Some advice from Russia for the materially deprived women of Britain: if
you’re wondering where it all went wrong and why you ended up not marrying a
millionaire, let alone a billionaire, first take a look in the mirror.
Chances are that some, if not most, of the following attributes apply to you
. . .
You wear flat shoes. If you do wear earrings, they’ll be plain old studs, not
the dangly, sparkly sort favoured by men of taste. Your hands and feet are
unmanicured, your eyebrows unplucked. Your hair is blow-dried only for
weddings. Your favourite words and phrases are: “No”, “Not tonight”, or “Do
we have to?” (as opposed to: “Yes,” and “I can be whatever you want me to
be”). You favour tights over stockings and if you have ever taken them off
in front of a man, you haven’t done so in pigtails while sucking a lollipop
and in time to George Michael’s Father Figure. You haven’t done so because
decades of feminist thought have conned you into thinking that it is
demeaning to be subservient, and that the brain is the most attractive part
of the female anatomy. From Moscow comes the news that the most attractive
part of a woman’s body is “irrefutably still the arse”. This is Vladimir
Rakovsky’s view, and he thinks he should know. Over the past ten years
Rakovsky has become the leading authority on how to marry a millionaire.
Not just a millionaire, claims Rakovsky. His oversubscribed courses in Moscow,
Kiev, St Petersburg and select resort hotels in Egypt instruct women how to
find, and hold on to, a Real Man. I tell him that many people in Britain
think a Real Man is the kind of person who knows how to change a nappy or
cry. Rakovsky digests this with a grimace, for him it is more proof of the
corrupting influence of the West, which he also holds partly responsible for
the recent defeminisation of Russian women and the invention of the detested
“metrosexual”. No, a Real Man in Russia is only three things: he is good in
bed, he has emotion and he has money. As long as he is these three things he
doesn’t even have to be attractive or sober.
Rakovsky is sober but less attractive in real life than he is on his website,
which does a good job of obscuring his striking paunch. Sign up for one of
his $200 (£100) six-part “Stervologiya” courses (the word derives from the
Russian for “bitch”), says the website, and you can become “a strong,
successful self-confident woman; a player who can skilfully manipulate a
man; a woman who makes a man do what she wants but makes him feel that he’s
in charge”. She gets what she wants by “creating a whole system with which
to play with a man” and making comments such as: “I have a big bum, do you
want to touch it?” Even at work “a short skirt and bright red lipstick never
hurt anyone”, says Rakovsky, “a boss is not interested in a robot”. In many
parts of Russia sexual harassment is still considered a compliment.
We are in a back room in an empty Moscow theatre where Stervologiya classes
take place three times a week. Everything that you need to know about
postcommunist Russian sexual politics is here. Twelve women in short skirts
and heels are taking rapt, meticulous notes from Rakovsky. The women are
sitting, he is standing. The women are attractive, but single, divorced or
desperate. Rakovsky is flabby but married (several times over): “You already
know how to be independent and strong, but who is teaching you to be a real
woman, to be mild?” he muses rhetorically. “You should be light and fluffy.
Sometimes it is hard for you to bring a cup of coffee to your man, to show
him respect. It is hard for you to be quiet, to be patient, to resist the
urge to take control.”
A hefty blonde in her late thirties is taken aback by this insight: “I always
want to take control of my man. I can’t fight it. But as soon as I take
control, I lose interest in him.”
Rakovsky is sympathetic but firm: “Russian women are psychologically repressed
because of their history. The traditional Soviet understanding of a woman’s
role is that she should take the lead. Women have been told that to get
something they have to try a lot. After perestroika many women lost their
jobs or the husbands lost their jobs and they felt unneeded. What I teach is
a little bit different. What you can do well, you do yourself. Of course you
can change the car tyres yourself, but why do you have to show your
strength?”
