All that could be heard in the darkness was my friends and I shouting his name, and the thuds and grunts of Anton wrestling with another guy. What happened next was awful, confusing, and I wanted it to stop. Here was a guy protecting my honor, placing himself into bodily harm on my behalf. It was what I had dreamt of all those years when I read of dueling pistols and men of great action and few words.
After the punching finally stopped, Anton walked up to me shirtless and sweaty, caked with blood and dirt, his arms outstretched in an unmistakable gesture of victory. But what I mistook for a smile was actually a grimace. Pistols at dawn seemed a ludicrous symbol of male egotism, and I longed for men in tailored suits, who solved arguments with Woody Allen jokes and New Yorker references.
I should preface this story by saying that I am Russian. I was born into a crumbling communal building in St. Petersburg in , moved to New York when I was five, and then moved back into a different crumbling communal building in St. Petersburg after graduating from my overpriced New York liberal arts college. All of which is to say, I am dual in every way, and my plethora of multicolored passports is a worthy symbol of the cultural mish-mash of my personality. In , I moved back to Russia to teach English.
They will sashay past you with their wobbly stilettos which are worn even over blocks of ice and designer bags which carry a full pharmacy complete with a mini shoe polish and handwipes and, if you tell them you pluck your own eyebrows and only get a facial once a month, will look at you as though you have just clawed your way out of a swamp.
These insurmountable standards of beauty can largely be credited to the fact that there are more women than men. The disintegration of male hygiene and work ethic that occurs when there is by some counts a female:male ratio should be noted by anthropologists worldwide.
