Russian Girls

there are some things post-soviet knockouts won't do, but having mindless sex with americans isn't one of them

The Ural Mountain Range is the traditional demarcation line that separates Europe and Asia. But in recent years the border has moved west a bit. And the new border isn't composed of earth but of flesh. Female flesh.

I live just to the east of the new border, in the now decidedly non-European city of Moscow, Russia. When the economy of that country collapsed a few years ago, my fellow reporters claimed Russians were simply not ready to adopt the civilized way of life. I knew better.

For almost three years now, my partner, Mark Ames, and I (both American expatriates) have been publishing an English-language newspaper called The eXile. It is a pseudopornographic tabloid whose commercial base is a racy club guide aimed mainly at sweaty-palmed English-speaking businessmen who need advice on which nightspots in town offer them the best chance to avoid mobsters but lay teenage Russian girls. Take our club listings: Three stars and your chances are good as long as you bring your passport; two stars and you probably won't get lucky unless you're packing an eightball of whiff or have a chauffeured Mercedes.

But the story line that has been the most consistently compelling to eXile readers has been the triumph of the traditional Russian femme Nikita over her enlightened, post-Cold War rival, the emancipated Western woman.

Russian men may be corrupt drunkards, but they aren't fools. They know what they want in a woman. They want her to be sexually inviting, instinctively sincere in her deference to the importance of men's affairs, clothed at all times in impractical but revealing outerwear, a good cook and housekeeper and patiently resigned to Monsieur's infidelities. Russian women have been the essence of all these things for about a thousand years.

Our Cold War image of Russian women as fat, poorly dressed and smelly could not be further from the truth. I should know. I moved to Russia right after college, and within a few months, without trying all that hard, I was living like Gene Simmons. Like a lot of American men who grew up in the MTV age, I never did well with women in my "sexual prime," and I was sure it was all my fault. The first Russian girl I ever dated laughed in my face when I asked her to the theater on a date, and instead took me back to her place and nailed me on the couch. On the way out the door, she handed me a picture of her lying naked in her bathtub as a souvenir. "Call me whenever," she said. A decade of young-adult sexual angst was wiped away in the space of that one afternoon.

After a few nights with the occasional Natasha or Sveta, eligible Western men stop writing home to their girlfriends and relegate their Western female co-workers to the status of office gofers, sending them out on McDonald's runs during lunch. These men are far too busy indulging in the deliciously submissive and sexually willing flesh of Russian girls.

In Russia, Western men are introduced to a whole new world from which many never return---a world where women do the dishes in the morning after sex, understand implicitly that oral sex is an obligation and a traditional first order of business, show off everything they've got in their clothing, don't expect you to care about their careers and in general pursue a sexual strategy designed to make you feel like King Fahd in their company. They rub your feet, give you massages, blow you without being asked, bring you food on trays while you watch videos, fuss over your clothes, buy you little presents. They also see through you as the shallow, libido-fueled, wholly self-serving mound of dumb flesh that you are. To them, you're not good for too much more than earning money and funding vacations to Crete---an attitude that most American men find they can live with after just a few years here.

When Communism collapsed, social scientists from America, the UK and Germany arrived in Moscow with bulging purses and talk of radical improvements to the Russian man's way of life. They promised ATMs, fast-food chains, magical toilet paper rolls featuring thousands of individually perforated (continued on page 154)Russian Girls(continued from page 109) sheets, interminable soap operas to replace interminable party congress telecasts. As a bonus, these foreign consultants offered, free of charge, a few extra gems mined from the Western 20th century experience, including freedom from the yoke of universal health insurance, the unlimited-hour workweek and, of course, women's emancipation.

Emancipation first appeared in Russia in the early Nineties, in the form of the Western females who had come to Moscow to work mainly as stockbrokers, journalists and consultants. Russian men were quickly debunked of their vision of American women as sexy surfer girls---these strange creatures bore little resemblance to Russia's homegrown women. They voluntarily went to work without makeup and in sneakers and bulky coats, seemed incurably high-strung on the job and were at once terrified of and desperate for sex. Finally, one of the great myths of the women's movement---that the liberated woman is just as sexy as the old cell phone-free version---was being shown to make as little sense as most of us always thought it did.

