Very cool protest at World Track and Field Championship in Russia!
Wow! I'm in awe. These women are brave!
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/russian-gold-medalists-kiss-medal-stand-world-championships-132337366.html
In Russia I'm sure this had a very large live audience. I'm sure the Russian authorities are not happy. I hope they don't initiate sanctions against these brave young women. I'm worried that they will never run for Russia again but I'm sure they considered that before doing this action.
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THIS should be a trend on the run-up to the 2014 Olympics in Russia.
just as in 1968 ...
Some Russians agree it's a protest.
A lot don't.
Some don't know.
It seems to depend on politics. There are those who want to see it as a protest and those who don't. Both have reasons for their interpretation.
Most are amused that the "Europeans" (or, disparagingly, the гейропейцы
seem to obsess over this and have such a single-minded view. Comes from cultural narrowness, I suspect.
Perhaps Ryzhova and Firova will clarify. Note that the article oddly says that Firova is decidedly male, "Firov". Another one of those irritating cultural things. Names in -ov show gender. And now i'm interested in finding out if there's the whole "gender in language" thing with lesbian females whose names show gender insisting on masculine forms of their names and of past tense verbs, etc. (Russian past-tense verbs show gender.)
There's a long tradition of being more expressive in Russian. Brezhnev kissed Honecker on the lips--there's a famous photo of it. There's even a nifty stamp of two Russian soldiers kissing over the joy Germany's defeat. Nothing sexual involved. I've seen a girls, when excited, kiss each other. It's more common in older movies and literature and among younger girls, but it still happens. And I've seen straight young women walk hand in hand or arm in arm as they talked about their cheesy boyfriends. It's less often that guys kiss each other, but if they're friends, esp. close in something like the military, they can still do the arm-in-arm thing, esp. if in uniform.
And getting drunk together? Arms around each other.
Still, it was a day after another athlete said disparaging things. And the law even prompted, it seems, one athlete to say that if she won a medal she specifically wouldn't kiss her rival on the lips lest it break the law. (She's not gay.)
When I saw the photo and thought they were Swedes, I assumed they were gay. When I saw they were Russian my response was, "Girls kiss when they're really excited." As a protest, it's ambiguous. Unless they come out and say something.
