My host’s BMW passed by a couple of slender women in their early 20s dressed up for a Friday night. He turned to me and said “the hunters are out.” Why would attractive young women be faced with the challenge of “hunting” for male companionship? “Remember that Russia lost 10 million men during World War II [see Wikipedia],” he replied, “and society still hasn’t gotten back to normal after three generations. Also remember that life expectancy for Russian men is 64 and for women it is 76 [CIA Factbook numbers are close]. Women dominate [are the majority] in every social group.”
What are they hunting for? “Sometimes they want money, but a lot of women have good jobs and just want to spend time with a man.” How about marriage? It sure seemed as though there were a lot of young mothers around the city [nationwide stats show median age of first marriage for a Russian woman of 25, compared to 27 in the U.S.]. “A man who earns at least $18,000 per year is considered a reasonable catch here,” he responded. “That’s enough to afford an apartment and support a family.”
Could the World War II demographic shock in fact still be felt? I met college students dating 35-year-old men (maybe because their college student peers still live with mom and dad?). I learned about a 70-year-old former Soviet administrator (i.e., not rich) with a 46-year-old girlfriend who had a middle class job and wouldn’t have needed a man for financial reasons. “Women over age 30 can forget it,” one local said. “There are fresh 18-year-old girls arriving in Moscow from all over the former Soviet regions.”
Departures from strict monogamy are not unheard of. A married man referred to the delicate etiquette of when the girlfriend meets the wife. For those with kids, the young girlfriend downtown is the “second family.” Does the girlfriend have an incentive to get pregnant and create a full-fledged “second family”? Unlike in the U.S., where child support following out-of-wedlock sex can yield $millions, the practical limit in Russia seems to be about $300 per month. If a girlfriend is getting more than that in the form of, e.g., free rent, she has no financial incentive to have a baby.
[It is possible to tap into a fellow citizen’s wealth through marriage, but Russia seems to have a California-style community property system in which assets acquired prior to the marriage are unreachable by a divorce plaintiff. Alimony profits may not be large due to the expectation that women in Russia are capable of working.]
Russian women are not shy about shedding a useless mate. “At least a third of the Uber drivers that I ride with ask me if I’m married,” said one local. “When I say that I’m not, they say ‘Good. Don’t get married.’ Then they tell me how they lost their job, were quickly divorced by their wives, and are now driving for Uber.” (If there are no children involved, a Russian divorce can be obtained through a quick and inexpensive administrative procedure. Even a judicial divorce in Russia is nothing like the festival of litigation that would be typical in many U.S. states. Ordinary citizens are able to retain lawyers to handle divorce cases without draining the family savings.)
As in other no-fault (“unilateral divorce”) countries, it is children who pay for the sexual freedom of their parents. An adult woman told me of her childhood visitations with the father that her mother had discarded. Presumably due to the shortage of men, he had been picked up by a different woman and had started a family with Wife #2. The daughter of the first marriage would go over to Dad’s apartment, complete with stepmom and new half-sibs, for a few hours every two weeks. They didn’t have enough room to keep her overnight and she never became a true member of her father’s family. This was not especially enjoyable for anyone.
You friend clearly does not understand how demography works. Apparently you need new real friends, and not just new facebook friends.
Bet the married men are a lot less crazy than in Silicon Valley. A severe shortage of women means men have to be a bit off the rails to hold their attention. We’ve all heard about the insanity at Uber, by now.
After the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay – Paraguay lost up to 70% of its male population. I’m guessing if you were a man during the era after the war, you were going to get laid every night. Probably no strings attached either (e.g., child support).
Maybe the solution is to start another world war, lose about 50% of the male population and just let the law of supply and demand take its course. Then perhaps we’ll stop hearing all the women whining about men and why they couldn’t join the local computer club out of their own volition.
And even the Catholic Church sanctioned polygamy – for those men brave enough I suppose. One women is enough trouble keeping happy, I can’t imagine having 5 of them (married).
If men are so hard to come by and alimony payments are low, why are the women so quick to divorce? Could it be they have discovered that men are not worth the trouble? Do the men make trouble because they know they can get another woman?
Your tales of life in Russia highlight only the positives (as in your pseudo-critiques of Trump). With advantages at so many levels, why are not hordes of people from big-government, regulation-encumbered USA not moving to Russia? Why are you in particular not moving to Russia?
Pretty sure the real reason is the mobsters. This culture emerged in Russia and several other Eastern European countries as a result of the lawlessness. The only way for women to get any personal security and reasonable standard of living was to chase the mafia types. For men it was the rise of the pumping iron and martial arts culture. Unlike the US the average Russian math or computer nerd can discuss the differences in diets between famous body builders and how many reps are optimal for building mass vs definition.
Tiago: Why don’t I move to Russia? Asking this question is a perfect example of the attitude that apparently evolves after decades of exposure to anti-Russian propaganda in the U.S. media. In a comment on https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/05/25/russian-support-for-vladimir-putin-and-freedom-of-expression/ I wrote the following:
(One thing that I have noticed on Facebook is that if I post anything favorable about Russia people get angry. I can write “the Louvre has some nice art” and nobody says “If you like art so goddamn much why don’t you move your sorry ass to Frogland?”. But if I say “the Moscow subway runs every minute” people respond with “Why don’t you move there if it is so great?”)
[But my reasons for not moving to Russia are the same as my reasons for not moving to Chile, New Zealand, Japan, Italy, et al. My friends and family are here in the U.S. and American English is my native language so I get more out of the culture here than in countries where they don’t speak the language of Jesus Christ.]
philg, I get the same response when I mention something nice about the UK here in my red native state. My daughter and her family are happy expats in London so it is not unimaginable to move there, but also not my first choice. Your reports from Moscow have been a pleasant surprise, but not-Moscow Russia is pretty rickety. The economy is about the size of Italy, so Moscow is clearly favored like so many capital cities.