This past summer, my newspaper did an informal poll to gauge the attitudes of Russian men toward respectable Western women. We asked a small pool of respondents: "How much would you have to be paid to fuck Madeleine Albright?" Despite the ragged poverty of the survey pool, the unanimous answer was more or less that it was impossible to conceive of such a sum of money. The only ambiguous answer came from a 65-year-old homeless drunk named Igor, who shrugged and told us, "I'm not sure!"

At this writing, I can say confidently that European and American women---those "just as sexy as ever" citizens of the enlightened Euro-American corporate culture---occupy the lowest rung on the sexual totem pole in the Russian nation, boasting fewer prospects than your average migrant melon trader working barefoot at the local subway station.

Since they can't find a mate among their own kind, these Western women have turned their attention to Russian men, who, despite their inferior dentistry, should at least be expected to show interest in them as money earners. Some amused Russian men have bravely gone ahead with these specimens, expecting to find normal, sexy, men-loving women buried under the nervous, frustrated, pizza-noshing disguise. They quickly found out how wrong they were. Few Russian men could make the match work.

The first unpleasant surprise that Russian men found was under the panty line. While young Russian women tend to keep their pubic hair trimmed in fiercely sexy aerodynamic stripes suitable for male consumption, Russian men complain that Western women often leave their mounds covered in gnarly, tangled bushes---as though they don't care what it looks like. Russian men scratch their heads and wonder, What sort of a woman leaves a mess in such an important place, where a man can find it?

Then there was their actual performance in bed. Not only did these Western women refuse to fake their orgasms, but afterward, when all the man wanted to do was sleep off his drunken decision making, the hysterical Western women would not shut up. Besieged by the contradictory postcoital neurotic ruminations of the Western female professional's irresolvable identity crisis (Does he take me seriously? Is this just sex for him? Was it just sex for me? Is it OK that I don't view him as husband material but slept with him anyway? Is he comfortable with that? Should I have a talk with him to make sure?), they actually kept the man awake to remind him of his mistake, talking endlessly about their careers or, worse, their weight problems.

"I exercise 20 minutes a day on my Stair Master," they'd say, pinching their thighs, "but it just doesn't seem to help!"

From the Russian man's point of view, life with a Western woman is like some awful new correctional technique thought up by vengeful criminologists from abroad. Come home to a Western woman and there's no food on the table. Take her to bed and she's likely to insist on the missionary position---and just try proposing anal sex! "Are you crazy? How would you like it if I did that to you?" she'll snap. "But you don't do zees to me. I do zees to you!" the Russian man protests glumly.

And that's if he gets that far. Most Russian men don't have the patience to wait out the extensive dinner-museum-dinner no-contact mating ritual so many Western women use to weed out the high percentage of serial killers among us sexually interested men. No, Russians prefer the "toss her flowers, grope her in the cab" method of dating---anathema to the emancipated woman raised on tales of Ted Bundy, Ike Turner and "serial buttocks fondler" Mike Tyson.

The natural superiority of her nymphomaniacal Russian female competition relegates the emancipated woman to the status of sideshow sexual attraction for bored Russian men, who turn to her as they would to any C-list change-of-pace fetish, like plating or the occasional golden shower. Worse still, these Western women have to endure the sight of planeloads of unmarried men arriving in town every day to pick up their sexy mail-order Russian brides.

Western women themselves aren't immune to the magnetic pull of Russian women: One of our favorite stories at the paper involves an American woman in her 30s who worked for a big-six accounting firm in Moscow. She was caught drunk one night, pouring her heart out at a bar. "In this town," she said, "I'm reduced to licking pussy!"

I won't deny being pleased by all of this. If you've ever been refused a blow job on the grounds that it's demeaning, or lost a tenure slot to a Ph.D. whose submission included a dissertation on phallocentrism in early Warner Bros. cartoons, or watched Chilean pottery pile up in your apartment under the influence of your live-in girlfriend, then you have to like what's happening in Russia.

But beyond that, it's gratifying to see progress meet its match. The failure of our values here erases the embarrassment of my own experience growing up in America. Blockbuster can buy every video store, Barnes and Noble every bookstore and Starbucks every coffee shop. But not everything can be gentrified---especially not the things we like about women. Russian women are as sexy and demure as ever in their low expectations of men, their spike heels and beaver-baring miniskirts---the last of these worn year-round despite a punishing climate that defeated the likes of Hitler and Napoleon. The advance of progress, it seems, has once again been halted just shy of the Russian border.