Rowan Blanchard Talks With Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards About Sexual Health in 'Paper' Mag

Rowan Blanchard and Emma Watson have chosen their girl crushes in Paper magazine’s brand new feature.

The 14- and 25-year-old actresses and activists picked Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards and bell hooks as their own “girl crushes” and had the chance to speak with them about issues near and dear to their hearts.

“If you make things like Planned Parenthood and sexual health no longer taboo or scary to talk about, I feel like that would lead to much less unwanted pregnancies with teens. But now when girls talk about these topics, they’re called ‘sluts,’ or something like that,” Rowan told Cecile during their conversation about sexual health and education. “There’s just not a way out! It’s like, if you know about your body and you’re educated about how to take care of it, you’re ‘a slut.’ And if you’re not, then you could accidentally get pregnant or something like that.”

Cecile chimed in, “Especially if you don’t feel like you have the agency to actually speak up for yourself.”

Rowan continued, “And I hope that those girls and men that don’t feel like they have a safe space to talk about it with their parents, or maybe their sex ed teacher isn’t really covering things that need to be talked about, I hope that they’re using your guys’ Internet space to answer questions that they would maybe feel embarrassed to talk about.”

Click inside to read about Emma‘s conversation with bell hooks…

bell spoke to Emma about how movie Hermione Granger disappointed her.

“I was often annoyed with the development of the movie character of Hermione. By the time of the last movie, she’s like a suburban housewife,” bell said.

Emma adds, “[Laughs.] Well, she goes on to have a career. And she does go on to do good and interesting things.”

“It’s interesting that in the final scenes at the train station Hermione is such a passive image…I was like, ‘why is she looking frumpy?’ and I wondered whose idea is this. Is this how the smart girl progresses? She moves from being intriguing to being the boring spinster? Movies are still struggling with how to create images of smart, vibrant, powerful, and intelligent older females,” bell continued.

“Honestly, just from a practical perspective and not from an intentional perspective, we had such a hard time figuring out how to authentically age us — to take us from where we were — we were all 20-year-olds, and to make us look like we’re in our 30s and 40s… we had a really hard time figuring out how to do that. We really struggled,” Emma said.