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

its abuse by tsars, Bolsheviks and oligarchs. Then it only needs the polite husbandly hands of Poland.
    An open transaction. A wife from an abused, impoverished country unlike emancipated westernized women is expected to be submissive, undemanding and grateful. The consequences of that model from not only feminist, but simply societal perspectives, are grim. In the popular HBO series
The Sopranos
Eastern Europeans serve as bodies to do sex and house work. At least several young Russian women come to the US, only to work in strip clubs and to find an American husband, usually becoming instead a
goomar.
In one episode the mobster Tony Soprano, when he’s not able to ‘perform’, quarrels with his Russian
goomar
, calling her ‘a communist cunt’. Judging from the series, at the beginning of the2000s Americans had all sorts of racist attitudes towards the ex-Bloc, using all kinds of communist insults: Russian mafia are ‘commie bastards’, Poles are of course ‘Polacks’ (just like in another HBO success,
The Wire
, in which an attacked ‘Polack’, Frank Sobotka is trying, oh the irony, to save the dockers’ union). In
The Sopranos
the economically competing deprived are hostile between each other as well, in the classic narcissism of small differences: when the Russian mistress calls Tony’s house and is answered by his Polish maid, they make sure to exchange a hateful little dialogue.
    The emigrant literature that we have is often treated as an opportunity to take out the regrets towards the native country rather than portraiture of the new conditions. In AM Bakalar’s novel
Madame Mephisto
, the female character relishes in doing everything possible against the social norms in her country: she’s single, she’s promiscuous, she doesn’t want to have children, she sleeps with men of different skin color, she has an abortion and she works as a drug dealer. On top of that, so as to seal her transgression, she sleeps with the husband of her beloved sister, who unlike her, is a perfect businesswoman, now consecrated as a Mother Poland with a young child. In
Illegal Liaisons
, Grażyna Plebanek focuses on the taboo of extramarital sex and gender roles. Her male character not only is supported by his better-off wife as a Euro-bureaucrat in Brussels, has a passionate, toxic affair (with unusually graphic details for a Polish novel) with a foreign woman, but also takes the weaker, “feminine” part in both relationships. Polish women find emigration liberatory, because the feminism that they don’t always admit to supporting is much more present in the social reality and the legislature of the countries they visit.
    This is what in the end makes migration in the times of post-Fordism and post-communism so hopeless and such a vicious circle-like experience: the exchange is unequal and set up from the very start. We go to the country which offers us a better paid job. ‘I will never come back to this country’ ensues, while the operation ofoutsourcing is going on. The ‘Don’t waste your time for Poland (or, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia)’, that people keep repeating is nothing else than a call to ‘Fuck up this country even more’. The neoliberal economy sets up the most socially and economically culturally draining situation possible, yet the response to that is – more neoliberalism. Capitalism doesn’t work? That means it’s not capitalist enough. This is the mantra repeated by our politicians, most infamously by Leszek Balcerowicz.
    Post-communist countries are sometimes aware of this and then ashamed. In a funny social media scrap, the president of Estonia Toomas Henrik Ilves started a rant on Twitter against Keynesian economist Paul Krugman, who had used his column in the
New York Times
to criticize the use of Estonia’s ‘recovery’ from a huge crash in 2009-10 as a model for the rest of Europe – as he pointed out, a slight upswing from a catastrophe hardly counted as spectacular success. To this