Per the Wills and Kate debate: yes, losing your anonymity can, in fact, suck

via: katemiddletonforthewin.tumblr.com

I should be writing a new script. So that I don’t fall behind on my student loans (on can dream, anyway), and so the husband and I can stay fed this summer (the baby, presumably, will have the breast – just like in the “Lady Madonna” song). This naturally means that I am busy participating in useless online debates at Feministe. In the course of one such debate, I have discovered that – egad! – expressing pity for Kate Middleton’s utter loss of anonymity is problematic, ya’ll (I’m beginning to loathe the word “problematic,” btw: it’s right up there with “privilege” and “trigger”).

I don’t know what it’s like to be a diamond tiara-wearing international celebrity, but I do know what it’s like to experience a partial loss of anonymity. When I lived in Amman, Jordan, in the years 2008 – 2009, I couldn’t step outside and walk down the street without shit going down. At all. Seriously. I was a young foreign woman, and a conspicuously Slavic foreign woman on top of that, in a country where ladies like me are too often associated with being “easy”. Even some people who weren’t interested in getting a piece of me felt that they had every right to point, stare, make comments, and sometimes even follow me around as I tried to, say buy tampons or whatever. People took pictures of me with their mobile phones. Entire tables full of people would get curious, sometimes even viciously curious, if I wanted to have a drink at a restaurant at night. Girls made comments about me in club bathrooms, unaware of the fact that I could usually understand what it was they were saying about me in Arabic, so that I couldn’t even pee in peace.

We all lose our privacy when we go outside, but my loss of privacy on the streets of Amman was nearly total. I wasn’t a person – I was a curiosity at best. A lot of factors contributed to this – not just my gender, appearance, and age. I had a halo of vulnerability around me. I couldn’t get used to what was happening. Unlike some other people who find themselves in similar situations, I couldn’t cope with the situation, which only increased the attention.

Even kind attention, people calling me beautiful in an attempt to make me feel welcome (both men and women did this), devastated me. I moved about the city from safe space to safe space – house, gym, expensive hotel bar, friend’s house, etc. – tensing up every time I had to mix with “ordinary people.” The worst was being intruded upon in places I had initially decided were safe. I had felt comfortable going on shopping trips, and then the first time a group of grown men started making comments and pointing their fingers at City Mall, I went home and cried for hours. The same thing happened when I discovered that the guys who worked at the gym I attended had tried to get the women’s locker room attendant to covertly snap pictures of me with her mobile when I changed (when she had refused, they pestered her with questions about my body – what did it look like naked? When she told them they were being assholes, they were shocked, she said, because to them, what they were doing was completely innocent – they never even imagined that to someone like me, what they were doing amounted to a colossal, total betrayal).

Incidentally, I was pampered in Amman. I never had to hustle for money like I do in Moscow. I didn’t have to borrow at the end of the month, or delay medical procedures while I waited for a freelance fee to come through. I didn’t lie awake at night, wondering what on earth I would do when my savings ran out (as they’re about to, again!). I ate great food. I took mini-breaks at great hotels. Ladies were paid to put expensive pumpkin goo on my face and massage my back. I certainly never cleaned my own bathroom or cooked. I still have fabulous clothes and accessories from that period of my life, vestiges of past luxury: delicate cashmere scarves, sparkling Donna Karan dresses, pearls, giant sunglasses, golden keychains, designer tunics that now nicely contain my baby bump. I rocked that shit, yo. I was queen of it.

But the price was too steep. There were other factors that contributed to my ultimate decision to leave, many of them private, but the mere fact of my day-to-day existence in Amman had exhausted and worn me down to the point that I, little miss spoiled, went all the way to the crazy former USSR in order to get my shit together and heal. Seriously. I found healing in a place where the metro gets blown up, for God’s sake.

Incidentally, I had moved to Amman for love. That love was very much a real thing, which is why it chaps my hide to hear people make snide comments about the “real” reason why Kate Middleton married William (what do we officially refer to him as, now? Do I care?). Considering the Middletons are rich, I seriously doubt that money was at stake. Despite my own feelings about the British monarchy, which are conflicting, I think there’s actually a whole lot of sexism and snobbery involved in subtly making the claim that this girl is a damn gold-digger. Seriously, people, even royals, even rich folks, meet and fall in love – and then have to make sacrifices for that love. It happens, and I view Kate Middleton’s loss of privacy as a pretty giant freaking sacrifice.

I’ve got no doubt that Kate Middleton will be able to handle being a mega-celebrity. I’ve got good money on her! She rocks those tiaras! Still, unwanted attention can be a bitch for someone who still remembers what it’s like to walk down the street like a normal person. It can leave you feeling exhausted and bitter and hunted, and for anyone who thinks otherwise, I sincerely invite you to try it out for yourself.

