Why I No Longer Need to be Told to Be an Empowered Woman

Yesterday morning the president of The White House Project came to talk to my school.  Before I get in to talking about the actual assembly, disclaimers need to be made...

• I am not anti-woman, but I am by no means a feminist.  
• I have seen way too many of these "be an empowered woman" assemblies for them to make me feel anything but cynical.
• I think this project does great work for women who need it.  The girls of Greenwich Academy do not need it.

Disclaimers accepted?  Good.  Let's move on. (profanity exists on occasion below)

I take serious issue with listening to women talk to girls about being empowered when they grow up.  Not only does it presuppose that we need empowering, but I really feel like it also, in a reverse psychology kind of way, tells us that we need to fight.  I believe in equality for everyone (in the modern era, I interpret "All men are created equal" to mean all people), but I am really tired of hearing that I need to be a conniving bitch to get that equality (and that the equality needs getting in the first place).  Additionally, I'm tired of being told that the only way for me to show that I am an empowered woman is for me to run for office or be in a position of leadership in the workplace.  I respect our speaker yesterday for mentioning that we need more women in academia, but I still feel like these speeches force me into visible positions in the world.  There is nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom, in fact it's incredibly difficult to be a mother.  I resent the fact that we are told that being a stay-at-home mom isn't good enough.  On the flip side, I remember a few years ago I saw a dance project about mothers.  The thesis of the project was that mothers can be anything but that "anything" was defined as various kinds of home makers.  That I don't agree with.

All in all I respect the message of the assembly: don't just say, do.  The White House Project proposes to bring women out from behind the scenes into the foreground.  I totally respect that.  However, I had a question about Ms. Dufu's anti-lobbying message.  She says that we shouldn't lobby for our rights, we should get ourselves elected so that we can get done what needs to get done on our political agendas.  So I ask her this:

• Have you ever run for anything?

Exactly.

(Communist) Party Rock Anthem

I believe it is an accepted fact that nothing productive is accomplished on the last day of a MUN conference.  And if it isn't it should be.

Sunday marked the last day of PMUNC 2011, and the Politburo of the USSR marked it well with an execution, an invasion, superlatives, dirty MUN puns, and "In Soviet Russia..." jokes.  Comrade Voroshilov was accused of and promptly executed for: "shaving off the wise, glorious facial hair of Comrade Stalin while he was in a wise, glorious, illustrious, and patriotic drunken stupor; telling the entire Leningrad district that he does in fact feel pretty; conspiring to slowly poison the committee with the sound of his voice; defacing the body of glorious Comrade Lenin in unspeakable ways; and replacing all the signs in the Moscow District that say CCCP with a crudely drawn CCCPenis".  We invaded ECOFIN and brought the same charges against them.  Superlatives were granted for "Most Likely to Go to Jail", "Most Likely to Be an Informant" (all of us; we're soviets), "Best Facial Hair", "Best Actual Communist", and "Best James Franco Look Alike".  To assuage your concerns, none of these were granted to me personally, but we all had a good time laughing about what a great time we had.  But my favorite part of Sunday was definitely the dirty MUN puns.  One of my friends has an axiom, "All jocks think about is sports; all nerds think about is sex" and no where is that more evident than at a Model UN Conference.  Admittedly, parliamentary procedure lends itself to dirty puns ("Motion to table the chair" or anything involving the word "caucus"), but what surprised me the first time I went to a MUN conference was how easily the United Nations itself lends itself to dirty jokes ("For a third world country, you're awfully developed" or anything involving the country "Djibouti").  Long story short, Model UN is awesome.

But on a serious note, I think Model UN is a quality exercise.  I not only enjoy myself while there, I enjoy doing the research for my committees.  Writing a position paper is an onerous exercise, but you are forced to learn about a new angle of historical or modern international relations.  And I find it interesting.  I really wish my delegation went to more of these events, because I would go to as many of them as I could.  If any of you reading know of any conferences that are still open for registration, please let me know in the comments, because I am currently trying to figure out if I can attend more as an independent delegate.  Even if it's for next year, I'd love to begin figuring things out!

