Dunham is speaking metaphorically here, but it is worth mentioning that castration literally occurs in many of the obscene folktales that have been gathered in Russia. A good example is the tale “A Man Does Woman’s Work,” which was gathered by Afanasii Afanas’ev in the middle of the nineteenth century.189 In this disturbing little masterpiece a male peasant is depicted as staying home in the hut to do his wife’s work one day, while the wife goes out into the fields to harvest the crops. The husband of course proceeds to make a mess of everything in the household. Then he loses all his clothes in the river where he was going to do a wash, so he covers his penis with grass to hide his embarrassment. A mare standing nearby sees the grass and chomps off the penis in one bite. The moral is unstated, but clear nonetheless: a man should not do a woman’s work, otherwise he will be castrated. Or, more generally: a man should not try to be a woman (cf. the proverb “He who gets mixed up with women will be a woman [Kto s baboi sviazhetsia—sam baba budet]”).190 In the sexist male imagination the danger in becoming a woman is castration.
Nikita, the simple peasant hero of Andrei Platonov’s 1937 story Potudan River, suffers a somewhat less cruel fate than literal castration.191 He doesn’t mind doing housework for the highly educated woman he eventually marries. He especially likes to wash the floor. But he is impotent with the woman. That is, he suffers a metaphorical form of castration, for a penis that does not function is as good as no penis at all.
Kon comes close to being sexually explicit about the feeling of humiliation a “strong” woman can elicit in a man: “Women on their part do not always take into consideration the heightened sensitivity of men towards anything which is connected with their ideas about masculinity: a too energetic and pushy woman (especially in love) is involuntarily perceived as an infringer of male ‘sovereignty.’”192
Lynne Attwood’s comment on this statement is rather blunt: “This does not offer much hope to the cause of women’s equality.”193 But women’s equality does not depend intrinsically on what goes on in the bedroom. To teach women to be sensitive to the possibility of male sexual impotence is not necessarily to bar their way to equality in the outside world. Perhaps Attwood does not understand that Kon is talking about what sexologists call psychogenic impotence—though Kon himself did not wish to be absolutely explicit about this in a Soviet publication that appeared in 1980.194
Leningrad sexologist Lev Shcheglov put it this way: “I’m finding increasing male impotence among those couples in which women dominate…. The powerful women who say, ‘I want this, I want that, do it this way’—men deeply fear them. They’re afraid of still another oppressor.”195
The greatest threat to a man’s masculinity is a threat to his penis, and a “strong” woman in the bedroom is precisely such a threat. The trouble with the typical Russian male, however, is that even outside of the bedroom he often cannot handle a “strong” woman, or even just an “equal” one. He behaves as though a woman were a sexual threat even when the interaction is not sexual (e.g., at the workplace, in the kitchen).
Although there is much evidence that a Russian man fears domination by a woman, there is little indication that a Russian woman fears domination by a man. Perhaps the reason for this is precisely the sexual element: a man’s sexuality is threatened by a powerful woman, but a woman’s sexuality is not necessarily threatened by a powerful man (indeed, it may be enhanced).196 A psychologist is not likely to be surprised by this, but for some reason other scholars always seem to be surprised at the idea that it is sexuality which lies at the heart of the relationship between the sexes.
From this very fundamental biological dichotomy we may thus perceive yet another reason why the slave soul of Russia is a gendered—that is, a female—object: acceptance of domination by a powerful partner is easier for the sex that does not have a penis to preserve.
This easier acceptance by women is not intrinsically masochistic in nature, but it can quickly become masochistic—and all too often does—if it spreads beyond the bedroom and takes on self-destructive qualities in interaction with men. Russian men, meantime, are no less masochistic in their world of primarily male-male interaction. But to ask whether the slave soul of Russia is a gendered object is to focus on what goes on between the sexes. There is no gender without gender difference, and there is no gender difference without differences between the sexes. In relations between the sexes in Russia, it is the woman who is most likely to be the moral masochist (despite the fact that it is the man who is likely to be the erotogenic masochist). What Dr. Nemilov said more than half a century ago still applies:
The condescension and contempt marked in the attitude toward woman is so general that often we even fail to notice it. Moreover, women themselves have become so thoroughly inured to it that they are prone to regard a radically different attitude as something unworthy of the male or even as evidence of weakness and perhaps impotence on his part.197
A woman who thinks a man must have a low opinion of her in order to have an erection has a low opinion of herself without even realizing it. Without knowing, however, how she feels about herself, she will inevitably act out her feelings instead, that is, she will behave in a self-destructive or masochistic fashion.
The Guilt Factor
In addition to bearing their double burden of domestic and extra-domestic work, Soviet women endured the resulting psychological strain. Attwood says that, “Just as the grafting of professional work on to their former domestic roles has resulted in a double work-load, the grafting of a range of hitherto ‘masculine’ psychological traits on to their traditional ‘feminine’ personalities has resulted in a psychological double burden.”198 Lapidus speaks of the “extreme degree of nervous strain and fatigue” which was sometimes damaging to health, and which could hinder a woman’s functioning both on the job and in the family situation.199 The “strain,” “tension,” “contradictions,” and “conflict” between women’s two roles were often mentioned in the literature on women in the Soviet Union, though usually these phenomena were not treated in any psychological depth.200
The psychological strain was not simply a matter of playing two roles instead of one. Guilt was also involved. Alix Holt, who interviewed several Soviet women in 1978, says that working women with young children felt “a certain amount of guilt.”201 In her introduction to the collection of interviews titled Moscow Women, Lapidus says that “an undercurrent of guilt” runs through many of the interviews, that is, guilt over not being able to devote enough time and energy to children.202 Susan Bridger points to articles aimed at rural women which encouraged self-denial in the family and fostered guilt feelings if the proper attitude of self-sacrifice was not maintained.203
The Soviet working woman’s guilt was double. In trying to do two jobs she felt that she never did either job quite right. The double burden meant double guilt. But guilt feelings toward the family came first. This is true not only historically, but psychologically. Guilt toward the family was primary and weighed more heavily on the working mother.