Russian women are more beautiful

A former exchange student's rebuttal to the Passport Bro myth.

Me with my host mom, Nelli, in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, in July 2001.

I was seventeen when I split my pants while riding a horse through the Russian countryside. I didn’t hear the fabric tearing, but there was suddenly more air on my backside than there should have been, and I could feel the leather saddle sticking to my skin.

It hadn't been an easy ride. It was hot, for starters. Flies irritated the horses, and the horses irritated inexperienced riders. The trail we followed wound through Russia’s unspoiled wilderness, but that meant we ran into hazards, like a small creek with a steep embankment on the other side. We had no choice but to jump, which was a problem for the less experienced riders in our group. Poor Sebastian fell right into the water.

(There is not a single horseback riding camp or stable in the U.S. that would take inexperienced riders over a jump, at least not before demanding signatures on a pound of waivers. We signed no waivers that day, and we wore no helmets.)

By the time the ride was over, everybody was ready to dismount, and I was starting to worry just how much of my butt was exposed to the open air. Finally, when we made it back to camp, I discovered that the inseam of my jeans had completely blown out. After changing clothes in my tent, I showed everybody my denim Chernobyl.

Joslyn, a tall, Dominican boy from the Bronx, put his head through the crotch, and his arms through the legs, and ran around on all fours, neighing.

It was the summer of 2001, and I was in Russia on a summer exchange program through American Field Service. There were seven of us in our group (eight, including Beverly, our adult chaperone) and we were there to do some sort of ecology project, which mysteriously vanished from our itinerary not long after we got there.

We spent half our time in Nizhny Novgorod, a city several hours east of Moscow, and the rest at a scout camp on the Vetluga River. Somebody had asked our group whether we wanted to go horseback riding, and a guide came along with a horse for each of us. Looking back, I don't remember him arriving at the camp with a trailer; he might have emerged from the forest on his lead horse with the rest of the tacked-up herd following behind.

A few days after the ill-fated trail ride, one of the locals, Marina, took me to a department store in Nizhny Novgorod. She thought since my other pants had been obliterated, I might want a new pair.

“This girl has ideal figure,” she lamented, looking at a headless mannequin with pencil-straight curves. I tried on pants but didn't like how they looked. They really weren’t my style, anyway: they were sort of like jeggings with fake jewels glued along the seams, and back then, I still preferred a wider leg. I left without buying anything.

Thinness as the ideal was inescapable in 2001. In Russia, more women seemed to be able to achieve it (more on that later). Anya, my host sister in Nizhny Novgorod, was 15, lanky and blond with visible hipbones. She had the body I was supposed to have, according to fashion, but even when I was at my lowest weight, I didn’t have a willowy figure like Anya’s. Was her look natural? Maybe. But there was no way I could ever look like that without harming myself.

Anya didn't want her mom to know she smoked; she asked me to lie. When her mom said, “Tell me. Does Anya smoke?” I pretended I didn't know.

“Why you don’t make up?” Anya asked me once, referring to the fact that I didn’t like sacrificing time on the altar of beauty every morning.

“I don’t like it,” I said. I’d grown up with the idea that the natural look was ideal, even if it was achieved with eyeshadow and blush. Remember Aunt Becky on Full House telling D.J. that the trick to makeup is to look like you aren’t wearing any? Anya and her friends favored a style closer to D.J.’s before Aunt Becky’s natural-look tutorial.

It was a bridge too far for me. To go from no makeup to looking like slutty Kimmy Gibbler would be like walking around in split pants. But what I thought of as overdone and cheap was simply the style for Russian women.

When I returned to Russia as a college student in 2004, I was concerned about what living in that culture for a whole semester would do to my already fragile body image.

Before classes began, the director of the Middlebury School in Russia met with all of us individually to address our concerns, and I told her how I felt about Russia’s body type. I waited for her to reply with some shopworn platitudes about how I shouldn't compare myself to others, but instead, she got straight to the point.

“Listen,” she said. “They don't age well. They turn into square babushki. And they're not thin because they're healthy. They're not eating field greens and walking on treadmills. It’s all vodka, cigarettes and eating disorders.”