Solving the Korean War

Saturday's PMUNC sessions involved settling our second major question: Soviet Involvement in the Korean War.  Admittedly the people on my committee were less interesting in this question than in the German Division question, but I think the Korean Conflict turned out to be quite interesting.
We began the session in October 1950 as the UN coalition forces bear down on the Yalu River.  These UN Coalition forces (from our perspective) threaten the sovereignty of two communist nations (North Korea and China) and have demonstrated capitalist imperialism by over reaching their assigned mission by making incursions into North Korea instead of simply defending South Korea.  To be honest, I'm beginning to think the historical committees are designed to make the delegates appreciate what good decisions were made in the past; as our crises played out, we found ourselves adhering more and more to the course of the actual conflict.  Of course we weren't perfectly historically accurate, but we came pretty damn close.  We began by resolving to send overt humanitarian aid and covert military aid to both the Chinese and North Korean armies and asserting the rights of Communist Nations (simply put, they have the right to exist and other communist nations have the right to defend them).  Then one of our planes got shot down.  A few press releases later, we get word that the Americans are positioning nuclear warheads in the Yellow Sea to bomb China and North Korea and the Chinese forces have simply attacked the Americans (sorry, UN coalition forces) without any directive from Moscow or even close to enough equipment.  We drafted some more press releases, positioned our troops in Eastern Russia in the event of an attack on our sovereign territory (that was a directive I sponsored with the delegate who played Marshal Zhukov) and drafted a peace treaty between the Americans and the Chinese.  Long story short, we narrowly avoided nuclear war.  We also drafted what would have been a precursor to the Warsaw Pact if it had happened in real time.  The document created an economic union between soviet nations and created a mutual defence clause.  This all happened in the space of seven hours.  If that's not enough reason to put Model UN kids in charge of the real world, I don't know what is.

All in all, I had a great time at this conference.  I was originally unsure about it (and by unsure I mean less than excited), but it really turned out to be a great time.  As we say on committee: "Long Live Brosef Stalin, wise, illustrious, glorious, and patriotic leader of the Broviet Union!"

Welcome to PMUNC

As of last night, I am Nikolai Bulganin on the Politburo of the USSR, 1945. Why? you may ask. Because I am a member of the Greenwich Academy delegation at the Princeton Model UN Conference. Just when you thought I couldn't get any nerdier, you find out I'm a Model Government kid. In my defense, I am no where near as intense as some of the other kids. I thought my binder was good, but some kids have 3 1/2 inch binders that legitimately don't close.  But enough about Model Government kids, lets talk about historical international relations!
My committee this year is the Politburo of the USSR, so all the delegates are different members of the main policy making body of the  Soviet Union.  I'm pretty sure the only downside of being on this committee is having to memorize multisylabic russian names.  As of our fourth committee meeting we have resolved our first crisis topic: policy making regarding post-Nazi Germany at the Yalta Conference. One thing that's really cool about historical committees is the ability to correct the mistakes of the past. Of course that's not to say that we have, but having the knowledge that we can is really cool.  I think my committee this year strikes an interesting balance between historical accuracy and fantasy.  We all represent different soviet Russians and we (for the most part) portray them with historical accuracy, but we have to respond to fictional crises.  Today, we were threatened by an Allied that to invade the motherland (which was later discovered to be a bluff) and a Japanese attack on Soviet territory near Vladivostok. Both were dealt with quickly and efficiently. So efficiently that we had time to draft and pass a treaty regarding the division and governance/management of postwar Germany as well a the extraction of reparations from German territories.  In the midst of all this directive passing, three of our number were sent to the gulag and two executed.  It's been a busy day.  Personally, I'm very impressed and happy with our plan for reparations; I think it's comprehensive and effective. I have some reservations regarding the way our treaty divided up Germany, but that's mostly because the plan I sponsored with Korotchenko which comprehensively went through Germany province by province and divided it between the Allied powers didn't get passed. I think the one we did pass is too general.
All in all, I'm really happy with what has gone down already in my committee.  I'll do my best to keep y'all updated, but I'm currently blogging from my phone because I'm too cheap to pay for internet.  Tomorrow we begin our next topic: how to handle Soviet involvement in the Korean conflict. Can't wait!