On Being a Feminist in Russia

As horribly small-minded as it is for a foreigner to pass judgment on a culture to which he or she is unaccustomed, while wandering around St. Petersburg, I could not help feeling awfully uncomfortable, even personally affronted. My reaction to the dress of many Russian women was (and still is) prescriptive and culturally insensitive (but it’s okay as long as I acknowledge it, right?). How could any of these women, who show up to work and school in four-inch heels, heaps of make-up, and restrictive, skin-tight clothing, possibly be taken seriously by their male colleagues? One of my peers wittily inquired, “is this a school or a night club?” I have never, I thought to myself, felt so content with womanhood in the United States.
It is interesting for me to think of myself an American (or even a foreigner) discussing Russia because my family and I immigrated from Belarus, which, I can humbly add as neither an anthropologist nor a sociologist nor a political scientist, is not all that different from its arresting neighbor to the east. After fifteen years in the United States, I have become shamelessly American, yet as the daughter of Belarusian parents, I don’t think about Russia and Eastern Europe in the same way that most Americans do. My familiarity with the Russian heart and mind, I trust, adds a vital layer of nuance to my analysis.
My assessment of Russian dress was (and still is!) dangerously similar to the rhetoric of misogynists and slut-shamers who inappropriately police women’s behavior and sexuality while maintaining a semblance of morality. Who am I to tell any woman that she is not free to dress in whichever way she chooses? More to the point, how am I to draw the line between individual choice and cultural prescription (especially keeping in mind that I do not, by any measure, dress conservatively)?
Yet an important distinction must be made between true liberation and culturally prescribed self-objectification in its guise. I have difficulty swallowing the naïve assertion that in Russia, a country whose prime minister can state, on International Women’s Day, “we want women to be the ornaments of our lives” and get away with it, women are choosing how to dress independent of the influence of a patriarchal social structure. Blogger Harsha Walia wisely notes that fixating our discussion “solely around liberal questions of individual choice – the palatable ‘I can wear what I want’ feminism” is “devoid of an analysis of power dynamics.”
Though I much prefer to live in my head and cry about the ills of society, why not, I thought, ask some Russian women? Each of the wonderful women I spoke with acknowledged that women in Russia are expected to make themselves attractive before leaving their homes but also insisted that, contrary to how it may appear to us Americans, they do not spend hours a day obsessing over their make-up, they are not sent back by their husbands to apply make-up if they one day choose not to, and they are not, for the love of God, valued only for their appearances. More than once a Russian woman explained that they are taught from infancy to ukhazhivat za soboi, roughly translatable to to look after oneself, a principle with which I am so familiar that I was ashamed to have it told to me, as though I were a foreigner ignorant of a basic standard of decency. One might be tempted, as I was, to patronizingly dismiss Russian women as blind victims of patriarchy, yet the fact remains that where I saw a patriarchal, damaging cultural expectation, they saw nothing more than a harmless, even empowering convention.
Yet people do not often consider the ideological implications of their choices, and it is left up to the social critic to discuss to what extent women adorn themselves because they find it enjoyable and because it makes them feel good about themselves, and to what extent they do so for other reasons. It is very likely the case that women who conform to a social expectation are rewarded and made to feel good about themselves, but what is equally likely and far more significant is that thanks to cultural expectations like this one, women are made to feel that that their beauty is an indispensable element of their public persona, that they are not quite doing what is expected of them and that they will be significantly lacking in social capital if they do not wish to make themselves appetizing to men.
For now, I will choose to take the assertion that cosmetics make women feel good about themselves with a substantive grain of salt. To rely on make-up to feel good about oneself, to aspire to the impossible and demeaning standard of beauty perpetuated by the media, is, for many women, to be perpetually dissatisfied and insecure with oneself. One feminist blogger writes that in Russia, women are expected to both pay “attention to beauty” and be “well read, intelligent, competent.” Well, that is an awfully prescriptive and demanding expectation. Surely, I thought, these conclusions, which seem clear as day to me, would make sense to these women. I was met with blank stares. No, they insisted, we just enjoy dressing up.
As culturally relative as I strive to be, it would be naïve to deny that what I see in Russia aggravates my feminist vision. And strong feminist though I am, the cultural relativist in me (and the part of me that really wishes she were a moderate) contends that it is similarly naïve to judge Russia in the same way I do the United States; if women are insisting that they are not being oppressed or coerced, perhaps it would not be unreasonable to believe them.
Marina Bolotnikova ’14 is a Contributing Writer.
Photo Credit: russianwomentruth.com