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Modern Feminism is culturally important

History has distorted the definition of 'feminine,' causing it to symbolize vulnerability. Fortunately, in the United States and many other nations, women have the same legal rights as men, removing the tangible barriers to female equality. However, the intangible barriers manifest themselves in tangible ways, such as the inequality of gender pay. The title of vulnerability has been passed through the generations by means of cultural expectation. Addressing these intangible barriers to female equality is a cultural task, not a legal one, and is therefore best performed by a cultural movement. The tangible barriers to equality - such as the right to vote - were straightforward and tangible. They were easily rallied for and a matter of political muscle, not philosophical finesse. But as Verta Taylor and Leila Rupp point out [8], modern feminism seeks to achieve this sense of self-actualized equality via an alternate women's culture. Women's equality has been legally achieved, but women and men are born and raised in entirely different worlds, and therein lies the necessity of modern feminism. A proper modern feminist movement enables empowerment of women before they reach voting age, during the development that will define their self confidence, cognitive focus and expectations from friends and relationships. The importance of feminist movements is heightened by the unfortunate reality that women do not grow up and develop in a world regarding them as equal. The media, which helps define mechanisms of power and social acceptance for children, often paints a world in which women acheive power by overrelying on sexual attraction, causing women to grow up with less incentive than men to think critically. This produces a society in which a man is legitimately more likely to have the skills to be an engineer, scientist, chess player, or critical thinker by career or by hobby. Additionally, males in media are more often taught implicitly that confidence is their key to success, causing them to work on confidence as they grow up. A woman is still less qualified a for politically oriented job than an equally qualified man. This causes men to be richer, and the media responds to wealth by playing to its audience. The media yields more and more to the men who want to see male characters empowered. It's not a conspiracy to push women down, it's just the free market, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. It calls for a cultural response. It calls for feminism. The same mechanism exists even more strongly in the porn industry, in which female porn stars have an average shelf life of three to six months and most of the money to be made in the industry comes from a male audience. As if that weren't enough, there exists a cannibalistic paradox to feminist movements, in which feminism calls for the empowerment of women, yet individual women are financially and socially empowered by anti-feminists for dismissing feminism. Since feminism stands for the empowerment of women as a whole, its core qualities that attract women to the movement are the same that motivate dissension and a lack of unity. This creates a negative feedback loop, in which feminism is predisposed to assign itself less credit than it deserves. In these contexts, women intuitively sense that they are not given the proper forms of respect, but since most people do not have social science degrees to explain these perfectly reasonable conclusions, most women are unable to connect their rational, frontal-lobe cognitions with their deeper, dignity-oriented feelings. Though the connection has been made by sociologists and psychologists, most women are forced to choose between their thoughts and their feelings, creating a political irrational loyalty for whichever party gives them more general respect, as Vladimir Lenin so adeptly exploited in his Russian communist movement. Even in modern America, democrats and republicans can count on the invisible male-female rivalry that few understand in detail, in which democrats will do better with females and republicans will do better with males. To clear politics of such gender rivalries and discuss the actual difference between liberal and conservatives ideologies, feminism must acheive an intellectually understood structure.