"You know, devushka, a Russian man will give up anything for love!" Thinking he had appeased my feminine need for attention, this particular Russian man turned back to the real conversation he was having with my male friend about the Russian economy. But before he could do this he heard, to his annoyance, me asking his wife loudly whether he had given up anything for her. I got the prompt answer that he had given up nothing, whereas she had been a promising engineering student whose career had ended when she married him.


He asked my friend, Simon, who is gay, what he was doing in Moscow, making the amusing assumption that I was his girlfriend. When he heard that Simon was studying Russian, he did not wonder why my Russian was better than Simon's: He just assumed that I had come to Moscow to wash Simon's dishes -- not to worry my pretty little head about learning a language.


The amount of crass and wrong assumptions he had made in the space of a few seconds astonished us so much that we had no time to giggle about what he would think if he knew about Simon's sexual orientation.


The precious knowledge he was imparting to Simon was certainly over the head of Simon's "devushka," and he tried to pay me other attentions: "You are looking so pale and thin, couldn't I just get you another plateful of food?" I was proving a surprisingly difficult devushka, contradicting him and showing him up at every turn; and the vodka he tried to pour down my throat in an effort to make me giggle only made me more vociferous. He managed -- by some admirable feat of male self-importance and insensitivity -- not to notice Simon's stifled giggles and winks in my direction.


After I asked the man's wife for her opinion on the sacrifices he made for love of her, she and I retreated into that haven of dissidence, the Moscow kitchen, where she immediately asked me what I thought was the right age to get married.


I could see the nervous attention she paid to my answer. Did her flight into the kitchen with me suggest a spark of awareness that there were other ways she could be living her life? She was an attractive woman of 26, very mousy in her husband's presence, but more lively in the kitchen. What had she been like before her marriage?


I felt lucky that I only had to spend half an hour with this man: Even that was enough to show the uselessness of proving to him that I was his equal. It was as if he had a totally different pair of ears to listen to what I had to say, and different reactions from those he showed to Simon. I gave up trying to communicate with this two-headed monster.


Even more frightening was not the realization that he had won by making me leave the conversation, but that I left it with a feeling of foolishness: Who was I to go imposing my views on someone who obviously was not capable of taking them on board? Wasn't it better to retreat into sulky silence, or to talk only to those people with whom I could hold a peaceful conversation? My hackles rose at such thoughts, since the protest of silence would be playing into his hands, but the feeling of foolishness remained. However the feminist in me protested that it was more outrageous to retreat: His wife had probably begun like this, making compromises for the sake of keeping the peace, and bringing up their son in a calm atmosphere. Perhaps she had started with the same feeling of shame at having rocked the boat. Later, as she kept silence, things had become easier with her husband, and she may even have felt guilt at ever having made difficulties in their marriage.


And gradually, for the simple reason that his views were the only ones being voiced in their household, he would have convinced her that his way was the best way. Let the man do the talking, the working, the being clever.


I could quite easily imagine myself in another life -- her life -- believing him, beginning to argue the same way. "It's not practical for both to take leading roles in the family or in society," I would say, unaware that I would be projecting the situation in my own marriage onto society at large. Stuck in my own home, how could I ever find out that there are other relationships where the qualities of both are brought out? That it was only my husband -- not the world of men -- who could not function if women, including his wife, were to take a joint leading role?


I would not be able to imagine any other way of spending my life, and men would say of me, as I have heard them say of other women: "But women don't want to work ... Women know instinctively that their husbands are right ... They like men to take the lead ..."


In short, I would have become what, in his view, a woman "should be," and from there it would be easy for him to make the same logical leap made by those other men I have heard talking: The assumption that I epitomized what a woman "really is." Often there is a treacherous confusion between the two, and the man in question was just the sort who might use one to define the other. If he were to lecture long enough on how he would like to see his wife, she could not but take on the attributes he specified, in order to fit into the "man's world." Once she was being held up as an example of what a woman really is, she could be used as an example to reproach women who are not quite what a woman should be. And so it goes on.


Soon he would be holding me up as a paragon of womanhood at drunken gatherings with his friends, and in my mousy life of compromise, I would feel grateful that I was being praised by a group of men, the people who are really significant, who do inexplicably important things at work and go on tiring business trips. I would do everything I could to keep on deserving that praise, and would finally have destroyed anything I had known of my own personality.


His wife had not yet got to that stage, but was asking the last questions one asks before deciding conclusively whether or not one has taken the right road. Perhaps her husband has moments of kindness and gallantry, and her wish for a secure life may send her down the path I described.


Or she may make the more difficult decision, concluding that not only has she made a mistake, but that she is not prepared to live with it, that she has to leave her husband and somehow support their child alone.


I very much doubt the latter. Her husband expressed the status quo exactly when he met my gay friend in the Russian banya a week later. In a male-bonding session blissfully oblivious of Simon's sexual orientation, the man toasted my friend's "future wife," whose behavior the week before had obviously distressed him. "Your girlfriend -- she's alright," he said, winking knowingly at Simon, "but don't worry: She'll get married and grow out of it."





Georgina Wilson is a writer who has lived in Moscow for two years. She contributed this article to The Moscow Times.