on behalf of the women in their lives (their mothers, daughters and sisters as well as their wives and girlfriends) but it actually might be a bit of enlightened self interest to do so. Even the idea that a man could be something beginning with ‘fem’ seems to have freaked some people out.

Well, what a bloody hypocrite!

Sorry, are you sure you’ve got the right word here? A hypocrite is someone who does not live by the standards they espouse. Donald Trump, for example. I haven’t had to time to scrutinise the full detail of Emma’s stance on every single feminist issue, but I’m pretty sure she hasn’t held forth particularly upon how appearing in public in attractive or alluring outfits undermines worldwide sisterhood.

How can you be so naïve? This isn’t just attractive or alluring. It is sexual! She is exposing her breasts!

See above. In fact, see the bloody pictures. You weren’t getting into a froth about it when she wore this or this, or even this (were you?). Apparently what you don’t like – or seem to think hypocritical – is either that she is exposing particular parts of the breasts (the lower parts) or the simple fact that she very obviously isn’t wearing a bra, and that if (oooh, how tantalising) whatever that thing draped over her shoulders were removed her breasts would indeed be, as you put it, exposed. Calm down.

You’ve enjoyed doing the picture research for this haven’t you?

If I had, in the way that I think you mean, then that’s no more of your business than which parts of her breasts Emma exposes. But actually, no, not really. It’s quite hard to find pictures of Emma Watson which you can be sure aren’t fake (and I’m not entirely sure about those ones). All those perves inspired by the media who started sexualising her at the age of 14, as she says here, have been very busy creating photoshopped fantasies of her. In fact, if you find a bit of sideboob outrageous, for God’s sake don’t type ‘Emma Watson breasts’ into Google image search without Safe Search on.

I just feel sorry for all those girls who looked up to her as a role model. She’s betrayed them!

Oh, this is that hypocrisy thing again, isn’t it? If you think Emma Watson is no longer a valid role model for young girls because of appearance of her breasts in a Vanity Fair photoshoot, and yet you didn’t think that before in other photoshoots (she is a professional model as well as actress, remember) where her breasts were slightly better concealed, then you presumably feel that those girls should not themselves be encouraged to appear likewise. Perhaps you think that when a women appears in pictures like this she encourages men to think of women as sex objects.

Is it that simple? Can you be sure only the suggestion of bare breasts does that? Might not a short skirt, a particularly glossy lipstick, or a pair of high heels do the same thing? Why should the shockwave of unacceptability sit only on the borders of a woman’s nipples? If you believe women’s bodies to be instruments of mystical sexual power which have to be contained and constrained by clothing to prevent men from becoming lustful and losing control, should you not be advocating the burka?

Ought not men to accept the tiniest smidgeon of responsibility for how they act in response to women’s bodies? Indeed, is this outrage that a United Nation Women Goodwill Ambassador, an inspiration to Malala Yousafzai (no slouch of a female role model herself) should also be part of the beauty and fashion industry and prepared to be photographed in a sexually overt manner, not a particularly insidious form of the practice condemned as ‘slut-shaming’?

Men and women alike may find themselves confused, excited, outraged or appalled by  Emma Watson breasts. But I would suggest that it is their problem not hers, and that her fight for freedom, liberation and equality for women the world over is not affected one jot. As she herself says ‘I don’t see what my tits have to do with it’.