He asks the women to draw up on paper a plan on how to attract a man, to begin
a relationship and make it serious. This involves not only careful budgeting
but ingenuity. Where are all the rich men? One woman suggests joining a
deep-sea diving club. Another suggests her local bar.
Rakovsky is unimpressed by their lack of vision: “If you want a real man you
have to have a real strategy. I’ll give you an example of a genius plan,” he
says. “A woman decides to open a VIP club and sends invitations to only
rich, attractive men. On opening night she is the sole woman there. This is
a plan with strategic realisation.”
How rich is rich enough? The consensus from the women here to-day is that a
real man doesn’t necessarily have to be a millionaire as long as “he can
afford everything”. “A man must have money to make you happy,” says Anna, a
pretty and robust-looking 27-year-old HR manager who signed up for the
course after her marriage fell apart. Anna says that the miniskirt she is
wearing is new and it seems to be attracting “more of a reaction” than the
backless top she experimented with last week.
“It’s up to a man to be good at business and women to be beautiful. A man
without money is not a man,” sighs Anna. “He is a boy.”
Irina, a 28-year-old, turned to Stervologiya after she was dumped for the
first time in her life. It has, she says, given her confidence and, in
Rakovsky’s words, helped her to “identify her prey”. Tonight her enormous
cleavage threatens at any moment to break loose from her low-cut frilly top.
Do other women mind? “If a woman is not happy that way it’s fine for me.
There are fewer competitors.”
Irina’s mission when she started was to become the mistress of a millionaire
she’d met. “Recently he’s called me,” she says airily. “But the problem is
that the better a woman becomes, the less men deserve her. I’m too good for
that millionaire now.” She has no problem “with being subservient to a man
in private; if I behaved at home as I do at work, I’d never get anywhere”.
One of the cornerstones of Stervologiya is Rakovsky’s theory that men come in
only three varieties. Once a woman has identified whether deep down a man is
a little boy, a mature man or a carefree bachelor type, she can realign her
behaviour accordingly. The little boy craves a self-confident, mature woman
who will take him in hand. Meanwhile, a woman who behaves like a timid,
often shy and occasionally ignorant five-year-old child will bring out the
protective instincts of the mature man. Even if you are an overweight
fiftysomething woman, the eternal bachelor will be more susceptible to your
advances if you move (and occasionally skip) like a carefree teenager.
Apart from the influence of the evil West, two other factors make it
particularly difficult for any woman to find a Real Man in Russia. First,
men in general are in short supply – male life expectancy here is 58.
Secondly, huge losses of men in the Second World War and the Soviet labour
camps have contributed to the myth that men are special.
“Russian men are really quite weak,” says Rakovsky. “They are frightened of
career women, as they are frightened of their mothers.” What they are not
frightened of is a woman who is selfless, physically attractive, fit,
interested in sex, educated and indispensable. A woman “who always smiles,
flirts erotically but isn’t vulgar, has good manners and is rather
shy”.
In the corner, Ivgenia, 23, to whom Vladimir is married at the moment, stands
in a short black dress and heels, casting her connoisseur’s gaze over the
assembled stragglers. In a moment, once her husband has set this week’s
homework (return next week with the business cards of at least three
interesting men), she will take the women next door for Part Four of the Art
of Seduction, in which her charges learn to permanently walk as if on a
catwalk and take off what few clothes they have on in an alluring yet
sophisticated manner and in time to Britney Spears’s I’m a Slave 4 U.
They will learn how to wiggle their hips, kneel in a posture of mock
subjugation and eat a banana suggestively by practising in front of a mirror
– all with a view to some day applying those techniques to the anatomy of a
very successful man. They are successful themselves, these women – they earn
high wages, they even run their own companies thanks to Russia’s booming
economy – but they take their cues from Ivgenia, a former model. Why?
Because in one crucial aspect she outclasses them all. Besides Stervologiya,
her husband owns several other thriving businesses. He is middle-aged and
overweight. But he is rich.
