Free Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West by Agata Pyzik

remember my shock at this. I didn’t know whether it was the semi-racism or the fact I was called a Romanian that caused me more outrage. And this from a Greek!

    1.6 Community Center Lobby in Pripyat, the town built for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers.
    If we necessarily have to admit we’re Polish, there has to be something that compensates for it – a necessary sense of pride. “You know, Poland fought heroically during the war. Unlike manyothers, we never collaborated with the Nazis, 8 million of us died. We had heroic resistance and Home Army, and then the communists came and with them some traitors. Which war? What uprising? What communists? You might ask, seeing, that the person probably never lived through any of those events. It doesn’t matter. The war is always still going on.
    As far as sexiness goes, in Poland we definitely consider ourselves unsexy. So do must other post-communist countries. Yet upon travelling across the ex-Bloc, what strikes you is the seediness, the astonishing amounts of peep-shows, sex-shops and various strip and ‘Gentlemen’s Clubs’, and the more one goes east, the more sleazy it gets. Polish Catholicism keeps this relatively quiet in Poland, but in Prague, Budapest, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Tallinn, Belgrade and Moscow this is not an issue. When in a hotel, on the shelf there’s already lots of flyers, totally assuming you’re there to use Eastern girls’ charm. The sex industry that mushroomed in the East is only one side of its capitalist transition. Yet, the more sex, the less sexy it seems, the more sleaze, the less pleasure. If we’re to believe the Free Theatre of Belarus’ successful travelling spectacle
Minsk 2011 (after Kathy Acker’s New York 1979)
, sex in Minsk is particularly off-putting. The piece collected all sorts of humiliating acts Belarusian folk have to endure and a huge dose of bleak humor as well, establishing the murky relations between sex, money and nationality. Yet the troupe displayed little consciousness about the place where they’re showing their militant piece. In London, it fuelled the liberal, narcissist positions which are simply rebuking the horrid Soviet republic, refusing to acknowledge the privileged position from which those criticisms could be made. The audience clapped furiously cherishing the ‘bravery’ of the dissidents, while overzealous broadsheet critics believed that in Minsk you are arrested for looking at someone for too long, while the play itself, with its depiction of the streets of Minsk full of aggro, implied you would only risk a hostile look back. Belarus, “the last dictatorship in Europe”, couldn’t have aworse reputation, but Western opinion, hoping for the demise of Lukashenko would gladly see also the demise of its welfare state. Western politicians and commentators clearly see it as a part of this “totalitarianism”.
    The “Ukrainian bride” was and still is a social phenomenon, the most abrupt meeting between the Western financial capital and the Eastern beauties’ submission. So imagine my shock, when I discovered Ukrainians are using it unironically. There’s a huge demand for an Ukrainian Bride, also among Poles, fed up with the relative emancipation of Polish women, who, as one of the commenters on the “Loving the Ukrainian Woman” forum puts it, expect them to help with housework and bringing up children! The patterns of exploitation are subtle. It’s enough to be a little bit better off, and it’s always from the West towards the East, or, as the Polish example shows, from the EU to the rest. The leader of
Krytyka Polityczna
Sławomir Sierakowski even used the term “Russian bride” in a
Guardian
comment piece, published there during their “New Europe” month (where apart from Poland, the “New Europe” was also…Spain, France and Germany). In his view, the Russian bride, all in political metaphor, “will make a good wife to the Polish husband”, who will rescue it after