Russian Women in America

Russian Women. No doubt a good many, maybe even most are big, blonde, beautiful and bad, lonely, single, hot, horny, sexy young and once young women looking, pretty much like the best of us on this lonely planet, for love, sex and marriage in all the wrong places, including abroad in the USA via online chat rooms, mail order bride catalogs and guides, dating services and escort agencies, free pen pal address sites and networks, and, of course, by posting 1000s of personals with festooned galleries of photos, pics, pictures and videos -- desperate and non-so-desperate model shots, some nearly undressed, some completely unclothed, some almost exotic erotica -- anything to make contact! at any rate to close the sale! -- all seeking that meeting, that one date with that mythical All-American marrying man, that mature but not necessarily old or older, tall or short, smoking or non-smoking, white or black potential husband out there just waiting to meet and marry that equally mythical Russian tennis player of a wife. American men. Beware! When it comes to Russian women, never try to scam a scammer. All sapphires are not blue!

In case you haven't guessed by now, some parts of Parts Are Edible are not exactly edible, at least not by human beings. Some - for example, the above thoroughly indigestible lump of words and phrases - are little more than bait for the digital beings that also roam this, our common virtual world. I am almost always amused to see which comes to swallow and which just chokes and spits it right back out. And considering that, to date, bots more often visit here than my fellow and fella humans, it is only reason that leads me to take my satirical pleasures where I may.

So in that vein, I am constrained to tell all you bots out there that the top five "russian women" terms for Christmas 2004 were single russian women, beautiful russian women, dating russian women, unclothed russian women, sexy russian women. And they were closely followed by another five terms, further revealing the desperate folly of lonely men: russian women for marriage, hot russian women, undressed russian women, young russian women, meet russian women. And why, among the concluding top 20 do we find only more of the same? Such as russian women photo, free russian women, beautiful meet russian women, russian women for sex (pretty much getting down to it), pretty russian women, russian women network (this one scares me most, because that's what any two together are), blonde russian women, russian women bride, and date russian women, until, in conclusion, the obvious, which perhaps more wisely ought to have been first: russian women black list.

Enough. Out!

Oh foolish men! If you have been misled here by some baited bot, you may think this the worst scam of all Russian women dating and marriage scams. But wait! I yet may have something to say on topic....

Enough, again. Out, out!

Oh foolish men of the net! If you dream of a Russian woman as a sexy, attractive yet dutiful and subservient wife, dream on, dream on. No such creature exists upon the face of the planet.

Enough, though that was on topic. Out, out!

Maureen Dowd: "Men Just Want Mommy"

Actually, I was thinking not necessarily about Russian women but about a Maureen Dowd column from a few weeks ago entitled "Men Just Want Mommy," which begins with the timeless, classic mid-life lonely older women's slur against men their own age, which, also true to classic form, comes complete with testimony of a manly "guy I know" manly validating the same slur against himself and his benighted kind:

A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.

Maureen Dowd goes on, rightly I think, to note the hint of a current trend in Hollywood toward "the soothing aura of romances between unequals." She cites, specifically, "Spanglish," in which "Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid," who "without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman"; as well as "Love Actually" - now playing interminably on HBO - in which the "witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese."

She's got a point about Hollywood - no doubt feeling its way to greater profitability in Bush's Red State America - that I'm not about to dispute. I can only wonder that she didn't also note as part of this trend the earlier "Maid in Manhattan," also now making the cable rounds with "Love Actually." Of course, I'm uncharitable enough to suspect that "Maid in Manhattan" didn't occur to her because the star and visible heavy-weight in this instance of the very same "romance between unequals" genre is Jennifer Lopez, playing the profession-aspiring, struggling, single, ethnic, working-class mom (Could we possibly get more PC inside this faded raqs-to-riches plot?), and not the empty suit playing the stiff Republican politician she lands with the help of her Nixon-fan of an adorable son.

Nevertheless, being that I am more or less (less!) of Maureen Dowd's age-cohort and married to a Russian woman over a decade younger than myself, I couldn't help but take some of her classic slur to heart, especially since I've otherwise become quite a fan of hers recently. At least I thought I'd think about it a bit; that is, to the best of my limited ability considering that I am, after all, a member of the "mentally challenged" gender.

