Lured by the impossible dream of free pussy, the abused Westerner flies to fantasy land—East of Eden—to the former Soviets. There, women don’t compete with him. They do not want to prove they belong to the workplace, and aim to come on top. (Actually they may even enjoy being met in the bottom). There, he does not have to show first and foremost his vulnerable side in order to get some. There, he doesn’t even have to show proper respect for the bill of rights—he can get as rowdy and obnoxious as sex demands. There, ladies still learn in their mother’s womb that they have to please to be pleased.

Enough. The readers of this esteemed paper have been exposed to that kind of lecture over and over again. But since the editors tend to get involved on the lowest level with teenage sluts, they also tend to forget, keep under wraps, write off to hysteria, boiling hormones, you name it—the pros and cons of sex that dares say its name. On top of all that, being born in the United States, odds are they never knew the real thing in the first place—especially if the first place was high school… ecch, talk about ignorance. (Or was it Go-Go girls in Go-Go bars, along with weak beer, bad bourbon, and suspicious male bonding?).

Well, we Europeans (save, of course, for the British—who had to colonise four continents to find decent wives, and came up with such an exotic concept as Jack the Ripper at home) may be almost as hard up nowadays, but we still had a taste, our glory days are not that far behind us. So we do know that payback is a bitch, and that the bitch always collects.

However, the pull is so strong in this feminist Brave New World that we do wander into never-never land from time to time, and do learn our lesson—even though it’s more like a reminder.

So I’ll venture so far as to say that the Russian woman, say, 10 years above legal age, tends to be as fussy and overbearing as your average Mediterranean wife in the early 20th century.

You may fuck her silly, of course, and to hell with the foreplay—but how are you going to make it a permanent condition? As a double-edged sword, sex cuts both ways, so you’ll be lucky if you keep your weapon of choice where it rightly belongs.

Sure, she’ll marvel at first because you drink only every other day, buy groceries once in a while, refrain from unleashing your vaunted left hook every time you argue with her. But then, as with every major shift in the balance of power, all hell is bound to break loose sooner or later—a well-documented fact in this country about a decade ago.

For it’s an age-old truth of traditional womanhood that every small favor will become a means of control, and the Russians take it to another level: for the sake of poryadok, order (the key word in the house), you’ll have to review with her in excruciating detail every minute aspect of domestic life, which will take the best part of every damn evening you were willing to spend getting in her pants. If you do agree to express yourself—and you’d better—you’ll have to hang on to your every word for dear life: switching to cognac when you mentioned vodka, or to kasha if you once liked potatoes, blue sheets instead of white, etc.—can lead to an earthquake. Poryadok is the order of the day, not chaos. Then you better dress okay—especially if you’re going out with her: shiny shoes, creased pants, Ralph Lauren shirt, the works. The bitch assumes every other bitch in town will judge her by the way you look—and she’s right. On the morning of inspection, you’ll regret having missed the Foreign Legion; there, at least, you had a chance.

So your bohemian habits will be discarded one by one in light of the sacred order meant by God himself when he created man and woman. If, by some twist of fate, you happen to have a taste for expensive booze, decent coffee, and food that’s not exclusively parch and grease, you’ll be cursed and branded the evil bourgeois Westerner—how the hell can you spend all that dole on luxuries, when Baltika, Nescafe, cabbage, and lard cost next to nothing? At night, after a hard day’s work, complaining you’re tired and sick of the job, you will learn that man was made for labor, and woman to let him know, for she gives meaning to his life. She will probably indulge in a lecture about the sacrifices she makes day-in day-out to make your life comfortable—if you’re old enough, you’ve already heard your mother play that tune. Speaking of which, there may be talk of children after that; you look ripe for the onslaught. It’s easy to surrender, since the fuck is still great—even better after a good Russian row—and tomorrow is another day. According to me, though, it’s time to withdraw your expeditionary corps and run for what’s left of your life to set up a bordello on some remote atoll of Polynesia. But there are options:

• You can still become an alcoholic and a wife-beater, in which case the woman will adjust to the Cosmic Poryadok of National Karma… she may even end up loving you.

• Resume screwing teenage sluts and catch the clap.

• Go home and marry the careerist bitch from which you were running away in the first place, then live a life of misery.

But of course, all of the above means you lucked out in Russia.

You did not fall prey to one of these gold-diggers just dying to rip you off!