Terrified neurotics, or worse?
The United States has changed dramatically as it arose with and nurtured the Industrial Revolution, grew swiftly to world power, and struggled to extend human rights. Gender roles have developed along with it to their present half-revised state. Advances in mechanics, then electronics have eliminated from most jobs the need for gross strength while medical science has brought reproduction under even greater control. Emergencies have to be met and jobs filled.
Truth contradicts feminist teachings, such as that World War II was a gender watershed. America was. In the diary of midwife Martha Ballard, who died in 1812, we see that her contemporaries weren't surprised that she rode through heat and cold and crossed flooded and frozen rivers to reach her patients, was consulted by doctors, and ran her household. Frontier women loaded and fired guns and plowed fields while their urban sisters ran businesses and worked in factories. Confederate ladies ran plantations and worked in munitions plants. In 1872 Victoria Woodhul ran for President on a "free love" platform (the "sexual liberation" of 1972). By then Ballard's grand-niece, a doctor, administered a hospital staffed entirely by women. In the 1890's New York required state institutions to give female doctors hiring priority.
Even before women could vote organizations like the WCTU wielded enormous influence. Adventure was always "gender neutral," and the first female parachute jump was in 1913. An A&E film history documents that early 1900's movies showed women in heroic actions roles, and Hollywood has always shown them as executives and community leaders. In reality, by 1925 women had with few exceptions acquired the same options and rights as men -- that is, nearly everything feminists now claim to be struggling for. Since social concepts lag behind practice, however, the formulae of traditional roles remain graven in attitudes and law.
Though they have complete freedom, women can still evade responsibility by acting stupid or weak. They can still expect chivalrous concessions and have such high status they can scarcely be discussed, much less criticized. Men, however, remain shackled to a narrow role of provider and protector, with no relief from responsibility. Only men can be drafted. Military women aren't expected to meet the same standards as men ("dual standards" is the term). Men are punished for sex with teenage girls, women who abuse boys aren't. Gary Dotson's case shows women can imprison men at random. Female criminals get lighter sentences and better treatment. Divorce judges, nearly always awarding maternal custody and jailing fathers unable to make payments, ignore their own visitation decrees. In this transitional era women have all the advantages.
So who are the feminists? Values are beginning to catch up. Sometimes women lose custody and pay alimony. Female criminals are more often punished. There's been talk of drafting women. Men are less likely to defer to them. The first of two answers is that feminists are spoiled neurotics terrified of having to outgrow their lives of irresponsibility and dependency. These reactionaries are trying to preserve gender inequality while pretending to fight it.
Since authorities naturally defend the status quo, outdated beliefs empower feminists. Conservatives indulge and cater to women because they consider them emotional and incompetent. Liberals because they consider them victims. Thus feminists need but look sexy and throw hysterical fits before senators, judges and social workers. No democracy is involved in such feminist legislation as the slew of redundant measures like "violence against women" laws and "wife rape" laws intended to preserve women's elite status. Just as with the media, which blares their propaganda from every page and tube, feminists command and government obeys.
The feminist line is that evil, inferior men dominate good, superior women. Feminists use propaganda to excuse and glorify themselves and to foster hate. In the first case, women's successes are despite and their failures because of men. A girl advised against acting in porno movies screams she will do it to defy "the patriarchy's" plot to control her body. If she comes to grief, men made her go into the business, if she succeeds it's despite their efforts to stop her. When she gets too droopy to display, she earns money by denouncing the porno men forced her to make.
In the second, a girl sues the Boy Scouts for rejecting her membership application, claiming the Girl Scouts fail to offer what she wants. Logically, she'd benefit more from girls petitioning the latter to offer the desired activities. Logic is no more involved than in feminists' insistence that all male but not all female clubs and schools are illegal, because education isn't the real purpose here; rather, it is to infect young minds with sexist hate through doing as well as teaching.
Their blatant hypocrisy reveals feminists' real motives. Some recently denounced birth control pills as a male invention designed to put reproductive responsibility on women, yet their perennial demand has been for complete female control of reproduction -- exactly what the pill provides. Certainly they'd have denounced a male pill as a plot to control women. The move to let women choose combat jobs is obviously a feint aimed at keeping military women from having to fight if they don't want to. Like abortion on demand, these things show feminists don't want adulthood. They want eternal adolescence, life by caprice and whim, with others (men, mainly) forced to deal with the consequences.
Amid claims they want financial independence, feminists push legislation adding ex-husbands' pensions to the divorce loot. They insist PMS doesn't disqualify women from strategic offices and that it so addles their brains it excuses murder. They claim women and stronger and smarter than men, who easily beat and rape them, and that they need separate schools to avoid masculine competition. The list is endless.
Most women, unlike feminists and the pathetic wretches who grovel before them, are honest hardworking individuals. Almost everyone, however, seizes opportunity when it arises and feminists have worked hard to convinced women that serial divorce leads to prosperity via support and property settlements, plus inheritance possibilities, from several men. That's got to be why 80+ percent of divorces are filed by women, why the family is coming apart, why poverty is increasing, delinquency and crime are rampant, why people turn to drugs and fanaticism, why psychotherapists are rich.
Feminists, instead of working to achieve the balanced, equal roles necessary to our society's survival, are attacking its most fundamental unit. And that's why the second answer to our question is that they are the most dangerous, destructive persons alive.