the post-Soviet woman

A brilliant analysis can be found at http://valt.helsinki.fi/staff/rotkirch/gendcontract.htm

It's a few years old: I will search for more recent work by these people.

Lovely kids' books: pity about the sexism part 1

Do you notice how kids' books are still propagating the same old gender stereotypes? 

I'm picking on Julia Donaldson and Axel Schaeffer, purely because their books are lovely and imaginative. They're great, but they are sexist! Take a look at these three:

Rabbit's Nap:

Rabbit (female) tries to sleep while various busy male animals, Builder Bear, fox chopping wood and tortoise on a bike, mice musicians, all keep her awake. They are mostly wearing tweeds. Finally, they sing her to sleep. Whilst the book is very charming, it's clear that the female role is reclining, static, the passive recipient of annoyance, and the male roles are all active: chopping, building, cycling, playing music.

The Smartest Giant in Town:

George the giant gets a new suit of clothes but gives each item away one by one to animals in distress. At the end they thank him. It's beautifully illustrated and takes place in a semi fairytale, semi-real landscape. However, why do all the characters have to be busy fulfilling stereotypical gender roles? Women are shown pushing prams, hanging up washing, shop assistant helping male shop manager. Men are shown wheeling wheelbarrows and reading the newspaper. All the animal characters George helps are male except for 'mother mouse' who is only defined through being a mother and having lots of children. 

The Snail and the Whale:

Snail is female, whale is male. The whale plucks the snail away from her static existence and shows her the world, opening her eyes to its wonders. He is the mentor, teacher, enabler, and is physically massive and powerful. She is small and the pupil taking it all in. She does, however, save the whale through her intelligence. 

Now I'm not advocating some sterile universe of kids' books where everything is PC, but it would be so easy and liberating to to project the idea that all kinds of people do all kinds of things in the illustrations and stories.  The Shirley Hughes books, though dating from the 1970s and 80s are streets ahead. You can be folksy and imaginative without being sexist, you don't have to copy tired old stereotypes into beautiful imagined worlds. So come on, let's see Mother Mouse with a hammer.

Hot in Kazakhstan, not in the Netherlands.

'Western women walk like men, like this', my Kazakh friend said, doing an impression of a kind of dyke cowboy swagger with shoulders thrust out. 'Why do they do that? It's so ugly. 

'If I had a daughter, I would teach her that a woman's duty is above all to be decorative,' another female Kazakh colleague told me very seriously. She was a highly intelligent professional woman who had brought up a child alone whilst working full time. She admitted that even on a recent ranch holiday, she had always applied her lipstick before going down to the stables.

I was definitely not decorative enough for Kazakh standards. Most young women were extremely good-looking already and also spent hours making themselves glamorous every morning. Like Ukraine and Russia, Kazakhstan is like a country sponsored by FHM: models everywhere. Profoundly disquieting for your average hearty Western girl.

'May we ask you a personal question, Gemma?' probed another colleague. 'We noticed that you do not wear make-up; is it because you have an allergy to cosmetics?'  They were bemused when I said 'no'. Why would a woman not want to look as gorgeous as possible 24/7? Why would she wear glasses and flat shoes to work (they considered that trousers and flat shoes were just not 'prilichny' or 'decent' in an office environment. They all knew I was living with my boyfriend and not married (also not mainstream in Kazakhstan), and were gently trying to nudge me towards better personal grooming in the hope that he would do the decent thing and marry me (he did: was it those eight blonde streaks I had done in the summer of 2005 that led to his mountaintop proposal?)

So in Kazakhstan (as well as Russia), the predominant opinion amongst people I knew is that a woman makes herself attractive as a kind of duty of respect to others and to herself. In Soviet times it was also part of trying to add some glamour to the bleakness, and was a kind of valiant resistance against the feeling of being knackered out and dehumanised by daily life, when women queued for food around 7-8 hours per week.  Cultured grannies sported perfectly whipped-up maroon beehives, nowadays toned down at Toni and Guy in Almaty or Astana. 

Although grunge has been washed in to this region through MTV and the internet, it is too late for the over twenty fives who must stick to the beauty norms, with a Western size zero flavour: eating disorders have skyrocketed in the former Soviet Union since 1991. 

None of this is true for men. A friend in Almaty was deeply disturbed by her teenage son's vanity and the way he cared for his appearance. Any trip in a shared 'marshrutka' or minibus taxi reveals a certain disregard for personal hygiene amongst the men, added to the usual post-Soviet infusion of tobacco, meat fat and last night's spirits. The harsh truth is that in Kazakhstan, if you wish to get a boyfriend with his facial features more or less in alignment, you have to look like Agyness Deyne, or better.

Cut to the Netherlands. Tall, statuesque women stride fearlessly about wearing leggings with baggy flowery dresses over them and long flat boots, their manes of wild hair in varying shades of blonde blowing haphazardly in the wind. Of course, the more soignee exist, but unlike the UK, not everyone has ironed hair and pastelly lipsticks (perhaps because they are incompatible with rain and gales), and there isn't the same trend as in the UK towards the Because I'm Inferior L'Oreal Zombie look that has taken over a lot of my home country. 

A lot of Dutch women dress functionally, as if setting off on a Girl Guiding expedition, wearing sensible waterproof jackets over their black polyester work trousers. Do they get boyfriends? Yes. Does this make me feel more comfortable, as a person who a) believes women shouldn't have to be dressed as Carry On style dolly birds to be considered sexy and b) is basically unwilling to wear uncomfortable clothes and shoes unless for a special occasion. I don't know. Anyone want to borrow my straighteners?