Brief thought...

...about "empowerment."
A word I promise never, ever to use because of how recklessly it's been tossed around. Think about it the next time someone says that an experience is "empowering," particularly if it's used in the same sentence as "feminism/feminist." Think about power as something that follows the law of conservation of energy: power, too, is constant over time in a closed system and therefore cannot be created nor destroyed-- simply transferred from one person/thing/entity to another. Say, for example, college is an "empowering" experience because you are on your own for the first time in your life. But where does this power come from? You take a little from your parents, your guardians, your hometown, whatever you were rooted in before. It's an empowering experience because you seize the power that your parents or your hometown used to have over you, and you take a little of it with you to college to redistribute to whatever relationships or attachments you make in this new chapter of your life. Still following?
My point is that it seems silly to assume that this power is just self-generated, out of nowhere: if so, empowerment seems so trivial, and disempowered people (people living in poverty, etc.) are, by implication, people that just suck at empowering themselves. While empowerment has to be accepted and undertaken by yourself (and is almost always a moment of inward reflection), power also has to be taken from elsewhere.

...and THAT is why being "empowered" by something seems like everything, but really means nothing. Realizing that you all of a sudden have a little more power than before is great news, don't get me wrong, but think a little further and tell me where this power came from and how you got it.

Super generic example #1:
Woman poses nude, finds the experience to be empowering. Fine, I can't and won't argue with her, but just saying that this experience was "empowering" turns a political/institutional/historical situation into a personal experience (more on this personalization later). I need to know more about where this power came from. Is it empowering because you seized control of your sexuality, in a world where women's sexualities are often owned by husbands or fathers? Is it empowering because you felt confident being nude, instead of being overwhelmed by media messages about what women's bodies should look like? Or is it empowering because you are presenting your nudity in a very raw form, not passive or shy (like most ads of women are) but assertive and unforgiving? When this woman can answer those questions, it is time to ask about how that power that she seized will be distributed. Something as simple as having the photo posted on facebook will take that power and turn it into someone else's power: it doesn't matter if she doesn't care about the consequences of this nude photo, it matters how the power is distributed in the system as a whole. Who holds the copyright over this nude photo? Did the photographer make any personal decisions (cropping, angle, accentuating body parts) that compromised the woman's intentions? Will a teenager use this photo as a pornographic opportunity or will this photo be strictly used with artistic purposes? Very very simple example, but avoiding the word "empowerment" and talking more about where that power is coming from, whether or not it's a fleeting moment of power that instantly gets redistributed, or whether it's simply an illusion power are all much more important questions to ask. What I'm sure of, over anything else, is that power is a very politically charged thing. It has been used to persecute people, to exterminate populations, to imprison entire communities, to justify injustice. How is it that this extremely volatile, political thing can put on a pretty hat and call itself a personal experience?