If you observe women without rose-colored glasses tinting your impression or a shiny pedestal obstructing your view, you’ll easily notice patterns in their behavior that abjectly defy their spoken intent. Sometimes, not often though, women will admit in moments of candor the true shape of their desire that they otherwise spend inordinate energy and time concealing under layers of obfuscation and guile. Russian women, bless their cynical souls, have a habit of divulging the secrets of the da!da! sisterhood. One of these pre-babushkas, an avowed golddigger, confessed to the yearning she and other women have for men who are “walls of stone”. Dominant men.
“There are three types of men,” she tells her students. “The creatives. The analysts. We’re not interested in those. The ones we want are ‘the possessors’,” and she repeats the tell-all, prison-intimating phrase, “a man behind whom you feel like behind a wall of stone. We all know how to spot them. The strong, silent men. They wear dark suits. They have deep voices. They mean what they say. These men are interested in control. They don’t want a forceful woman. They have enough of that already. They want a girl who’ll be a pretty flower.”
The alpha male. Every woman wants one, few will nab one. Supplies are limited. Most women, average in looks, will spend a lifetime with men they don’t fantasize about seducing.
Oliona came to Moscow with next to nothing when she was twenty and started as a stripper at one of the casinos, Golden Girls. She danced well, which is how she met her sugar daddy. Now she earns the basic Moscow mistress rate: the apartment, $4,000 a month, a car, and a weeklong holiday in Turkey or Egypt twice a year.
The rewards are good for women born with a fortuitous commingling of DNA.
Oliona’s playing fields are a constellation of clubs and restaurants designed almost exclusively for the purpose of sponsors looking for girls and girls looking for sponsors. The guys are known as “Forbeses” (as in Forbes rich list); the girls as “tiolki,” cattle. It’s a buyer’s market: there are dozens, no, hundreds, of “cattle” for every “Forbes.”
The line between soft and hard polygamy blurs in totally liberated sexual markets. Thanks to female hypergamy, the choosiest sex isn’t women; it’s alpha men. Bring in the cows.
“So many eighteen-year-old girls,” says Oliona, “breathing down my neck.” She’s only twenty-two, but that’s already near the end of a Moscow mistress’s career. “I know I’ll have to start lowering my standards soon,” she tells me, amused rather than appalled.
Glasnost.
“Today we will learn the algorithm for receiving presents,” the instructor tells her students. “When you desire a present from a man, place yourself at his left, irrational, emotional side. His right is his rational side: you stand to his right if you’re discussing business projects. But if you desire a present, position yourself by his left. If he is sitting in a chair crouch down, so he feels taller, like you’re a child. Squeeze your vaginal muscles. Yes, your vaginal muscles. This will make your pupils dilate, making you more attractive. When he says something, nod; this nodding will induce him to agree with you. And finally, when you ask for your car, your dress, whatever it is you want, stroke his hand. Gently. Now repeat: Look! Nod! Stroke!”
Game for women is essentially methods for maximizing the allure of their beauty and their child-like vulnerability.
(“They think they’ve won something when they get a dress out of us,” one millionaire acquaintance tells me when I tell him about the lessons at the academy. “I let them win sometimes. But come on: What could they ever, ever take from us we didn’t actually let them?” “You know what my word for them is?,” asks another. “I call them gulls, like sea-gulls, circling over garbage dumps. And they sound like gulls, you know, when they sit and gossip in a bar together. Kar-Kar! Kar-Kar! Gulls! Funny: isn’t it?”)
The men sitting in the drivers’ seats know how to play this game too. If you’re a billionaire, gifting a hot piece of ass with a $4K/mo apartment is chump change in exchange for sexually spoiling her prime fertility years and dumping her when her four-year expiration date has been reached. (Female product expiration dates tend to arrive much sooner for men with more market options.) In gambling, this golddigger strategy is what is known as a sucker’s bet.
“Russian men are completely spoilt for choice; Western men are much easier,” she says earnestly, like one carrying out market research. “But the problem with westerners is they don’t buy you presents, never pay for dinner. My German guy will need some work.”
If you’re an American dating an ex-pat Russian girl, don’t buy her stuff. Sure, she’ll lash out occasionally at your stinginess, but she’ll keep coming back for that one roll stuffed in your pocket that really matters. In other words, ACT like a man spoilt for choice.
“He’s handsome as a God,” Oliona tells me, whispering with excitement. “He was giving out hundred dollar bills to girls for blow jobs. Kept going all night. Imagine his stamina! And those poor girls, they don’t just do it for the money you know; every one of them thinks he’ll remember them, that they’re special, so they try extra hard. Of course I refused when he offered: I’m not like THEM… Now we’re seeing each other. Wish me luck!”
Super alphas get a train of blowjobs in da club for pennies on the ruble. The women, naturally, deceive themselves that they’ll be the ones to “convert” the alpha into relationship material, aka sponsorship.
The one thing Oliona will never, ever think of herself as is a prostitute. There’s a clear distinction: prostitutes have to have sex with whomever a pimp tells them to. She does her own hunting.
You have to admire a whore’s honesty about the nature of the deal.
‘Do I really have to go home with him?’ I asked my boss. ‘Yes.’ I went back to his hotel. When he wasn’t looking I slipped some Ruffinol in his drink and ran off.”
Russia is in an anti-feminist alternate universe.
Finally, the shiv that twists guts in the platitudepuses:
“But what about love?” I ask Oliona. It’s late; we’re taping an interview in her apartment. We’re drinking sticky, sweet Prosecco. Her favorite. The nervous little dog snores by the couch.
“My first boyfriend. Back home in Donbas. That was love. He was a local authority.”
Authority is a nice word for gangster.
Chick meets jerk. Chick falls in love. Real love. Fin.
Oliona’s relationship with the Pushkin-loving Forbes didn’t last long. “I thought at first he wanted a bitch. So I played that role. Now I’m not sure, maybe he doesn’t want a bitch. Maybe he wants a nice girl. You know, sometimes I get confused, I can’t even tell which one I am, the nice girl or the bitch.”
Women will bend over backwards to appease an alpha male exactly like beta males will do to appease a cute girl. The difference is that women prostrate themselves for a shot at a relationship, and betas for a shot at sex.
