"Pretty woman walking down the street..."

We live in a world of stereotypes - we are born into it and by that same fact of birth we acquire a predetermined inventory of characteristics. Then having absorbed with the mothers milk the core attributes of femininity or masculinity on a long road of maturity we are becoming more of what the society expects of us: "Aren't you a boy to be whining like a girl?", "You have to be clean and pretty - you are a girl!"

And, gradually, chiseled by everyday judgments we are shaped into what we have to be: pretty, clean, shy, weak, or strong, decisive, rugged and ambitious - you know, sort of blue or pink, skirts or trousers.
As a Russian woman ("pink", "modest", "timid", hmm... "pretty"? , "blushing", "with long hair", "coy" and "shamefaced" (whatever that means) living abroad I want to discuss intercultural gender misunderstandings that I faced being brought up "in a pink-bow-Russian way".

source of photo
In one famous and most revered Russian (Soviet) movies ever, which got most of the all possible prizes abroad - "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" - the plot is banal and as conventional as it can be: three simple girls came to Moscow from the province in search of a better life in the middle of the 60s. The obvious embodiment to a better life was a fortunate marriage which could establish a position of a woman and secure the rest of her life.

Consequently, in a rather archetypal and fairy-tale manner, one gets married to a simple worker, the second in an ongoing search of something better ends up alone having lost her quite a decent husband to alcoholism, and the third, having been knocked up by some ambitious charming scunk, after 15 years turns into a self-sufficient director of a huge and successful plant, sort of a self-made woman - bitter, cold and decisive single mother in well-made Soviet pants, spending her scanty free time with a married lover - quite a widely-spread and accomplished image these days.

The movie touches upon many issues (if you come across a version with English subtitles - as a winner of a Golden Bear in Berlin 1980 and an Oscar in 1981, it should most certainly exist in  English - I implore you - watch!), the main being the fate of a woman in a society.  

None of these women is happy without a man, the successful one being utterly unhappiest of all three. Envied by many, she confides into her friends: "Just don't tell your sons that when you get everything in life, the only thing you feel like doing is to howl as a lonely wolf" (- Только ты пока ребятам не рассказывай, что как раз когда всего добъешься в жизни, больше всего волком завыть хочется"). 

Until (of course - this movie got an Oscar) she meets the real man - sort of a Soviet Mr. Big - who sets the priorities right - "And by that remember: from now on, everyday, everything is decided only by me. With one simple reasoning that I am a man". (- А заодно запомни, что всё и всегда я буду решать сам. На том простом основании, что я - мужчина").

And what happens with that forty-year-old woman, the head of an enormous industrial enterprise in Moscow, the strong woman in man's pants? She weeps with happiness - I am not joking!

In a society like Russian, despite all the hard work of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, life, still in many respects, is organized around good old Domostroi (a 16th century book or a code of a patriarchal rules of family life), of course, changed and adopted by the compliments of the XXI century. But a woman - in a notion of a woman - is supposed to be pretty, skinny, well-dressed, high-heeled, red-lipsticked, long-and-polish-nailed, educated (preferably, but not to use it), smart (optionally), good cook, good mother, good friend, good (inventive) lover, strong, fit, and by all that - stand by the side of a man. Just a man. With no attribute.

All that, no doubt, made a Russian woman a proverbial model wife all over the world with no obvious realization and acknowledgment from her side. Because we are brought up this way, we find nothing special in being a woman.

When my moderately handsome boyfriend, back then, was visiting me in Russia, I found it so rude that even stopped speaking to him for 30 minutes or so, after he left the bus ahead of me without offering me a hand. Then, this uncultured (so I thought) schmuck went through every door in a city first, never waited for me to take my place in a taxi, never offered (of course I would have declined gracefully, but still) pay a bill in a coffee shop. Never. never, never. So that eventually my inner lady-in-pink felt so cheap and neglected that I even considered an immediate break up.

Now it seems like charming memories from the past. But still the difference exists. We are, in our personal imaginative way, princesses in an ebony tower waiting for our knight in a shining armor (preferably on a white horse, produced in Germany). Even if we never admit it.  

And we let them think we are a bit stupid, naive and weak because...
we are not.


Copyright © 2013 by Olga Johannesson