Russian television and Russian sex

As you'd expect television in Russia has opened up opportunities. In case you think that it's created a brave free world, it hasn't. Television is still, very much, state controlled, except the Russian State knows it's people and takes a Roman Emperor-view of what they need by creating the illusory total freedom of them to experience fun-and-games but no substance or investigative TV.

Sex sells in Russia. It is a country sex-obsessed. Image and and style are used to sell everything and celebrities are not celebrities (nor can they hope to be) unless their clothes come off (at least partly).

Take a leading pop singer for example: Zhanna Friske (top left). This is the image of her that's propagated everywhere (if I didn't know any better I'd think she was a Playboy model rather than a singer). Another is 'popular' TV star Kseniya Borodina (top right). Popular because of her acting talent, obviously.

Ok, ok, It's easy to make fun and easier still to get cynical. Russia is a funny place. There are at least two women for every guy, there is a city somewhere outside Moscow called 'The city of brides' because the ratio of men to women is like four to one.

If you're a guy who look slike Ron Jeremy you have absolutely no problem getting laid here. But girls are not 'easy' in the conventional sense, unless they are drunk in which case they are not different to girls anywhere else.

For the average Russian woman her looks are her career and she is going to trade them for income, security and financial stability.

Given the fact that at 26 you are considered too old in Russia, Russian women, in general are under greater pressure than major-league football players. They are under intense pressure, competing with each other at a younger and younger age for, wait for it, older guys, because they are the ones who have made it and can have these girls.

Reality can be a very stark affair in Russia. In the west we have ad the time to dress up our cohabital arrangements with romanticism and fun. In Russia everything happens in a pressure-cooker environment. Girls are sexually active at 14. By 17 they look like pornstars and use their bodies and looks like commodities and by 20 they have either succeeded in finding a guy who wil answer their needs for stability, money and security or they are making a beeline for the west.

Russian meeting sites are a huge business.