From Russia with Love

For frigidity, try caviar and red peppers, both rich in the reputed aphrodisiac vitamin E. Even better are "limited doses of dry wines." Or for a special lift turn on suitably sensual, rhythmically erotic background music such as Ravel's Bolero and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. If all else fails, why not shudder a little with an electric vibrator, used sparingly, of course, so that "a woman will not become more attracted to it than to her husband."

Such advice to the sexlorn might arouse little more than a smirk from U.S. and Western European readers accustomed to more sophisticated counsel. The Russians, however, are virtually panting for the suggestions, which appear in an astonishingly frank sex survey sponsored by the puritanical Soviet government. Female Sexual Pathology, a 189-page paperback illustrated with a handful of blurry photographs of lesbians and transvestites, sold out in its first few days in Soviet bookstores and is currently the hottest-selling item on the Moscow black market, where curious Communists are shelling out more than 50 times the book's official 87-c- purchase price for a copy. Says one female aficionado: "It's fascinating to read what before I'd only guessed about." But another reader, more sure of her skills, sniffs: "Someone showed me a copy and I don't need it."

That may well be true for most Soviet women if the author, Leningrad Sexologist Abram Svyadoshch, is right. In dry technical language (the book was intended as a guide for doctors treating sex problems), Svyadoshch contends that Russian women achieve greater sexual satisfaction than their sisters in the West. After an analysis of reports from six experimental sex clinics in the U.S.S.R. and foreign surveys, he concludes that only 18% of Russian women suffer from nyet orgazm, compared with 40% of French and 41% of English women. Moreover, he finds that 16% of Russian women have an orgasm during every or almost every sex act, with as many as 44% making it more than half the time.

Still, there are problems under Soviet sheets. Svyadoshch says that "men often overestimate a younger woman's needs for sex while they underestimate an older woman's needs." Part of the trouble, he thinks, is that Russian women rise to their sexual peak around 30 and often stay fairly high until their 60s; men, however, slip into a "slow and gradual descent" after 30. To perk up those in need, he describes the erogenous zones of the body and suggests ways of using them to maximum effect. "In love," according to Svyadoshch, "everything is permitted that may bring a couple to full harmony."

Of course, the reader cannot escape without some stern Soviet moralizing. Premarital sex, warns the author, "can be a source of severe psychic disturbances and can lead to social impoverishment of the personality." For marital sex, his prescription is not more than once per night nor should it "last too long." If intercourse occurs in the morning, the couple should take a long snooze before getting out of bed. That way they will emerge at full strength for a day of socialist labor.

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