Hello, Natasha

You are sitting in a trendy restaurant in the booming heart of the Russian capital trying to forget about your jetlag and lost luggage when you are suddenly slapped with the bracing realization that you aren’t in Kansas anymore.

Photo by Julia Borodina, www.eliara.com

Across the table from you is seated an attractive Russian woman, your Internet flame, a deadly femme fatale for all you know. But definitely a Russian woman.

(Please note that the adjective ‘Russian’ before woman is absolutely essential, because a Russian woman is as different from an American woman, for example, as a French woman is different from a Polish woman, as a Canadian woman is different from a Spanish, etc., etc. But generalizations, although sometimes deadly accurate, are dangerous things to play with. “She had a German mouth, French ears, Russian ass,” wrote Henry Miller in The Tropic of Cancer, for example, in an effort to portray a particular girl he had met in Parisian café one hot summer. No wonder his books were banned in America for so long).

Anyways, things get off to a bizarre start at the restaurant. Before you even set foot into the place, ‘Natasha’ lets you open the door for her; in fact, she coolly expects it, and doesn’t even say ‘Spasibo’ as she sweeps past with a violent toss of her blonde locks. Somehow, this gives you a strange sense of male liberation and empowerment, which might just be the world’s biggest oxymoron. And things just keep getting weirder.

The svelte Slav at your side expects you to help her with her fur coat, position the chair just right under her awaiting derriere, order the food, and yes, even pay the exorbitant bill without even so much as feigning to open her Gucci pocketbook. Wow, you think, there might just be a purpose on this nutty earth for a six-foot-two stumbling male after all. What the heck is going on here? It’s as if that Boeing 747 that hauled you across the Atlantic Ocean was actually a time machine, transporting you back to the 19th century.

Suddenly the reason hits you: feminism, or rather the glaring absence of it.