Birds and Bees

Way back in the late 1980s, talk show hosts Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donahue did a series of television space bridges that allowed live audiences in the US and the USSR to talk to each other. In a “woman’s show” filmed in Leningrad and Boston, a Soviet woman uttered the phrase: “В СССР секса нет!” (“There’s no sex in the USSR!”)

This has gone down in history as an emblem of the officially prudish attitude towards sexual matters in the late Soviet Union. Actually she was answering a question from a Bostonian about the use of sexual images in advertisements, and the end of the poor woman’s sentence was cut off: “…секса нет в рекламах» (there’s no sex in ads).

But this episode highlighted a problem: talking about sex in Russian in those years was not easy. And you know what? It’s still not easy.

There are basically two ways of talking about sex in Russian: using words that are very naughty but that everyone understands, or using borrowed words with Latin roots that are more polite but that almost no one understands. For example, a quick survey of nine Russian women aged 25 to 65 showed that only one knew what the word коитус (coitus) meant, even though they had all seen the word in instructions for medicine or heard it from their doctor. They just weren’t quite sure if it was an act or an object, or both.

Note to pharmaceutical companies: simplify your instructions.

In between the two extremes of obscenity and opacity are three calques from English: спать с кем-то (to sleep with someone); заниматься любовью (to make love); and заниматься сексом (to have sex). The first two are okay in polite company; the last is a bit clinical. If you were having tea with your Russian grandma-in-law, you might use the expressions интимные отношения (intimate relations), брачные отношения (conjugal relations), or половые отношения (sexual relations) — and she wouldn’t faint. You could also talk vaguely about физическая близость (physical closeness), although that’s a bit Victorian.

There is also the very general and inclusive половая жизнь (sex life), something doctors are wont to ask about: “Вы живёте половой жизнью?” (“Are you sexually active?”)

And that’s about it.

Oddly enough, it’s also hard to talk about the people with whom you are having intimate relations, unless you’re talking about муж (husband) or жена (wife). Another highly unscientific survey indicated that people middle aged or older thought любовник or любовница (lover) was fine to describe a long-term, live-in almost-spouse. But the younger generation hooted at that: for them, любовник/любовница is the person you are having an extramarital affair with.

Бойфренд (boyfriend) or гёрлфренд (also герлфренд — girlfriend) are used by young folks about young folks. Older folks use them, too, when talking about their kids or grandkids, but with implied quotation marks around the words.

So what do you call the divorced neighbor lady’s fellow, whom she has been seeing for a couple of years and who generally stays at her place? My focus group stared off into the middle distance. Сожитель (co-inhabitant)? No — too bureaucratic. Партнёр (partner)? Absolutely not — this is not a business relationship. Возлюбленный (beloved)? He might be — but that describes the emotion, not their relationship.

Finally they decided that they’d simply call this person мужчина (man) as in: У неё появился мужчина (She’s got a new guy). If we were talking about a lady friend, it would be женщина (woman): У него давно живёт женщина (He’s been living with a woman for a while.)

Мужчина, женщина, секс…. Maybe it’s comprehensible, but it’s not very romantic.