First topic on this sub, maybe this will be helpful, maybe not. I was reading the post from the guy who compared feminism to a religion and that got me thinking. There are similarities and important differences. I believe that the people who believe religion is evil, for example, need to understand the religious law of propenquity. There are many, many religious people doing amazing things in the name of faith. I know many of them myself. Faith can be an incredibly strong source of good in this world. It can also be bad. How can you tell? Ask yourself this: would the person of faith recognize, if they met them on the street one day, the person who founded their faith? Would Christians recognize Jesus if he walked up to them and said "hi"?

All faiths started with a small group of true believers. As the centuries went on, some people stayed true to the founder's intentions, and others wandered and transformed the founder's original intent into something he never meant for it to be. God fearing, Christian Republicans who oppose basic poverty fighting programs fall under this category. Jesus said to help the poor, and that if you did not, then he never knew you. He didn't say to help the poor only if they didn't do anything to make themselves poor, he just said help the poor. People like mother teressa and the nuns, priests and pastors who are doing everything they can to help the poor all over the world, those who are going to africa and doing what they can to fight ebola, those people are doing God's work. Jesus would recognize them, and they would recognize him. The idiot politicians who cut funding for basic help to the poor, or the talk radio moron who asks why people are putting themselves at risk to fight ebola, Jesus would have no idea who they were, and they would never recognize him.

Feminism has a similar problem. The movement, today, has accomplished most of what the founders of it wanted back in the late 70's. It always has been an "us" versus "them" mentality (any good political movement requires an enemy, people are not moved by abstracts, they want specific villans to demonize) and for a long time, women were so disadvantaged that it served its purpose. The last ten or so years has seen an inflection point. Feminism is reaching the limits of what it can reasonably deliver. Feminists talk about rape all the time, despite the fact that they have accomplished their original goal: rapes are plummeting across the country and there seems no end to the decline. The irony is that if feminist's real goal was to reduce rape, they would attack the problem from both ends: educate men to not rape, and educate women on simple things they can do to avoid rape. That would make rape rates fall even faster. However, that would also require admitting that both sexes share some of the burden for overcoming this problem. Feminism has accomplished a lot to reduce rape rates by demonizing men, now to accomplish total elimination, they have to educate women too. In other words, to accomplish the balance of their goals, feminism must transform into something different, otherwise it isn't a movement to help women (which no reasonable person objects to), its a movement to demonize men (which is not the same thing as helping women, its not a zero sum game).

What should be the feminist's ideal, moving forward into today's world? I give you the first feminist, the woman who was a feminist forty years before there was such a thing as feminism. The women who was a feminist right after women won the right to vote. A fictional woman created by two male jewish kids from the mid-west: Siegel and Schuster's Lois Lane. In a modern context, there's nothing remarkable about Lois Lane, but imagine someone like her in the 1930's when the world was very different.

Men fought in World War 2, women stayed home and worked in factories and took care of the children. Not Lois. Lois went to the front lines and reported on the war for the Daily Planet, as the first, and at the time, only, female war journalist. She has complete confidence and bravery. She gets into a lot of bad situations, but the thing about Lois is that she's no damsel in distress. She's gotten out of many of those situations without any help from Superman over the years. She was a celebrated career woman, working as the star reporter for a major metro newspaper (at a time when that was a big career, before television) who wasn't married (for a long time anyway) and has never had kids. Despite being intelligent, brave, daring, career-oriented, and not taking any shit from anyone, Lois doesn't hate men. She loves them. Whether it be Jimmy, or Clark or Bruce. She's spent her life uncovering corruption and helping heroes from the shadows. She's taken on Lex Luthor, Darkseid, Ra's Al Ghul and the Joker and held her own. When she was put into a situation where there was no superman to save her, she was the same as she ever was: she became Princess Leia and joined the rebellion (because that's what Lois does, she thinks for herself, does what she thinks is right, and accepts the consequences). Lois Lane was Princess Leia forty years before there was a Princess Leia.

That's why Superman fell madly in love with her: she was strong, independent, confident, didn't need him to save her all the time, and she was his other half, the person who could and would stand up to him if she felt it was right. Even today, you don't see this all that often, back in 1938 (the first appearance of Lois Lane) it was unheard of. Lois Lane proves you can be pro-female liberation without being anti-man. Its just very hard, because it requires things like personal responsibility. Lois Lane is both sides of what feminism has always needed: she stands up against (mostly male driven) injustice, and she also believes wholeheartedly that you reap what you sow, that you have to do what you must to protect yourself. That you must do what you can to never become a victim. Superman does have to bail her out, from time to time, but she has just as often managed to bail herself out, and she's bailed him out more than a few times.

If I ever have children, and some of them are girls, Lois Lane is the person I'll tell them they should try to grow up to be like. Live your own life, succeed or fail on your own merits, fight institutional unfairness, accept the consequences for your own actions, be strong and level-headed, and don't hate anyone or blame others for where you are in life. It should be pretty obvious, based on this model, why a woman like this has to be a fictional character. Feminism leads to a lot of misunderstandings that wouldn't be misunderstandings otherwise.

I'll close this post with a story. Today, as I was walking back to work from lunch, I saw a very beautiful girl on a street corner wearing a very revealing outfit. There was no back to the outfit, so you could see her entire bare back. It also didn't do a very good job of covering her breasts, so you could make out a total side-boob, and it left nothing to the imagination as the shape of the breasts. I was stunned, she was so beautiful, and I was really appreciative of her showing me so much of herself, and for having the confidence to do so. She was attractive, and she knew it. Some men would say that she was dressed like a slut, and was therefore, asking for it. I think this gets things backwards. She was showing herself, and we ought to appreciate that. If more of us shame her for her dress, less women are likely to dress like her, and we all lose when that happens. No matter if she was completely naked, no woman is ever "asking for it" by how she dresses. Feminism would say that by seeing her, and thinking about her in a sexual way I was objectifying her body. I think that's total bull. She's a pretty girl, I was admiring her, and there's nothing wrong with that (that might be a reason why she decided to dress as she did). If I could have done so without coming off as a creep, I would have walked up to her, extended my hand to her and told her "thank you so much for making my day". I don't see anything wrong with that, but feminism wants to make it wrong. I don't understand that. I think there's a perfectly logical middle ground her, one that's neither shaming the woman nor accusing the man of objectifying her. Thanks for listening, guys and gals.