Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, but what are you signaling with the flowers to a woman? Ongoing loyalty. The old joke. I think it’s Romanian rather than Russian. What’s the Romanian word for friend? Future enemy. Groups are very tight, but people get purged all the time. To keep on signaling so you don’t get purged or that you’re not a purger is I think what’s going on with the flowers, is opening the door, but it’s still somewhat of a mystery to me. I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s about, on the surface level, you had all this rhetoric and policy about women being equal to men, but really, Soviet society remained a pretty essentialist place. People saw women, “Women are this, and men are that,” and post-Soviet Russia leaned into that a lot. The stereotypes of what a woman is and what a man is became so exaggerated, so cartoonish, and women were cartoonishly feminized. I remember when I lived in Russia, a Westerner made a joke that all Russian women look like Jessica Rabbit. What do all women want? They want jewelry. They want flowers. They want chocolate. They want manicures. It’s just part of this gender essentialism that you see. What do men want? Men want alcohol. They want cars. They want cigarettes. They want prostitutes in the banya. They want hunting and fishing trips. When I was able to travel to Russia, when I lived there, all I heard was, “In Russia, men are men and women are women,” as opposed to you androgynous weirdos in the West. I think flowers are very much a part of that, that this is what you do for women. By the way, I had people I would interview for work. We’d meet for clearly a work lunch. They would bring me flowers because I was a woman first. That’s why I told the story of Surkov bringing bouquets of flowers for two of the most senior American diplomats in the Obama administration. He knew that he was trolling them with that by saying, “Yes, you think you’re a diplomat, but you’re a woman first and foremost.”…

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