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To help Make Russia Great Again, President Vladimir Putin is telling Russian women to stop getting educated, stay out of the paid workforce, reject the dangerous Western poison of feminism, and have as many babies as they can for the Motherland, because he’ll be needing the boys just as soon as they’re old enough to carry a Kalashnikov, OK? In a depressing longread published yesterday, the Washington Post (gift link) examines just how far Russia is going to force women back into “traditional” roles for the supposed good of the nation.
Oh sure, there’s a little bit of a cost to women in terms of having to give up their freedom, a few human rights they didn’t need anyway, and whatever steps toward equality they’ve taken since Czarist times, but it’s all for the best, say Putin and his cronies, who are in charge, which means they must be right. And if feminists and human rights advocates complain, that means Putin was right to declare them agents of foreign influence who must be suppressed.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more,” Putin declared to an audience of ultraconservative religious and political figures who had convened in the State Kremlin Palace in November. “We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions.”
He said all that in Russian so nobody would mistakenly think they were listening to a Trump rally.
Russian officials have taken up the cause, the Post reports, and are urging women to have great big families, and to do so as soon as they’re 18. “Women are being told to forgo education and careers to prioritize child-rearing, even as the war in Ukraine drains men from the workforce, creating critical labor shortages.” Well look, you want factory goods, you just need to birth more babbies and in a couple decades there’ll be no more labor shortage, unless of course Vlad or his successors are still having some excellent wars.
Putin wants to defeat the corrupt West with more babies, more militarism, and more Orthodox Christianity that enforces Puritanical rules about gender roles, all of which suggests to us that American rightwingers are going to love him even more than they already do — our own culture-war weirdos want much the same:
In pursuing these sweeping changes, Putin has cast Russia as the global leader in a fight against what he considers Western debauchery, and has branded democracy advocates and other liberals as purveyors of “destructive ideology” who must be suppressed. Feminists, LGBTQ+ activists, independent journalists and political opposition figures have been designated as foreign agents, extremists or terrorists and arrested, jailed or forced to flee the country.
Women who embody the traditional image, which is constantly reinforced on state television, are being promoted to high-level positions — such as national children’s ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova, who has 10 children, five of them adopted. Lvova-Belova, along with Putin, was accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court over the forced relocation of Ukrainian children.
Sounds great, America’s rightwing weirdos are no doubt salivating, demanding to know where they can sign up, too.
The article is full of stories of rightwing Russian women who simply can’t wait to make other Russian women conform, no matter how cartoonishly they might sound like they stepped right out of Orwell. There’s Yekaterina Mizulina, the daughter of a Russian senator, who heads up the Junior Anti-Sex League “Safe Internet League, a censorship organization.”
Mizulina’s denunciations have ruined the careers of risqué celebrities, and led to the closures of gay bars and the blocking of LGBTQ+ internet sites. Asked in an interview what she thought about feminism, she answered flatly: “I don’t think about it.” Russian women, she said, think men should come first.
“Many women in Russia feel fine if they’re deputy to someone. They don’t want to be in charge of something. This is our character,” Mizulina said. European countries made a mistake, she said, when they put women “in weird positions like minister of defense.”
Among other great steps toward restoring the patriarchy and moral order, we learn that Russia actually rolled back several domestic violence laws in 2017, because if parents can’t beat their children and men can’t beat their wives, how will you ever have a just and decent society?
Putin has even resurrected an old Soviet-era award for “Heroine Mothers” who have 10 or more children, because, as he said in a video conference to promote the awards:
Making sure Russians have “as many children as possible,” he declared, is “the underlying goal of our state policy.”
The parallels to American fundagelical ideology are scary at times; we half-expected to hear about Russian girls having to dance with their dads at “purity balls” where they would be given a ring to pledge they’ll stay virgins until they marry, but that’s still only an America thing, it seems. Give them time.
OK, we have room for maybe one more blockquote before we hurl, so here we go:
Senior officials have repeatedly hammered the message for large families and behavioral changes in women. Last July, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko attacked “the downright vicious practice” of women pursuing education and careers before childbirth. The deputy prime minister for social policy, Tatiana Golikova, in March said that the “correct” age for women to have children is 18 to 24.
“The earlier the first child is born, the earlier the second and third will be born,” Golikova said at a youth festival. […]
Margarita Pavlova, a senator from the Chelyabinsk region, in a television interview in November said: “We need to stop encouraging girls to get higher education … which then leads them nowhere.”
Why yes, this all sounds like it could come from Turning Point USA, perhaps with some boilerplate about gender studies programs added in.
The story also looks at the fetishization of military wives, who are of course 100 percent supportive of the husbands they’ve sent off happily to the “special military operation” in Ukraine, which is like the Great Patriotic War except if you call it a “war” you’ll go to prison.
Happily, there are women who are sick and tired of all this, although the Post has to protect their identity lest they too be arrested. One Moscow-area businesswoman whose husband has been fighting in Ukraine explained,
“They’re trying to create an image of a very obedient woman, like a slave.”
Women, she said, are being treated “like incubators,” even as men are dying in the war. […]
“We are in the middle of the war and they’re calling on women to give birth to children,” the businesswoman said. “Are they crazy? I’m not going to give birth to children in a war.” If Russia wins, she added, there will soon be another war.
“So why should I have babies who will live till the next war and then be killed in this next war,” she asked. “No! No way.”
As we always say, go read the whole thing with your gift link; these are scary times in Russia, and you just know that the American Right is looking on and hoping to import much of the same poison.
[WaPo (gift link)]
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