[speakeasy]

While I don't want to say Russia is necessarily a great place to be a man due to the harsh conditions of life in Russia and low life-expectancy for men, when it comes to women these guys have no idea how spoiled they are. It sounds like the women there are great and just want supportive and non-abusive spouses. I don't get the impression they ask for much more than that. Nothing like what we have to put up with in the West. If these guys had to make do over here they'd commit suicide.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...elors.html

Quote:

The dating prospects are so grim, in fact, that Shpakova and many other Russian women of her generation are consciously deciding to stay single. Moscow alone boasts more than 3 million single women between the ages of 25 and 50, out of a population of 11.1 million (that’s three times the number of single Muscovite men). In Russia as a whole, there are 11 million more women than men, due in part to a century of bloody revolutions, gulags, and wars that drained the country’s male population. Add to that the fact that male life expectancy is particularly grim in Russia—on average, 59 years, as opposed to a woman’s 73 years, the largest gap of any country in the world—and you’ve got a serious demographic imbalance.

Still, the numbers of single men and women in Russia are roughly equal: 17.6 million single ladies to 17.2 million single lads. “That means that Russian women simply have no interest in marrying Russian men,” says Irina Zhuravleva, the head of Russia’s census department at the Federal Statistics Service. A single woman herself, Zhuravleva says she “never had any interest in marrying a drunk, to later suffer the pain of divorce and splitting [of] real estate.”

Quote:

Just recently, Russian women have begun to circumvent this traditional system by forming female networking events. At StartUp Women, a recent conference held in Moscow, hundreds of glamorous female entrepreneurs discussed how to take over consumer markets through online social networks. Most of these women admitted to being disillusioned by the way their career paths were blocked by male colleagues. In another part of the city, a group called Straight ‘A’ Students—a movement of politically active, mostly divorced mothers—brainstormed what a Russian brand of feminism might look like. “I spoke to Putin about our female movement,” founder Olga Kryshtanovskaya said. “He disliked the idea.”

Quote:

It’s unsurprising, then, that Russia is home to the world’s second-highest divorce rate—after Belarus—with 65 percent of marriages ending in a split. And while many Russian women still hold out hopes of finding a Prince Charming, they are also coming to terms with the weight of the demographic and cultural factors working against them. Some women, like Shpakova, have decided to date only non-Russian men. Others have resigned themselves to a life of singledom, rather than wrestle their boyfriends into the role of a modern, supportive partner. “Most [Russian men] have no clue how to communicate,” says 40-year-old Maria Shubina, a leading researcher at the Boris Yeltsin Foundation in Moscow. “Their parents had no tradition of sitting down and talking things over, either.” After watching several relationships with Russian boyfriends fall apart, Shubina realized that she needed to redefine her idea of happily ever after. “As a teen, I always thought I would be married by my early 20s” she says. “With age 40 approaching, I am ready to give up looking for the love of my life.”

In the case of Russian guys it sounds like these dudes DO need to man up and put down the vodka. They have decent women but are so drunk on their demographic privilege that they may force their women into abandoning them or turning to feminism.