Thrilled to be a guest on Dr. Fern Riddell's History podcast

The Night Witches were the feared, all-female military aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Yet the Night Witches weren't the only Soviet women on the front-line during the Second World War. Women were pilots, doctors, partisans, snipers and anti-aircraft gunners. Dr Fern Riddell speaks to Dr Reina Pennington and Prof Kristen Ghodsee.



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Quote from the book Love, Marriage and Friendship in the Soviet Union (1984)

“One of the major factors that has contributed to the sexualization of the Soviet mentality today, according to Igor Kon, is ‘the drastic increase in female sexual activity.’ Kon derogates Victorian morality and medical theories that contend that ‘a decent woman in general does not enjoy sex.’ He asserts, referring for lack of Soviet data to Czechoslovakian sources, that the proportion of women from the younger generation who experience orgasm reached 79 percent, against 31 percent among women of the older generation. He further suggests that this sexual awakening of women is a source of conflict between men and women, presumably because now men cannot satisfy the increasing sexual appetites of Soviet women (Kon 1982, p. 118).” Page 55-56

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Just the book I needed

I ordered this gem through interlibrary loan and discovered many fascinating facts about sex and love in the Soviet Union. The author, Vladimir Shlapentokh, was a prominent sociologist before he emigrated to the United States in 1978. This was his first book published in his adopted country in which he argues that the Soviet citizen had become hedonistic in the extreme.

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