Rehabilitating Sex

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

A button on sale at Moscow's Izmailovo open-air market not long ago neatly captured the country's traditional attitude toward sex: IN THE SOVIET UNION, THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SEX. As far as public discussion is concerned, the statement is not far from wrong. The U.S.S.R. has long been a society that is not just puritanical but almost completely ignorant about sexuality. The typical Soviet woman has nine abortions not because of liberal attitudes but because the procedure is a substitute for contraception, which is essentially unavailable. Says Igor Kon, a founding father of Soviet sociology and the nation's leading -- and perhaps only -- sexologist: "If you want to imagine the atmosphere in the Soviet Union, imagine a world before Kinsey -- even before Freud."

But the very fact that the button is available at all is a sign that those attitudes are beginning to change. The Soviets seem determined to make up for lost time. In the past year as never before, TV shows have been alluding unashamedly to sex and even offering occasional nudity, while films have had explicit sex scenes. Last December at an erotic-art exposition in Moscow, a woman was covered in whipped cream and men in the audience were invited to lick it off; the scene was later shown on late-night TV. The capital even boasts its first touch of Times Square raunch, at the Tramway Workers' House of Culture, which last month began playing host three nights a week to a nude revue featuring a striptease and a simulated sex act.

Magazines such as Soviet Photo and Ogonyok are publishing erotic pictures, and there is a publication called Moscow Personals. Kon's own textbook, An Introduction to Sexology, became available in the Soviet Union last year, more than a decade after it was first published in Eastern Europe. Already half a million copies of the Soviet edition are in print. An explicit sex manual, Advice to Young Couples, is a best seller at bookstalls.

The new openness is not just a media phenomenon. The Moscow City Consultation on Family and Marriage recently opened its doors, offering advice to the general public. The Family and Health Association, a voluntary organization, has applied for membership in International Planned Parenthood. Sex education, offered for the first time in just a few schools in the early 1980s, is now supposed to be part of a course on marriage and family life required in all Soviet high schools.

Like many aspects of glasnost, however, actual reform of government attitudes toward sex is lagging behind the change in official doctrine. Three years after sex education became mandatory in schools, barely any instructors are qualified to teach it. Those assigned to do so are often too embarrassed even to use animals to illustrate their points. Instead, they talk about sexual reproduction in plants or avoid the topic altogether. The effect is that many schools essentially have no sex education at all. Though that is mostly the result of sheer backwardness, some of the delay also stems from active opposition. Just as in the U.S., those against sex education have accused its proponents of conspiring to undermine the morals of youth.

While ignorance still reigns, little remains that is actually taboo except male homosexuality. Those accused of the practice face three years in prison for a first offense. The handful who test positive for the AIDS virus and then have sex can get eight years.

Nonetheless, Kon is encouraged that things are changing a little. He finds that younger people are maturing earlier and learning more and that women's sexuality, which was previously denied, is starting to be acknowledged. At the same time, men's total authority is starting to crack. Kon even intends to have the word sexism added to the next edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

In the meantime, Kon, now at the Institute for Ethnography, hopes to use his new status as a member of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to keep pushing for change. At Kon's urging, the April issue of the magazine Semya (Family) will begin to run a translation of the no-holds-barred French children's sexual-instruction book La Vie Sexuelle (The Sexual Life). Three different publications this year will include excerpts from the works of Freud. "Readers will be enchanted," Kon says. "They will think it is the latest thing." Perhaps, he suggests, the excerpts should be accompanied by scholarly introductions to let readers know what has happened in the intervening decades.

With reporting by Glenn Garelik/Moscow