Was everything she said true? Well, the smoking part sure was. There was visual and olfactory evidence of that everywhere. I don't have data to back up the rest, but the Middlebury director had lived in Moscow for years and been a student there herself when it was still the USSR. There's no doubt that her insights had merit.

As I write this, I'm remembering another part of the conversation. She told me about how when she was a student, she ate mostly potatoes because not much else was available. She told me a male classmate lost weight while she tore the seams in her skirts.

“It just goes to show how differently our bodies process carbs,” she said. I had told her I was worried about putting on weight. My diet while in Russia wasn’t quite as starchy as hers, but it wasn’t high in vegetables either.

Thinness is often correlated with wealth. In the U.S., money means you can access weight loss treatment most people can't afford and can indulge in pleasures out of reach for the hoi polloi — cocaine and daily massages, for example. You can dine out at the kind of restaurant where some sous chef tweezes herbs onto a single scallop and then charges you $30 for the privilege. If you're really wealthy, you can outsource all your decision-making to someone who will plan your calories in, calories out for you.

In Russia, thinness may be a path to wealth, an entry into a modeling career or a chance to land a western husband. The Middlebury program director suggested as much during our conversation, though I can’t remember her exact words.

Because Russian women tend to be thin, this leads people who visit as tourists to conclude that they’re more beautiful, but I think this is an illusion, despite what Passport bros say. In fact, I have serious doubts that people in any one country are better looking on average than people in any other country. If jobs are scarce, then hotels are more likely to hire the best-looking women to be concierges and waitresses, so if you never leave the tourist area of a foreign city, what you’re seeing is likely a selection bias, not genetic superiority. Moreover, one of the stages of adapting to a new culture is looking at it through rose-colored glasses. Anyone who goes to another country and comes back declaring its people to be better looking was probably there just long enough to experience the honeymoon phase.

I discussed this with a friend who grew up in Thailand and has observed American men losing their minds over Thai girls who, according to my friend, vary as much in attractiveness as women from any other country.

We talked about how American women don’t typically wax poetic about the hotness of Russian men — and wouldn’t they, if the Passport Bro myth were true? After all, Russian men contribute half the genes to those would-be internet brides. Logic follows that Russian men should be hotties too, but somehow, being vodka-and-cigarette gaunt doesn’t work the same way for men. We surmised that American women are far more likely to go gaga over Mediterranean men, but the same questions apply. Italian and Greek men may be tall and dark, but is handsome a given?

“If beauty is scarcity,” my friend said, “and you don’t see many Mediterranean men around, then even the average guy is scarce and exotic.”

Are Russian women really more beautiful? If you covet a certain body type because it's rare, are in the throes of the first stage of culture shock, and are a tourist, then maybe. If you’re experiencing daily life in the country and immersing yourself in the culture, you’ll realize they’re just people. Some are conventionally beautiful, some aren’t.

People mock the idea that “all bodies are beautiful,” but can't everybody be beautiful to someone? I've heard the author Lionel Shriver say that we need beauty standards so people have something to aspire to, but who benefits from aspirational beauty, aside from Unilever’s shareholders?

What do beauty standards actually accomplish besides robbing us of our inner beauty as we focus on the external at the expense of our souls? How does it help us to obsess over our looks when doing so saps our cognitive ability?¹ I've argued before that beauty standards don't help us find love so much as stand in the way of it. We defend beauty standards because we have no idea what it's like to live in a society without them. I know that terrifies some people but the idea excites me, though I don't think the day will ever come when we are allowed to decide for ourselves what's beautiful.

At the end of July 2001, I returned home with a suitcase full of souvenirs (and one less pair of jeans), eager to start my senior year. Anya sent me a letter after 9/11, but we didn't keep in touch after that. Did she become a square babushka as the Middlebury program director predicted? Did she end up with one of the boys she was dating that summer? Is she still in Nizhny Novgorod? I don't know.

I do know that today, I would not fit into the jeans I didn't buy that day at that department store with Marina. Not even close.

But I also know that despite all the time and attention, all the money and energy, that were supposed to put into our looks, they don't matter. Not even a little.

Not at all.

Author’s note: Below are photos that paying subscribers can see.