As a child I had picked up the term sex symbol from somewhere. I understood that it was a woman whom men found attractive. I sketched out for myself what a sex symbol ought to look like. Waist-length blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks and enormous boobs. I compared this ideal image with my mother, who was skinny, with small boobs, black eyes and short black hair. I wondered how my father had ever fancied her. On not a single sexy indicator did she overlap with the poster divas like C.C. Catch and Samantha Fox, who jiggled their boobs in time to the music in the drivers’ cabs of the city buses and trams. And I was also worried by the fact that I carried her unattractive gene inside me too, and when I grew up I would become a flat-chested brunette.
So there it was. I bitterly pitied my father, who had gone and married a skinny, short-haired woman. I pitied myself too, because I would turn out like that when I grew up. I didn’t pity my mother, since she had already been “taken”. But who would ever take me, if I was genetically not predisposed to being a sex symbol?
Until one day, a few years later, my father told us how, as a student in the 70s, he had several times provided “material” at a hospital for artificial insemination. You probably imagine that for this purpose he was left to seclude himself in a room full of issues of “Playboy”, specially imported from the States. No. He was abandoned alone with the little cup. In an empty room, where the only naked thing was the light bulb, swaying sadly above the donor.
In this depressing atmosphere my father had quite a struggle fulfilling his duties. So he asked to be supplied with something for “inspiration” next time. The hospital management granted his request. The next time, waiting for him in the room was this photo – Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut.
This story made me rethink my childhood notions of a sex symbol – if this little woman in a spacesuit was being used as a sex symbol by the doctors, then there was still hope for all the rest of us who don’t look like C.C. Catch.
