The economics of hot Russian tennis players

Conservative pundit Anne Applebaum looks into a question I've often asked: Dude, what's with all these smoking hot Russian babes? Applebaum doesn't phrase it quite like that, but you get the gist.

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.

Applebaum cites tennis players, fashion models and high-society arm candy as beneficiaries of this new "market for female beauty", but the same dynamic holds in the less glamorous field of pornography. Much of the hardcore pornography sold in western Europe and North America is shot in post-communist eastern Europe, home to multitudes of young, beautiful, sexually liberated (and just as importantly, let's be honest, white-skinned) women willing to work for relatively low pay.

Critics of the beauty industry and/or globalization might question whether joining this international "market for female beauty" represents progress. But Applebaum notes that the openness that gives us Maria Sharapova wallpapers also creates many other opportunities.

Ultimately, what goes for the fashion world goes for other spheres of human activity. In the past, you had to play chess or be a champion gymnast to come to international attention if you were born in the Eastern bloc—chess and competitive sports figuring among the few party-approved export industries. Nowadays, stars in fields previously unsanctioned by the party—crime novelists, conceptual artists, computer whizzes—from Russia, Hungary, or Uzbekistan have a shot at fame and fortune, too. As for talented entrepreneurs, the sky's the limit.

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table [or being dp-ed by uncircumcised thugs on your monitor — ed.]: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

Markets in everything, amen.

 

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