Phil, I am sorry if my comment came across as angry. That was not my intention. I was actually genuinely curious. I have far from my country of birth for many years and moved around several different countries where the language was not my native language and away from friends and family. These countries include the USA but not Russia, and I have not been subject to decades of Russian propaganda. (In fact, the country where I live has a border with Russia.) So my perspective may be a little different, and I’m sorry if it sounded angry. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Russia or Moscow, but your descriptions seem so at odds with my experiences that I’ve been rather amazed. Maybe central Moscow has developed significantly, although I find it hard to believe the same is true in the suburbs.
Donald: Yes, I’m sure that the wealth of Moscow comes at the expense of the hinterlands. But the same can be said of the D.C. Metro area. Bethesda, Maryland, where I grew up, is one of the richest areas of the U.S. (and has become ridiculously richer in the years since my childhood), fed by tax dollars streaming in from Ohio, Michigan, Arkansas, etc.
Separately, I’m not sure why Tiago thinks that the above posting is unqualified praise for Russia. The original post talks about a life expectancy for Russian men of 64. That’s not a good number. I tell people that I’m “90 percent dead” but it would be close to the literal truth if I were to move to Russia. Having grown up behind a white picket fence with parents who are now well beyond their 50th wedding anniversary, the Russian system of dating and mating doesn’t fit my personal idea of how a society should be organized. Their family law system is less destructive to children than the U.S. system, but the same can be said of almost any country.
Helen Rapaport’s “Caught in the Revolution” https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250056640/ref=rdr_ext_tmb quotes a foreign journalist in Russai saying something to the effect of “to write about Russia you need to live there for few decades but than you become half Russian and you can’t” Seems like a fitting observation. I would give this book C- but it is yet the best introduction to those who want to understand Russian events I have so far read.
Tiago: I didn’t read your response as angry so much as typical! I think that Moscow has changed dramatically. Some of the people telling me about how chaotic, dangerous, dirty, etc. it was going to be were Russians who lived in Moscow as recently as 2000. When I told them that nobody smokes in public places and that everyone seems to obey the traffic laws their jaws dropped.
Congrats to you for being willing to globetrot. Thus far (in 53 years) I’ve been too lazy/complacent to do anything other than move among three big U.S. cities (D.C., Boston, and San Francisco Bay Area).
Russia certainly isn’t perfect, but Moscow is a great city by anyone’s standards. What they’ve achieved in public transport is something that no city in the U.S. has ever come close to achieving. Certainly one could be happy there, though I think that life is almost always easier in the U.S. Just yesterday a neighbor was asking me about Russia and he said that his impression was that it was a beaten-down slave population where everyone was constantly in fear of being rounded up for making an anti-government statement (perhaps this was true in the Stalin era?).
We’re coming up on July 4, probably our greatest lie-telling festival! We were being crushed by taxes amounting to 2 percent of income and the British were committing Al-Qaeda/ISIS-grade atrocities against us. So of course we had no choice to rebel.
philg #13
Moscow was public, not exactly reflective of rest of the country, face of USSR just as you describing it. I see no difference with 1985 Moscow in your description. But people who lived in part of Russia that is train ride away from Moscow rode railroad trains there for routine supermarket shopping, because nothing was available in their towns.
Let me just scan today’s domestic headlines to see if we’ve built a society that should be calling other societies inferior and dysfunctional…
A guy who hates Republicans went on a shooting spree in Virginia.
An employee of UPS in San Francisco went on a shooting spree at the UPS office there.
“Top Michigan health official, four others charged with manslaughter in Flint water crisis”
“UN says 300 civilians killed in US-led air strikes in Raqqa since March”
“Democrats in Congress Sue Trump Over Foreign Business Dealings”
“At Bill Cosby’s Trial, Hours Unwind Without a Verdict”
“Police: Texas man tired of paying child support meant to kill kids”
“Two indicted in lottery ‘discount’ scheme to circumvent child support, welfare debts”
“Man who robbed South Portland bank had fallen behind on child-support payments”: “When Gaston arrived in Maine he went to a temporary work agency and got three jobs working around the clock,” … Gaston was tired of working a lot of hours but not making enough money to pay off his child support, or get ahead in life.”
“Massachusetts woman charged with encouraging boyfriend’s suicide on trial for manslaughter”
philg # 15,
Wikipedia has 2015 homicide rate in Russia more than twice USA homicide rate, with from extremely limited to nonexistent civilian firearms ownership in Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
I would expect crime statistics from 2015 Russia (past Crimea occupation) under-reported. The link also has links to Russia regional resources. I did not check them but they may shed some light on the issue.
It is a shame that Russia has a higher homicide rate than the U.S., but one can’t live simultaneously in all of Russia. Moscow itself has a lower murder rate than New York, according to https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/30/new-york-crime-free-day-deadliest-cities-worldwide
New York is the safest of big U.S. cities, which means Moscow is safer than any big U.S. city: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/02/daily-chart-3
The murder rate in Moscow is also far lower than in our imperial capital of Washington, D.C.
Murder in America is essentially an African phenomenon. This comes up over and over again with international comparisons. All stats must be broken down by ethnicity to hold any meaning.
Jack crossfire – I agree with you about Silicon Valley. I had more attention paid to me in 4 days in San Francisco than 4 years of local match.com. Maybe I should relocate?