Anna Shpakova is a beautiful Russian blonde. A professional dancer and the art director of Moscow’s new Leica Academy, she favors a wardrobe of black single in russian threads that hang gracefully on her trim frame. And yet, like so many Russian women, Shpakova has lost hope of finding a suitable mate among her fellow countrymen.
The litany of complaints that Russian ladies have against their male counterparts is long: They smoke too much and drink too much. They cheat shamelessly and curse freely. They expect their girlfriends and wives to clean for them, cook for them, and to look like models. The dating prospects are so grim, in fact, that Shpakova and many other Russian women of her generation are consciously deciding to stay single. Moscow alone boasts more than 3 million single women between the ages of 25 and 50, out of a population of 11.
In Russia as a whole, there are 11 million more women than men, due in part to a century of bloody revolutions, gulags, and wars that drained the country’s male population. Still, the numbers of single men and women in Russia are roughly equal: 17. 6 million single ladies to 17. Irina Zhuravleva, the head of Russia’s census department at the Federal Statistics Service.
Her stance reflects the fact that Russian culture has yet to catch up with women’s lib—a point that frustrates the country’s younger women in particular. Despite the overwhelming surplus of women in Russia, only 3 percent of the country’s senior executives are female and a scant 6 percent of politicians are women. Just recently, Russian women have begun to circumvent this traditional system by forming female networking events. Most of these women admitted to being disillusioned by the way their career paths were blocked by male colleagues. Russia’s male leadership was publicly accused of chauvinism last week by Valentina Matviyenko, Russia’s most senior female politician, who predicted a woman would sit in the presidential chair in as little as 15 years. I am sick of men always treating me as if I were somebody’s dumb secretary, unable to make my own decisions!
Popova exclaimed emotionally during a coffee break at the Russian Socialist Left Alliance last week. While Popova is a single woman working to change the system from within, other young women remain distrustful of Russia’s political and legal systems, which are run by and for men. It’s unsurprising, then, that Russia is home to the world’s second-highest divorce rate—after Belarus—with 65 percent of marriages ending in a split. And while many Russian women still hold out hopes of finding a Prince Charming, they are also coming to terms with the weight of the demographic and cultural factors working against them. Some women, like Shpakova, have decided to date only non-Russian men. It is the desire for sexual contact with any given person. It has a lot of things in common with libido, but high libido is more of a permanent high state of sexual desire without regard to a particular person.
