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Chapter One ABOUT THAT Sex and Its Metaphors “We’ll never understand it,” Anyuta tried to explain. “That was the morality of the era when this country had no sex.” —Viktoriia Rostokina, The Rich Husband (Bogatyi muzh) Walk into any sex shop in Moscow, and with enough cash or the right credit card, you can buy a perfect plastic replica of international porn star Jeff Stryker’s erect penis. Clearly, the penetration of the Russian market has been a success. To make an analogy unlikely to grace the pages of a college entrance exam, Stryker’s member is to the Russian sex industry as Snickers is to snack foods: while both guarantee “satisfaction,” the organ is a naked demonstration of the barely hidden erotic connotations of post-Soviet Russia’s humiliating status as a weakened, passive importer of prepackaged cultural and physical commodities. Though I have no statistics on sales (let alone consumption ) in the Russian Federation, given the price ($59.95, as of June 2004, on www.jeff-stryker.com/ for an autographed edition), it is safe to assume that the vast majority of the country’s impoverished citizens are not saving up their rubles to buy imported sex toys. But here, as throughout this book, I am dealing more with the symbolic and the imaginary than the real and the everyday, and on that level, Stryker’s commodified erection is a perfect fit. The Stryker artifact is a powerful, if artificial, embodiment of so many of the anxieties that surround the discourse of sexuality after the Soviet collapse, starting with the fact that it is so unambiguously sexual: unlike the omnipresent representations of naked women in post-Soviet Russia, this partic- ular prosthesis cannot pretend to be merely aesthetic. Moreover, it is erect, and erections are sexual desire at their most visible: according to the unwritten laws of international erotica, only the flaccid penis can be displayed without signaling the transgression from the erotic to the pornographic. Finally, the importation of an American man’s mass-produced phallus conjures up an important set of Russian cultural anxieties surrounding masculinity , sexual humiliation, and globalization. Always erect, the plastic substitute can embody the phallus in a way that the biological penis cannot— in a bizarre echo of the Soviet cult of labor, it never stops working because it only simulates working. Stryker’s dildo recalls the tropes of male decline and sexual anxiety that pervaded the discourse in the nineties: impotent and pathetic , the once-proud Fatherland even has to import a phallus.1 The potential for humiliation is only increased by the gender ambiguity involved in selling dildos: who exactly is supposed to be buying them? Is it Russian women, who despair of finding a good man, or is it Russian men, who have thoroughly assumed a “feminine” position? The packaging on Stryker’s package is deliberately ambiguous.2 The Stryker dildo is hardly the only sign of the intersection between globalization and sexual anxiety in post-Soviet Russia. More than a decade after “adult material” began to slip through the state censor’s tight grip, sex in Russia still wore a distinctly foreign face. In November 1997, 30 percent of the sizable portion of the Russian television audience still awake after midnight was tuned in to a program on the NTV (Independent Television) network called Pro Eto (About That), Russia’s first talk show devoted entirely to sex (Carpenter). The program, which featured frank discussions of such formerly taboo subjects as masturbation, sadomasochism, and homosexuality, was hosted by one Elena Khanga, a young journalist whose Moscow accent and blonde wig were a striking contrast to her black skin. Born and raised in Russia , Khanga was the grandchild of an American communist and the daughter of a Tanzanian nationalist, the indirect product of the Soviet Union’s troubled love affair with the American civil rights movement and postcolonial Africa.3 The fact that Khanga sounded Russian but looked foreign made her a fitting About That 25 1 Cf. Victor Pelevin’s ironic comment in Generation P (Homo Zapiens): “[W]as it worth trading an evil empire for an evil banana republic that imports bananas from Finland?” (18). 2 In fact, Stryker is unusual among male porn stars not only for his celebrity (usually reserved for women) but for his unabashed bisexuality. While many men appear in both straight and gay porn films, Stryker flaunts rather than hides his sexual omnivorousness. His website reduces sexual ambiguity to a...

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