Easter Sunday in Novogireyevo

It’s the sort of day when church bells ring non-stop and people bring their digital SLR cameras and fancily dressed Chihuahuas named Caesar out to various Moscow parks, making me bemoan the fact that our own digital SLR camera is currently in a village outside Voronezh, accompanying my husband on a filming excursion. He can actually use that thing – and shoot video in full HD besides that – but still. Frowny face.

An as Easter treat, I took the bump (or “The Globe,” as we know call him – it originally didn’t start as a means to honour William Shakespeare, but the practice has sort of morphed into that for me) out to Kuskovo. I didn’t want to bother with buying tickets just so I could troop through the museum all by my lonesome, having not made any Easter plans with anybody, so I stuck to the park grounds. I met a horse in red leg-warmers and then lay on the grass by the lake for a while. The grass is just beginning to turn green.

Ducks – the regular kind, and the more exotic kind, whose species I can’t begin to guess – drifted by on business of their own. I thought that the Moscow around me is so different from many people’s expectations of what the city is like. It’s not scary, or intense. It’s hardly glamorous. It’s populated by increasingly random people – young picnicking Italians who made me think that they must be students, elderly women in bright scarves and trench coats, beer drinkers vaguely reminiscent of football hooligans on their day off, people on sports bikes, high school girls doing photo sessions by the water and pouting too much.

The Globe sat quietly for most of our journey, reacting briefly to such episodes as a horse neighing or me laughing when an English Bulldog came over to tickle my ankles with his nose. I’ve read that slow walks soothe babies in the womb – which seems about right. The Globe likes to rock out when I’m sitting or lying down. When I’m walking around, my body seems to act like a cradle.

I’ve noticed that he recognizes his father’s voice now. When Alexey comes home and starts talking (usually loudly, because he’s a loud talker) there’s a flurry of activity. They can spend a long time communicating, these two: Alexey talking to The Globe, The Globe kicking and tapping out his own Morse Code messages.

“I wish I could tell you that you were becoming citizens of a utopia,” the guy who lead my citizenship ceremony proceedings said back home in Charlotte, NC. I wish I could tell The Globe the same thing. Sometimes, it literally chokes me, to think about the world I am shepherding him into – and him in it, a little boy with two drama-loving (in every sense of the word) parents, a Muscovite of the 21st century variety, growing up in a place where public places get bombed and traffic jams are legend, a future (if perhaps temporary) hostage to Tolkien and Process Oriented Psychology, Greek cuisine and the PS3. A baby whose eventual conception was heralded by a meteor and slyly granted by St. Matrona of Moscow (we believe), and who taught me that one should always be prepared to have their wishes granted at a moment’s notice. I want him to be happy, and this want is probably the greatest want that I have ever known, and it scares me sometimes. I chase away the fear by reading Damn You Auto Correct and writing vulgar things on my friends’ Facebook walls.

I talk to him about everything, because I want to be honest. I communicate with him in English while in public, which amuses people.

It is funny when you think about it – a woman in enormous sunglasses, cooing to her equally enormous belly in a foreign language in the park. Almost as funny as a young woman in stilettos running after a Chihuahua in a little sailor’s outfit, screaming “Caesar! Do not DARE get in the mud!”*

* – I’ll give you one guess as to whether or not Caesar followed instructions. 

Vladimir Lymaryov from Chelyabinsk: you’re awesome. As opposed to Nikita Mikhalkov (I know that comparison makes it easy, but still)

Hence this:

From Vladimir Lymaryov & dirty.ru. Did I mention that Vladimir Lymaryov, whoever he is, is kinda awesome?

Oh, and look, more awesome here.

Meanwhile, releasing “Citadel”, the THIRD freaking installment in the whole “Burnt by the sun” saga, on May 5, just 4 days before the May 9 Victory Day holidays, is NOT EXPLOITATIVE AT ALL, YOU GAIZ. I mean, I’m not surprised – Mikhalkov did the same thing last year. But still.

*sigh* And I’d liked “12” so very much…

Bei Bei Shuai: if you’re pregnant and suicidal, then you better damn well succeed at killing yourself!

Or so the state of Indiana thinks, apparently.

The logic is flawless, you guys. Of course, they’re not taking it far enough. Next up: charging babies with manslaughter if the mother dies in labour. Charging fathers with murder if the mother dies in labour. If a pregnant woman gets hit by a car and suffers miscarriage as the result – let’s set up a special commission to determine if she were jaywalking, so we can charge her with criminal negligence.

Can you think of better use of taxpayer money in the middle of an unemployment crisis? I sure can’t! I mean, why worry about things like Medicare for the elderly when state legislators can busy themselves with abusing the mentally ill and people suffering from temporary mental collapse?