#Russia #gender #class
"The Real Housewives of Moscow
Russian women were early to feminism. Now, though, their vision of liberation can look strangely like the domestic trap they were supposed to escape.
(. . .)
During the Second World War, some twenty-seven million Soviets were killed, most of them men in prime reproductive age. Hoping to rebuild and repopulate the country, Nikita Khrushchev encouraged women to get married and have as many babies as possible, but there were no men left to marry. Those who had managed to return from the war often came back wounded, both physically and psychologically. These men, too, were encouraged to get married—and stay married. Divorce became much more difficult to obtain. As a result, millions of women had to settle for having children with men who were married to other women—something that the state endorsed. By the twenty-first century, the male population had long since recovered, but there was still a sense, bordering on panic, that good men—single, decent, with well-paying jobs—were an endangered species. As one Russian girlfriend told me, 'Men are like public toilets: either taken or shat in.'
Many Russian women felt time keenly, as if they knew to the second how long they had until their physical beauty—their main *aktiv*, one’s chief asset—would cease to be competitive in a cutthroat market. Until then, they capitalized on what nature had given them, investing as much as they could in clothing, makeup, and beauty procedures. (I was often asked by women in Moscow why their American counterparts 'didn’t take care of themselves.') During the financial crisis of 2008, Russia was the G-20 country hit hardest by the economic collapse, and yet cosmetics sales didn’t budge. Russian politicians, usually male, frequently touted Russian women as the most beautiful in the world, as if they were, like oil and gas, another natural resource to be exploited in the country’s march back to superpower status."
https://archive.ph/D1T6E