I was particuarly struck by this line:

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

And suddenly, it dawned on me!

No, it's not some turn so simple as that women's typical behavior reveals that what they really want is to be in "a relationship with guys" they can talk seriously at; whereas, if anyone asked, even the most macho guys might confess to only dream of relationships with women who actually, astoundingly talk to them. Note that Maureen Dowd's cute trick singular-plural shift - "a relationship with guys" - is pretty damn telling in this respect: sounds like the same interminable talk at a sequence of indifferently replaceable guys! And they complain that men treat all women as interchangeable!

No, it's the element of futurity that, upon reflection, seems the hang to me: not anyone's achievements present tense, but achievements future tense.

No man of sense, and most men eventually do come to their senses, despite the gender's infamous innate and cultural handicaps.... No man of sense wants to be in an interminable relationship with a woman who sees him not as he is, in the ever changing here and now, but as a kind of bundled up, necessary potential, an unfolding and unfoldable futurity that will, if suitably responsive to improvement, ever-better a woman's own life and happiness.

Sound familiar? This is the way, all too often, that women view men who are their peers, especially in their common youth when life's course seems spread before them for the running. But no man of sense, however initially flattering the management-coaching offer, wants to be spurred forever onward in the race of life. Sooner or latter - call it a mid-life crisis if you will - every man of sense grows old enough to see that such is a race is toward a finish line that is the same for all, win, lose, or draw.

As they say, "Whoever dies with the most toys, dies." And I hasten to add the obvious corollary: Whoever dies with the most or the nicest children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren....he just dies, too!

Here is where the "secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers," the - let's be honest - younger women and foreigners, even the most cynical and blatant of gold-diggers among them, have the edge with - let's be honest again - men older and more set in life than themselves. For when they look at these men, moreover, when they take these men, for better or for worse, they take them for what they already are, for what they already have. Not for what they will or might yet be; not for what they might one day have.

And that tiny extra slack of mere degraded human acceptance, without the too common and too often delusional calculus of futurity, I think, is what makes the greater part of the difference.

No. Maureen Dowd's got it wrong. It's precisely when he stops thinking of himself as a "Sun God," about whom all must orbit, "serving and salaaming," that a man comes to his senses.

And no man of sense wants to be married to Lady Macbeth.

Even if Lady Macbeth, these days, comes complete with a career of her own to flog onward and onward to the last syllable of recorded time....

The queen, my lord, is dead.

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5

P.S. This is not at all the piece I intended to write to go with the picture at the top, but I was prohibited by the two on the outside (wife on the right, her best friend on the left) from posting any pictures from that day. They took them, not me. I was given no reasons, but was left free to suspect it's (1) because best friend's daughter in the middle is only fifteen, and more likely (2) because they believe she looks hotter in a bikini than either of them. Not true, by the way, if you happen to be a happily married man who knows what's good for him. Perhaps a slightly different story if you're our twenty-something year old, single neighbor, a foolish young man to whom jail-bait in the middle seemed, in bikini on our lawn, "the most beautiful woman" he had ever seen. Most of the time, men are fairly impressionable idiots, aren't they?

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Update (Feb 18, 2005): In favor of Maureen Dowd's argument, it must be reported that the currently leading search phrase for this page, according to the site stats, is neither the expected and obvious "undressed russian women" nor "unclothed russian women" [undressed and unclothed are euphanisms for the original text, placed here and above because the two n-words seem to result in ads for this page being deep-sixed] but an accidental combo I did not anticipate -- "horny secretaries" -- the "horny" from the blast of terms at the top of the article and "secretaries" from one of the quotations from Maureen Dowd's column, "Men Just Want Mommy."

For the life of me, I never would have suspected guys (just kids, I hope!) are actually sitting around searching the net for "horny secretaries." Even if that were one's -- what shall we call it? -- taste in these matters, you'd think the proverbial office water cooler would be a better start....

rri