My email inbox has been overflowing with letters from readers ever since my last column about Russia's amazing abundance of beautiful women, and how the rise of free markets made them so gorgeous. Even academic heavyweight Michael McFaul of the Hoover Institute dropped me a note thanking me for pointing out the link between Russia's turn to open free markets in the 1990s, which he helped to design and promote, and the sudden revelation of Russia's remarkable female beauty.
"Yes, free markets gave rise to beautiful Russian women," wrote McFaul, "but what few realize is that today's Putin-era Russian beauties, who are even more appealing than the girls of the 1990s, would today be even drop-dead off-the-scale gorgeous had Putin not imposed authoritarian rule and clamped down on the free market."
Thanks for pointing that out, Michael! How right you are!
The link between beauty and open markets is incontrovertible and everywhere. Take for example Great Britain, where the proportion of hatchet-faced horse-toothed women declined from 98% of the female population during the Welfare State era, down to 97.85% of the population after Margaret Thatcher's market reforms took hold. True, the statistics have a margin of error of 5%, but as Michael McFaul correctly notes, that margin of error would be even greater had not free markets been introduced.
The free market at work for whore & john
We needn't look overseas to understand this. In the USA, the dazzling lustful hippie girls of the Great Society era in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the sexless post-Reaganomics American woman of today: fat-ankled, bitter, a bottle of Prozac in one hand and a jackrabbit vibrator in the other: she is the picture of free markets triumphing over the failed sexual socialism of the LBJ years. While it's true today's American women are frighteningly unappealing compared to their sisters of the protectionist past, at the same time, Michael McFaul would correctly argue that were it not for Reagan's market revolution, today's American women would be even fatter and angrier than the current generation.
When I look at myself in the mirror every morning, I say, "Anne, you look great, and you feel great, and it's all thanks to the open markets!"
I'm bringing all this up because in all of my excitement over Russian beauty, I forgot to cite the single most impressive and visible benefit that market reforms brought: the incredible explosion in Russian and East European prostitutes! Earth to Anne, hello Anne! There I was reminiscing about the Russian beauties appearing in high-class London hotel lobbies and restaurants in 1995, but the part of that story I left out was how most of the girls I saw in those places were working women.
Free markets mean whore markets: Spasibo Applebaum!
If you recall my column, I noted how an old Russia hand friend of mine who'd spent time in the Soviet Union during the 1970s looked at the women in the hotel lobby and remarked, "But where were they all before?" I left out what he said after that: "Where were all the whores crowding the alley tochkas in every Russian thoroughfare, where were all the whores advertising on the Internet or the Moscow Times? If only I'd known, I would have done everything different!"
"They hadn't yet been saved by the free markets!" I chimed in cheerfully. "And don't forget, Old Russia Hand friend, open markets means open borders for hundreds of thousands of prostitutes, which means the exciting opportunity to become a globalized sex slave: in an Albanian trading post, a client to an AIDS-infested Nigerian peacekeeper, orthe chance to travel the world from a basement dungeon in Tetovo to a basement dungeon in Seoul! The trendy left-wing ivory tower types may talk of the evils of globalization, but what they forget is that without globalization, we wouldn't have this great mixing of cultures: Moldovan, Ukrainian, and Belarussian whores getting trafficked through NATO-run Kosovo through a network of Romanian, Serbian and Bosnian criminal gangs, then handed over to Albanian crime groups, and eventually sold to brothels from Saipan to Brazil and points in between!"
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