Behind the Global Obsession on Eastern European Women
Growing up in the northern capital of the largest country in the world, there has never been a morning where my mom did not put on her long wool coat and her high-heeled boots only to give me a ride to school. “Casual” never existed for her or her friends or millions of other women across the country. After moving to Florida in my early teens and adapting to a culture valuing comfort over style, going back home for the summer meant feeling self-conscious about my acne face when seeing my childhood friends who skipped their ugly phase.
Image Courtesy: Daily Soap Dish
Eastern European women are indeed recognized for their unmatched beauty in every corner of the world. If you were to read through a prestigious high fashion magazine, such as Harper’s Bazaar, or Vogue, chances are you will spot a Russian or Ukrainian model taking up the advertisements page after page, if not the cover. Millions of women question, how do they do it? The answer is more than just putting on makeup and looking feminine on a daily.
Sure, reading the history, you will find that modern Eastern European women emerged from a diverse gene pool. From the Tatar Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus to the October Revolution in 1917, Slavic people have been exchanging their genes with a variety of cultures from neighboring Eastern European states, Central Asians, North Europeans, and many other backgrounds in the world. As one of the syndromes of economic and political instability, Eastern Europe is also notorious for invasions and wars. When resources become scarce, husbands die in war, safety is at stake, and women yearn for stability. For that reason, we are today’s biggest “gold diggers” and “scammers”, as the internet likes to label them.
Image Courtesy: Rare Historical Photos
History makes it clear– since World War II, Eastern Europe has seen a significant loss of its male population, who perished in battles or simply left the country. Modern Eastern Europe is predominantly female, as the gender ratio “ in Russia is currently 86.8 men per 100 women, and the ratios in Latvia (84.8), Ukraine (86.3), Armenia (86.5), Belarus (86.8) and other former Soviet nations are similarly low”, as reported by the Pew Research Center in 2015. The shortage of men in Eastern Europe instigates the cultural and gender high-maintenance beauty standards consisting of weight-loss diets, cosmetic treatments, and even plastic surgeries. Under the deliberate appearance of an Eastern European woman lies a fierce competition between other women, the majority of whom will end up in hands of abuse from their spouses.
This takes me to my next point. The Eastern Orthodox church endorses patriarchy to conflate with traditional conservative values. Women are envisioned to be subservient to their husbands and adapt to their demands while expecting women to “support and preserve the family”. As the World Health Organization estimates, “1 in 4 women in the Eastern European region will experience physical violence from her intimate partner”. Despite the prevalence of sexual violence, the Russian legislative system, in particular, pushes women to seek to “reconcile sides”, even after getting betting beat up with a shovel, like in the case of Shema Timagova– a domestic violence victim from Chechnya.
Under the hard lives of Eastern European women lies bravery, strength, and spirit. Every woman from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Poland, and other ex-Soviet States has a bloodline who went through lots of hardship and adversity. And it’s no different in today’s day and age, as Ukrainian women still continue to fight for survival and stability through times of total devastation.
Strike Out,
Writer: Kamilla Knyazeva
Editor: Karina McCarthy
Graphic Designer: Samantha Lawless
Tallahassee