Natalya Slavina on gender roles, issues, and stereotypes in Russian country living vs. city life.
What’s a better environment for a man to live in: rural or urban? I asked this question to several fellows who spent a good part of their lives in a city and then moved into a rural area and took their wives and children with them.
Here is what they told me.
The main idea of every story was that a man has his own place in a rural house, whereas in a city apartment, naturally, he doesn’t. Very often size 13 slippers in the hallway are the only sign that, in addition to a woman and the children, a man is part of the family living in the apartment. The space is clean and elegant. There is no room for a workbench. No room to dry fishing gear. No good place to store a gun: the children might get to it, God forbid. A man has a very limited area in which he can be useful: it is seldom that the family does any remodeling of their own anymore. Even when they do, there is hardly any heavy work involved in small spaces of apartments: no moving boulders, mixing cement, or doing strenuous carpentry work.
Then again, renovations are done five-ten times in a family lifetime, but a man is alive every waking hour! He requires space to express himself and feel productive. So, he slaughters all of the aliens in Halo. He browses the Internet for a while. He kicks back on the couch for a bit. He takes the garbage out. This infamous garbage and sex are about all the work that’s worthy of a guy’s efforts, really. That’s why a man will always keep searching for ways to escape, be it to work, to a paintball field, or go out with buddies for some beer. His buddies, needless to say, have just as little idea of what to do at home, and thus they relax in good company drinking beer or chewing the cud. Comes Monday morning – they are like new again.
Things are different out in the country. Out here, a woman’s and a cat’s place is inside, and a man’s and a dog’s place is outside, as the saying goes. Every family we know out here has a garage/shed/workshop of sorts they built or inherited from the previous owners. There, things dear to a man’s soul hang, are spread around, or pile up in places: auto parts, fishing gear, tools along with their bells and whistles, projects he started and thing he clings to, like a can of miscellaneous bolts and screws, an old broken voltmeter, or a Mercedes bumper. Every man has some stuff he keeps “just in case,” to be on the safe side; that’s why women are usually not welcome in those spaces. And if they do come in – don’t go past the doorway. A man behaves similarly towards the house: he comes into the house to eat, to read, to repair something, and at the end of the day – to rest, to love his wife, and to browse the Internet, if he wishes.
The men out here vary greatly. There are former programmers who never held anything heavier than a keyboard. There are former military that don’t take wooden nickels and can cut some mustard. There are high spirited ascetics and those who can appreciate a good meal and good drink. They all are happy with their lives. The only one thing all of these men have in common is that at some moment in their lives, each one decided to take his family out of the city – and followed through. Once that was done, their manly strength awakened and increased when it was needed.
In some cases they needed to adapt, and that took time. During such times a man would wonder through his property surveying its needs in horror: meter-tall weeds, leaning weight-bearing beams… During this “adaptation,” it is best to leave the man alone. Overall though, a man changes swiftly.
In fact, once the family does move out of town, the men change right away; they thaw out. In a month or so, he’s made some friends at the local hardware store; in half a year, his collection of drills and saws doubles, and he becomes an avid subscriber of the woodworking Internet pages, blogs, and forums. A man starts to mark his territory and learns his true self.
All his daily work is still trivial, but – contrary to his office job hours – now his actions take on a special significance, filled with meaning, and drive important changes. He nails some new planks to the fence – he is protecting his family. He goes into the garden and turns soil – he is providing a future meal for his family. He replaced some cracked boards on the roof – he is providing dry and lasting shelter for his family.
It becomes quite obvious right away to every family member: dad’s hands are quite literally holding up the house and yard. His wife sees she really does have a shoulder to lean on; it is not just his money any more, the man is much more vested in his family now. This is where the man starts receiving his due respect and reverence. The respect that is hard to earn while sitting at the computer or on the couch.
This is exactly why city men get cabins or run away to work. They can realize their potential in those places while installing a shelf or getting a raise out of the boss. At home they behave not like men, but like good, caring, well-bred boys who just wait out for the time they venture out into the big world and feel like adults again.
In the countryside, a man with his education, career, and left-overs of his woodworking class knowledge becomes satisfied with his life as a person who knows his own worth. There is no woman alive who can make him “do family things,” because he has his own manly business to take care of. This feeling of self-worth does wonders for the man’s health, family relationships, and longevity.
Russian source:
https://vk.com/whatisgood2?w=wall-21920914_10200
Link active as of November 27, 2017. RV