Misogyny knew no Iron Curtain.
A few years ago I heard in an report (that I cannot find anywhere) the interview of several Russian young women who stated that Russian society was a “post-feminist” one, meaning that, according to those same women, thanks to the former Communist regime and the apparent equality between workers, between comrades, Russia was now past the feminist fight for equal rights and, even more baffling, that women in Russia used misogynistic conceptions of femininity to their advantage. Men open the door for them? Neat, they have power over them. Men carry heavy things to spare them the inconvenience? Great, who wants to carry things anyway?
I was mad. Firstly because Communism never reduced the gap between men’s and women’s conditions in Russia. Secondly because supposedly taking advantage of being treated like a fragile bird or being shown politeness will never qualify as an empowerment. Thirdly, because from what I see now in my surrounding, Slavic women are far from being the epitome of feminism. At least, not the women of my family.
Given the quasi-mutic nature of my father, I will never know whether his marrying of a Ukrainian woman six years ago was an attempt to reach for his Slavic origins, a Freudian mimesis of the parental couple, or a mere coincidence. I have other theories about the ease with which you can, as a middle-class man, buy a blond wife from those self-proclaimed post-feminist countries, but I shall talk about this later.
I’ve been raised by my mother, a French woman, who spent years urging me to be financially independent, to never bond to a man so strongly that I shall be blinded by some of the things he might do. When I failed my driving exam, she sarcastically told me that I had no other choice but to be driven around by my future husband now. My mother kept on being what I thought was a feminist, yet she kept on bonding to the wrong men and now I’m quarantined with her and my depressed and hypochondriac step-father who tells her every day in the privacy of the whole house that she’s heartless, fat and ugly.
I wish France, like Mother Russia, were a post-feminist country.
Reading Critical theory at university made me aware of the fact that what I despised about women and men around me was despised by other women. It made me aware that heterosexual couples around me reek of internalised misogyny, of symbolic or straightforward violence. For a long-time I fought against my initial instinct to reject feminine figures who were not completely emancipated from the male yolk, because I thought that feminism was exactly that: embracing all types of representation of women, celebrating them. Housewives, cheesy princesses and Audre Lorde alike. Even the quirky French MeToo movement faced the primal cry from those women who like to be “importunées”, bothered, catcalled, harassed, as though their outdated vision of seduction ought to be yet another version of femininity.
Now I do not care about despising those who could find themselves in other situations than their current one for love. The present state of masculinity does not provide a nice and respectful version of The Straight Couple. Always women are in chains, be it mental workload or domestic violence. Even my mother failed to be the bra-burner I thought she was.
My Ukrainian step-mother and I are two different species. She smacks my hand when I bite my nails, calling me a “psychopath” (her words, not mine); she thinks literature does not serve any purpose and that I should have read Economy instead; she complains about my not wearing any makeup and my “not naturally” dyed hair, because men prefer women like this. I worry because now that she achieved French nationality, she will be able to vote for the far-right at the next presidential election. Most importantly she accepts the daily humiliation my father puts her through. I must admit that she is a great deal stupid on top of being racist, homophobic, islamophobic, and so on and so forth. But I can assure you that he married her exactly because he would have the upper-hand: she did not speak any French before moving in, her diplomas were not recognised in France and there is a natural tendency in her to submit to men. She wants to be taken care of, she does not want to work, she wants shoes and daubs to hang in the living-room.
I imagine that is what those Russian women called a post-feminist attitude; I imagine that making the most of my father’s money in order to have a better life is my step-mother’s take on misogynistic advantages.
I know Slavic women are not all like her, nor like my Polish grandma. I have read Akhmatova’s poetry.
Yet my Russian teacher in high-school was obsessed with Chanel purses and fur coats. She thought I had not understood the exercise when I matched the skirt with the male character and the trousers with the woman on my working sheet. In chemistry class in Saint Petersburg I had a massive fight with a classmate about lesbians. My Russian penpal’s family follows the same model of nurturance any other sexist society does. Russia is not post-feminist at all, period. Misogyny knew no Iron Curtain.
But now that Audre Lorde came into the picture, I can finally articulate the unease I feel when I hear some Russian lady say that using misogynistic patterns to a woman’s advantage is the ultimate proof that Russia is beyond feminism. Now I can just say “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.
I try my hardest to criticise the master’s house – my father’s house as far as my step-mother’s case is concerned. Yet sometimes I find myself in a situation of connivance. Because I laugh at her, because I genuinely think she is stupid and hopeless, I laugh at all her sisters, her equals, her comrades, I “divide and conquer”, like Lorde phrased it. I do not know how to finish this paper other than by saying that education offered me the opportunity to distance myself from those patterns as much as it gave me the opportunity to despise the willing or unwilling participants of such dynamics.
