JAMES P. writes:

Did you see this New York Times article on the “progress” of the sexual revolution in Russia? What amused me was the article’s overall perspective, which is that the sexual revolution indeed represented “progress” – rather than a slide into degeneracy – and that the Russians are to be pitied for their reactionary ignorance:

“We have to try to enlighten the customers,” said Ms. Borisova, an owner of Erotic Fantasy, a supplier of German-made intimate equipment in Russia. “No one knows what, why and how: what lubricant is, why a dildo is needed, how to use vaginal balls.”

How tragic that the average Russian doesn’t know about dildos and vaginal balls! Truly we live in a better world, where this knowledge is readily available to us, and indeed, it is hardly possible not to know about such things.

Two decades after government-imposed prudishness ended with the Soviet collapse, Russians still shy away from embracing European-style sexual mores. Despite a burst of licentiousness in the early 1990s, when pornography and prostitution surged through the country, the sexual revolution has never really taken hold here…. “There is just no sexual culture, none,” said Nadezhda Dovgal, one of the organizers of the sex shop convention, called the X’Show. “People are still ashamed.”

I am tempted to say, “good for them”. I am not convinced that towering transvestites and strippers dancing in cages are things we should take great pride in.

Then there is the fascinating contention that sex education is needed in order to encourage procreation:

While Ms. Dovgal’s recipe for marital bliss might not be for everyone, it is clear that Russian families are in crisis. There were three divorces for every five marriages in 2008, according to the Russian statistics agency. Russia is also suffering from a demographic crisis. The population declined by 6.6 million people between 1993 and 2008, according to a 2008 United Nations report. Emigration and a high mortality rate among middle-aged men are part of the cause. But so is a low birthrate.To get couples copulating, some Russian officials have come up with several ideas that Ms. Dovgal and her sex shop colleagues would certainly endorse. For several years the government of the Ulyanovsk region has set aside a special birthing day, when couples are given a day off to help reverse the population decline. Prizes are given to mothers whose children are born on June 12, Russia’s national day.

One thing is abundantly clear from experience in the West is that the “sexual revolution”, in which sex became primarily a vehicle for hedonism, tracks precisely with the decline in overall fertility. If the Russians embrace “European-style sexual mores”, then they will inexorably get European-style sub-replacement fertility rates. Of course, they have low fertility in Russia for different reasons, but this does not alter the fact that the “sexual revolution” is a cause of, not a solution to, people refusing to breed.

Laura writes:

This shoddy piece of journalism is so bad it’s unworthy of even Pravda on the Hudson. There is not the slightest pretense of analytic reporting. Imagine interviewing a purveyor of potato chips and asking him whether people should be eating more potato chips. Michael Schwartz has interviewed purveyors of sex toys and their customers and asked them for their views on licentiousness in  Russia. Schwartz was so lazy and smitten with his cheesy subject matter that he allows Ms. Dovgal to make the preposterous claim that birth rates have declined because people are having less sex and to argue, as sexual profiteers always do, that sexual pleasure was unknown before they came along and made it into a big business.

                                       — Comments —

T. Craig writes:

It is, indeed, shoddy journalism. Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world; some figures cite 13 abortions for every 10 lives births. So obviously Russians are managing to have sex and make babies (even if they then destroy them) despite being “unenlightened” and “prudish”.  

For Mr. Schwartz to sidestep the abortion issue in connection with the demographic crisis in Russia must have required some interesting mental gymnastics.

Laura writes:

Russian society has undergone a moral cataclysm. Everything that undergirds healthy relations between the sexes was all but destroyed under Communism.

Fitzgerald writes:

Russia has the highest abortion rate in the industrialized world per capita I believe, second only to China in sheer numbers. Until only very recently did live births exceed abortions and only barely. This is a horrendous and calamatous societal tragedy.

Gail Aggen writes:

Yes, the NY Times article is cheesy, pathetic, offensive and just so typical. What kind of person can read this stuff and really dig it? Well, wide is the path, as Jesus once said.

Our dear Fitzgerald brought up the distressing statistics about abortion in Russia. This horrible state of affairs in Russia was cultivated by the Communist culture which made life very harsh and the people very pragmatic about how feasible it is to raise and nurture children there. It is tragic how the Marxist debasement of traditional family life has really stacked the deck against Russian babies, and marriage too, for that matter.

However we in this country (at least until now) have had more resources (and I imagine sex toys) available to us than to any of our ancestors, yet we engage in “family planning” that has excised our future as a people. And we not only prevent them being conceived, we too abort a lot of babies, in large part because they are not convenient.

I imagine they aren’t convenient if you wish to preserve your current lifestyle. Babies are life altering, but as it turns out, so are the Obamas.

Because while it may be true that abortion is constitutionally protected, it seems we do not have a right to dessert. Here in our country, through some twisted perversion of the constitutional right to privacy, each woman has the right to “do what I want with my own body!!!” This right seems to start at the point where she can rip from her womb someone else’s innocent body. But I’m afraid if she wants to get that hot fudge sundae at McDonald’s, she’ll soon have to ask permission from the folks in the government who will be perusing her electronic medical chart in search of her BMI.

Leading the charge is that dreary deputy of the food police, Michelle Obama. But while she and the king are using our measurements to order up Mao uniforms for us chumps, our ruling elites have no compunction about their plans to see us eating beans and rice whilst we take to the streets by bicycle and rickshaw searching for a wayside scrap of wood with which to cook them. Its all about being lean and green, the cardinal virtues of the new religion.

In fact, the standard of living they want for us seems to be inversely proportional to their own appetites for lobster, designer dresses, extravagant dates on our dime, lavish vacations and entertaining themselves with sports, the hosting of pretentious, composting British rock stars, and quite simply all manner of PAR-TAAAYY!!!

I also like to partay, but I cannot partay because I am too busy paying for their partay. And besides they tell me I have no right to partay because its not good for me. And that we all, as a matter of fact should be ashamed to have or want anything.

Even Putin knows enough not to mess with the people’s vodka, but these guys will continue to step in and manage us for our own good. And I’m afraid that through sloth, complacence, apathy and excess, we are low-hanging fruit, ripe for the picking. For, if you will not control yourself, you will soon attract an outside power to do it for you.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Perhaps, after all, we are truly getting our just desserts.

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