Harassed housewives who drink a few beers to ease up, stressed businesswomen relaxing with a glass or two at the end of the day, idle new rich drinking away their solitude while the husband is away -- alcoholism, in Russia, wears an increasingly feminine face.
According to sociologists and doctors, every year Russian women plunge deeper into alcoholism on the quiet, without even realizing that they are succumbing to an evil that strikes at "women from good families" as often as those who are worse off.
Tatyana, a 27-year-old, well-paid audit expert, took her first steps down the slippery slope to alcoholism with a group of friends around a bottle of good wine.
"I became an alcoholic when it no longer made any difference to me with whom I was drinking," confided puffy-faced, hoarse-voiced Tatyana.
So far she has spent a month in a gloomy ward of a rehab hospital, sharing her room with five other women in the same predicament and from different social classes.
She swears she will "never again drink three bottles of vodka a day" and "never come back here."
Anna, a wealthy, 26-year-old housewife and mother of a three-year-old, felt trapped in a stifling "golden cage" when she married after graduating.
"When I was out walking with my son, I would buy two or three beers and drink them before my husband came home. I was always well dressed and made up, but I became more and more aggressive, with fits of unreasonable jealousy," she said.
"Every day, I would invent a new pretext to drink," she confessed.
Marina, 32, another housewife with a rich husband, used to hide her bottles behind drawers and drank away from her family's sight. Her husband left her when he learned of her drinking problem.
Experts insist there are few reliable figures on alcoholism in Russia, and even fewer when it comes to women as they tend to hide their habit more than men.
"They only come to us when they are totally hooked," said Yevgeny Tolkachev, doctor in Moscow's hospital number 17, which specializes in toxicology.
"A drunken woman is everybody's," "a drunk mother is her family's woe," are but two of the many bitter proverbs which Russia's intolerant society uses to brand feminine alcoholism while condoning male drunkenness, sociologist Margarita Poznyakova pointed out.
The waiting room of the privately owned "psychological adaptation clinic" is a picture of a discreet rehab center for the well-off -- complete with pastel painted walls and the relaxing background murmur of classical music.
"Ten years ago there was one woman for every 10 male alcoholics, now it is four," the clinic's director Alexei Magalif said.
"Many women nowadays lead the same kind of life as men, with the same habits. They work more and relax by drinking," he said.
According to doctor Kirill Vinokurov, women are now emancipated and living alongside conservative men hits them hard. "They want a more Western type of family, which does not go very well with the Russian mentality."
Besides in Russia "we are extremists. A glass to go with food quickly becomes a bottle," sociologist Poznyakova shrugged.
Another alarming factor is that the group at risk is becoming steadily younger, which is why doctors have become vocal opponents of beer ads geared toward teenagers who can easily buy the drink round the clock.
"Five years ago most of our patients were between 40 and 50 years old. Now a 23-year-old woman no longer shocks anyone," Vinokurov deplored.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
In front of a secluded temple in southwestern China, Duan Ruru skillfully executes a series of chops and strikes, practicing kung fu techniques she has spent a decade mastering. Chinese martial arts have long been considered a male-dominated sphere, but a cohort of Generation Z women like Duan is challenging that assumption and generating publicity for their particular school of kung fu. “Since I was little, I’ve had a love for martial arts... I thought that girls learning martial arts was super swaggy,” Duan, 23, said. The ancient Emei school where she trains in the mountains of China’s Sichuan Province
RSS