Mikhail Pozharsky: "The ideal of masculinity"

“I started thinking: why are there so many Harvey Weinstein sympathizers in Russia? Well, he’s really a vile, hypocritical pig. Apparently, the fact is that Harvey Weinstein is a Dream,” the publicist writes on his Facebook page.

“Let’s imagine Russian Vasya and the ordinary gender landscape in which he lives. Russian Vasya grows up in a same-sex family of his mother and grandmother, his father is a test pilot, and Vasya receives slaps on the head throughout his childhood because this pilot flew away (according to statistics , it’s mostly women who beat children in Russia). Then Vasya ends up in kindergarten, then at school - where Maryivanna yells at him for 11 years in a row, gives him grades and generally shows him who the power is. Then Vasya can get into university, where he’s everywhere. - from the office to the educational part - the same Maryivannas rule.

Then work - once a month in the accounting department, where Lyudmila Petrovna sits. In most interactions with government authorities, receiving all sorts of important pieces of paper, the face of this state is also female and gender. And with challah on his head.

But the most interesting thing is that in the kingdom of this post-Soviet everyday matriarchy, Vasya somehow manages to consider himself an alpha male, a real man and a supporter of traditional values. He can find a great many reasons for this - for example, Vasya scrubbed toilets in the army for a year, went to boxing for six months in his youth, fought three times while drunk and once sat in the bullpen. Man? Man.

However, the most important thing is that Vasya has a Dream. He dreams of entering the coveted 1% of Big Bosses (in the sense of higher than the accountant Lyudmila Petrovna), Real Men who can beat up secretaries at work. In a situation where there are no normal male role models in Vasya’s life (we don’t count a drunken Trudovik), the main male role model becomes this image of a redneck, which is established at the expense of the weak. This is the ideal of masculinity. And Weinstein fits this image perfectly, so he’s ours, man, hands off.

In America, conservatism is real, not exaggerated. Unlike God's salvation, there are no record divorce rates, and infidelity is not considered a cultural norm. An American conservative, who had a father in his family and a male teacher at school, looking at Weinstein, does not see an example of what a real man should look like. But, on the contrary, he sees everything that a man should NOT be. This is just a man, completely devoid of all the traditional male virtues: honor, dignity, fidelity, etc.”