Word: sexed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...despondent husband wonders why his wife fails to respond to him during lovemaking. To his genuine astonishment, he learns from a physician that he was not accomplishing much of anything by stimulating his wife's navel. The naive husband may sound like a caricature concocted at a sex therapists' meeting, but for Mikhail Stern, a dissident Soviet physician now living in France, the story is poignantly symptomatic of the woeful sexual lives of most Soviet citizens...
Though the Kremlin is energetic about publishing statistics on many aspects of Soviet life, one vital area remains terra incognita. The Communist leadership regards sex as virtually nonexistent, except to raise the birth rate; whatever figures exist are guarded as closely as the real statistics on defense spending. Stern, who left the U.S.S.R. in 1977, has now lifted that curtain slightly. In a book published in France, La vie sexuelle en U.R.S.S. (Sex in the Soviet Union), which is to be brought out in the U.S. next spring by Times Books, he offers the most comprehensive description yet of sexual...
...picture that one would think of titling The Joy of Sex. Deprived of opportunities for intimacy because of overcrowded housing, overwhelmed by long entrenched sexual myths, and ruled by a government that seems to deny the very idea of a sex life, most Soviet citizens, says Stern, lead lives of "sexual misery." For more than 30 years this Soviet Kinsey was a practicing endocrinologist at a clinic in Vinnitsa, near the Ukrainian city of Kiev, where his patients called upon him for advice on sexual problems...
...songs and folklore told of heroines suffering at the hands of men, and mothers have traditionally told their daughters, "If he doesn't beat you, he doesn't love you." Indeed, says Stern, sadomasochism and drink often rule the male-female relationship. He writes: "Violence, alcoholism, and sex form an explosive cocktail, making the line between 'normal life' and criminal pathology extremely fine...
Many women are so physically scarred that they lose interest in sex. While official Soviet statistics say that only 18% of Russian women are frigid, Stern is convinced by his researches that the figure is closer to 45%. Nor is much help available for these women; sex therapy clinics are nonexistent. Women must turn to sympathetic doctors like Stern or to one or two available government manuals that are about as informative as the hygiene texts once used in U.S. junior high schools. One 1974 Soviet sex guide, for example, recommends mineral water douches and vacations in warm climes...