First, it’s interesting that you bring up empathy as a value we should be praising, but then you show Melania none. It’s entirely possible that as a beautiful young girl in a working class Slovenian family, she was taught that the way to improve her circumstances was with her looks. As someone who grew up in a small, industrial town, I knew many pretty girls who were not taught that their minds were their ticket out of town. I’m not saying this is what we should be teaching girls, I’m simply saying we should have empathy for women who were taught values that were backward and made their choices accordingly.

Second, if the only (or best) way you can find to teach young girls to value education, hard work and humility is to point and laugh at the pretty woman in the expensive house with the rich husband, then you are still teaching them the wrong thing. A woman’s value should not be determined by a feeling of superiority over other women, no matter why they feel superior (education, money, looks, etc.).

All you are teaching young women when you criticize Melania for being a “materialistic” “gold digger” who is “without substance” is that it’s totally fine to be judgmental as long as your judging women for what you have deemed poor choices or values. So it’s not cool to judge an educated woman for not being pretty or not caring about her looks, but it is totally cool to judge a pretty woman for not being educated. Is that what we should be teaching young women? No woman should ever be told she is “without substance” simply because she isn’t as smart or as educated or as eloquent as our ideal.

I admit, this is an area where I sometimes struggle. (See, all previous comments about how KimK makes millions by breaking the Internet with nude photos and then says she wants to be valued as a business woman and claims she was deceived into taking off her clothes by W and Playboy.) It can be confounding to try to show young girls positive role models without pointing at the kind of women you don’t want them to be and saying, “See that harlot over there? For shame.” But I think this is where your call for empathy comes in.

There are far, far better ways to show young women that education and hard work are of the highest value, than by pointing at the pretty woman with the rich husband and laughing at her and criticizing her. And if we can’t set a better example for the next generation about feminism and supporting other women,because we want to salve our anger, then we should be ashamed of ourselves.