Last night's show at the club BARS owned by my friend shocked me by the fact that apparently it is now appropriate to use obscene language "at large". Dmitry Xrustalev, a pretty famous nowadays Russian actor and a host of the Comedy Woman show (advertised as the first and only intellectually humorous show for women by women, although ironically - probably on purpose - hosted by a man), openly cussed out from stage, sometimes as an "unbeeped" punch line to a joke, and sometimes just because.
This made me feel a little uneasy. You have to understand that the Russian mat (profanity) is VERY different from its English counterpart. If in English it is not such a big deal to say "fucking aye", for example, in front of your mother (at a certain age, of course), the Russian equivalent of this expression is 1,000 times more offensive, and if I dared use it in front of my mom, I would have been surely renounced on the spot. On one hand, it is regarded as a mauvais ton for women to curse, while men are sort of "expected" to use this language. At the same time, ironically enough, the Russian filthy expressions can also be considered "sophisticated", if your personality and demeanor allows for an elegant use of those. Female linguists (yours truly), for example, are famous for this "elegant use" of the obscene language and it is regarded "sexy". But anyway, the curses have traditionally been very colloquial, backstage, censored, and that has always been the pull of using them... Hence my shock of this sudden public delivery. Oh well.
The show itself was very enjoyable though - electric cello, saxophone, various erotic pirouettes. Not bad at all...
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