Oh, believe me, I speak from sad, bitter experience. I’ve spent significant chunks of time in Russia, speak Russian fluently, and have many Russian friends in the States. I’m sure there are some absolutely fine, wonderful, sensitive Russian men; I’ve even had some as friends. I’ve just never dated one.
And welll, let’s say that the culture as a whole generally deals women a rather harsh hand. If you want to know what I mean, dig up a copy of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope.
Or if you want, I can share some anecdotes from a grad school classmate who did her disseration on Russian women in the post-Soviet labor force. If your hair isn’t already curly, it would be when you were done reading her dissertation.
Well, since I’m bored as hell tonight (I’m at my dad’s house in NY, and everyone here goes to bed at 9 pm and is incapable of sitting in one room and having a familial conversation (which is what I was hoping for; hell, I would have settled for us all eating dinner simultaneously), why the heck not.
My classmate did a year of dissertation research in Moscow, and supported herself by working as a legal secretary for an American firm with an office in Moscow. The firm’s office manager was a rather flamboyant gay man, and apparently he used to really dread interviewing for administrative staff. Russian flamboyance isn’t of the same type as American flamboyance, and so the Russian ladies’ gaydar wouldn’t engage when he was interviewing them. So they would do what they thought they had to do to get the job: hike up their skirts, bat their eyes, and sometimes outright proposition him. Which basically made him want to throw up, since he didn’t swing that way.
Sorry, not nearly as entertaining as some of my other Russia stories, but I do what I can. Of more substance, however: the meat of her dissertation was about the backlash against Soviet-era labor laws that actually granted women a great deal of protection in theory (multi-year partially paid maternity leaves with guaranteed return to the same or an equivalent position, and the like).
When the economy tanked after the breakup of the Soviet Union, in practice this meant that women, especially young ones or single moms, were the first fired and the last hired, because it suddenly became much more expensive to employ them than to employ men. So many qualified, professional women ended up desperately seeking jobs for which they were insanely overqualified, and in a totally dysfunctional economy to boot. Throw in an equally dysfunctional court system, which meant that in effect women were unable to claim the rights guaranteed to them by law, and you can understand why lots of people took any available opportunity to get the hell out of there. In fact, an aquaintance of mine is a drop-dead gorgeous woman who I have always suspected was a mail-order bride; her husband isn’t exactly a dysfunctional zhlub, but well, he ain’t exactly in her league, and they have this really improbable story about how their eyes locked in the airport in Vienna, and they were inseperable form that moment on. He imported her shortly thereafter. But hey, if it works for them…
(And yes, the name is from Isabel Allende; I’m a big fan of hers. Plus my first name IRL is similar.)
JCoM, I’m really sorry about your loan troubles; that totally sucks.
Now, I don’t mean to be callous or anything, but seriously: The OP is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. I’m in the middle of writing the screenplay for my next zero-budget independent film, and that’s GOT to go in somehow. I’m still grinning like hell.
“Wait, he loaned $3,000 to a beekeeper? Named Bubba? And then it turned out the honey was gone, and Bubba was picking up a mail-order bride??? Am I on ‘Candid Camera’ or something?”
jackelope, you left out the whole bee-stings-as-therapy thing. That would make for the most hilarious scene of all.
[A thoroughly trashed Bubba with two black eyes and a bloody nose stumbles out to his hives only to sit down next to one, rattle it a bit and then get the shit stung out of him while he moans in pleasure]
You always hear about “mail order brides”, but I figured it was pretty rare and only a super sleazy dating service.
It’s sad that someone would feel that marrying a total stranger who ordered her by freaking MAIL like ordering from the Sears catalogue is her best option.
Eek! I’m reminded of the uber-creepy Roald Dahl short story Royal Jelly.
Actually, Zenster, I can see the “stinging therapy” scene being kind of weird and poignant:
*Fade in.
Bubba’s new mail-order bride done R-U-N-N-O-F-T and he’s in a bad heartache. He slouches out to the apiary, where a strange and seductive idea strikes him. As tears stream down his unshaven cheeks, he sheds his protective beekeeper’s clothing down to his skivvies, carefully folding and stacking the discarded garments.
And then, as the bees swarm over him and begin to do their stinging work, he slowly begins to smile…*
Not gonna happen in my movie though, because I act the lead and I’m afraid of bees.
Stick it in your movie, jackelope. Anybody that lives within spittin’ distance of the old SUN recording studios has got Carte-Blanche with me!
Now, I know I should have recorded a UCC-1 lien on that honey, but the dip-wads at the courthouse charge $14 in filing fees for such a thing, and… (Please note the first sentence of the OP: “So I’m a dumbass”)
I don’t know if Bubba gets his pickup from an adrenalin rush caused by the pain of the bee stings, or if there’s some chemical in the bee poison that lights him up. Either way, he swears by that particular cure for “feelin’ poorly”.
Well, good luck on getting your money back; it sounds like you have enough connections to Bubba that you probably will. He’s not likely to just take off and not come back, is my impression.
By the way, I’m about 200 yards from Sun Studio as I type this; I’ll drive by on my home from work. Been a rough year for Sun, with first Sam Phillips and then Johnny Cash dying.
Well, imagine for a moment you had a headache. You head out to the workshop, rummage through your toolbox, and find a ball-peen hammer. You drop your boxers and give yourself a whack in the nuts. Suddenly… your headache doesn’t seem so important anymore.
Also, just for grins take a look here. If the information is accurate [who knows?] these girls don’t look to have much wrong with them. They are plenty desirable and well educated. Makes one wonder - you’d think most of them could make their way without making any compromises.
One of DanielWithrow’s cousins married a Russian mail-order bride. She’s gorgeous, 25 years younger than her husband (she’s actually her stepson’s age), and speaks very good English. He brought her and her son over to the U.S. about three years ago, and they’ve since had another baby. They seem happy, but the situation nonetheless seems a little creepy. (This may be because one of the few conversations I’ve had with her is about the best sexual positions for conceiving girls. It was not a topic that I initiated.)
For clarification purposes, I don’t think hundreds of stings are involved in Bubba’s healing process. I took it to be more like one to three stings, depending on the degree of illness that needs curing. Since he has somewhere around 600 hives, I don’t think the death of a couple of bees worries him overmuch.
Thanks for the link, Waverly. Lemme’ tell ya’ this: If the Russian girl Bubba brings back is even remotely like the girls at that site, their relationship is going to be a train-wreck/mis-match of biblical proportions!
Two weeks ago a crowd gathered around Fred’s corral and hung out for hours. We were drinkin’ beer, tellin’ stories, and in general killin’ time until the cattle trailer arrived with Fred’s new bull. Everybody wanted to get a look-see, and it turned out that the bull’s arrival was the social event of the late summer.
How many folks do you reckon will be gathered up when Bubba brings his new bride home?
