From: The
Washington Post, February 22, 1993
RUSSIAN WOMEN: FROM PROLETARIANS TO PINUPS
By Katrina vanden Heuvel “In post-communist Russia,” a Russian friend likes to
say, “there are only two images of women. Mother or
whore.“
I used to think she
was exaggerating, but in the last year more and more
Russian women have told me that they feel trapped between
a state-sponsored campaign for family values and newly
unfettered mass media that depict women as sex objects for
male consumption.
The front line in
the family-values crusade is the Russian Parliament.
Sometime this spring, a motley crew of old-style
conservatives and newfangled democrats is expected to pass
a law that will strip women of economic and reproductive
rights.
In draft form the
Law on the Protection of the Family grants all rights to
the family, which it defines narrowly as a “cell” in which
there are children - natural or adopted. Only the family,
not individual members, can own an apartment or a house, a
plot of land or a car.
The law gives the
family - not women - the right to decide how many children
to have. Another provision proclaims “the priority of the
family is the upbringing of children,” which will compel
women to leave the workplace as day-care centers close and
other social services are slashed.
“In reading the
draft law,” a friend said, “you come to the conclusion
that the only thing a woman will be able to do in life is
to fulfill the state-approved role of motherhood, since
other opportunities for self-realization are denied her.“
One ominous
provision of the law declares that every child has the
right to life from the moment of conception - which many
women believe is a step towards undermining Russia’s
liberal abortion law. The provision may have been spawned
by government panic over the country’s dramatically
falling birth rate. Last year, for the first time since
World War II, deaths in Russia exceeded births.
Amid the grim
realities of Russian life, the proposed law seems like yet
another quixotic attempt to restore a mythic past - in
this case, when women stayed home to serve husband and
children and divorce was rare.
But in today’s
Russia, more than half of families with three or more
children live in poverty, divorce rates are high and each
year some 700,000 fathers of children under a year old
leave their wives. Every fifth Russian woman is the
family’s only breadwinner.
While the law winds
its way through the parliament, the Russian mass media
promote their own version of family values. Professional
women, with very few exceptions, are characterized as
anti-family. (“The most important thing women produce are
children,” the liberal newspaper Nedelya announced.)
Newspapers embracing the political spectrum blame “overemancipated,
masculinized women” for social ills from juvenile
delinquency to divorce.
At the same time,
even the most respectable newspapers and magazines use
photographs of naked women in the fierce circulation
battles that characterize Russian press life today.
The 15-year-old
daughter of a close friend recently confided that many of
her classmates consider hard-currency prostitution a
prestigious trade. After scanning several mainstream
newspapers, I began to understand why.
Last September
Komsomolskaya Pravda, a liberal paper with 8 million
readers, featured an article promoting a new 24-hour
call-girl service for Western and Russian businessmen. The
firm’s young founder told the newspaper that his girls “are between 18 and 30 years old, cost 10,000 rubles per
hour or 25,000 rubles per night, and wear beautiful
clothes.” (An average monthly salary in Moscow nowadays is
about 5,000 rubles - approximately $10 at present
conversion rates.)
Another popular
newspaper, Moskovskii Komsomolets, regularly runs ads “seeking young women without complexes for rich men.” And
Evening Moscow, once favored by pensioners and soldiers,
recently ran a story promoting the Miss Sex ‘92 contest.
Photos of the topless contestants cuddling with doubles of
Stalin, Lenin and Hitler were scattered across the front
page. Family values weren’t completely forgotten: The
winner won an iron and a washing machine.
Television,
unconstrained by FCC-style regulations, is no exception.
In December Russia’s Channel 2 showed an advertisement for
a secretarial firm seeking women between the ages of 18
and 25. (Sexist and ageist job advertisements are common.)
The ad showed a
young woman and her boss dining at an elegant and intimate
restaurant. “Ease his business anxieties,” a male
announcer says, as the couple leaves the restaurant. Even
television’s so-called family hour is not off-limits. My
daughter’s favorite Sunday morning cartoons were followed
by “Miss Moscow Striptease ‘92.” The prize: a fur coat and
a trip to Berlin.
For Russian girls
and young women in desperate financial need - 80 percent
of the unemployed are women - the media’s promotion of a
lucrative and glamorous life through prostitution or other
thinly disguised sexual services is seductive.
More and more
Russian women are forming activist and self-help groups -
from rape crisis centers in cramped apartments to
women’s-studies programs in high-rise academic institutes.
Although the Russian
women’s movement is small and disorganized, it is
fast-growing, diverse and no longer confined to Moscow or
St. Petersburg.
In November I
attended the Second Independent Women’s Forum in Dubna,
two hours outside Moscow, where some 500 women braved
freezing temperatures and the crippling cost of internal
travel to network, agitate and organize.
At the end, forum
participants issued an appeal to the Russian Parliament,
requesting that the hearing on the draft family law be
postponed until “the bill is finalized in accordance with
the standards of international law and widely discussed by
the general public.“
With the
co-operation of a few sympathetic deputies, women’s groups
in Moscow will hold a public hearing in the parliament in
March to bring
Russian and world attention to the law’s discriminatory
nature.
On another front,
several women who attended the forum have created a group
to monitor and challenge sexism in the Russian press; they
plan to meet with editors and reporters.
“We are not calling
for a new kind of censorship,” one of the organizers told
me. “We want some fairness and open-mindedness. In the
current climate we understand that calls for censorship of
sexually explicit material and moral policing can be
easily turned against women.“
(Katrina vanden Heuvel,
an editor at the Nation, writes about Russian politics and
society.)
