FUDGE: American culture can rev up Siberian sex drive

For years the United States and those wily Ruskies have been competing over nearly everything imaginable. They beat us to space. We beat them in hockey. They defeated us in building cathedrals that look like giant cupcakes, and we beat them in pretty much everything else.

But now our vodka-swilling rivals to the east have broken ground on a new competitive front: making babies.

In a country riddled with AIDS, alcoholism and suicide, it is becoming increasingly difficult to produce the future generation of Russians to carry on the proud tradition of drinking yourself into oblivion, ending your own life and contracting the world’s most notorious sexually transmitted disease. So much so that the population is shrinking by nearly 700,000 people each year.

While the United States might combat this problem with better healthcare or discouraging people from sharing sexual partners with Magic Johnson, the Russians think they have devised a better idea — state-sponsored sex. In fact, last week the Ulyanovsk province sponsored its third annual “Family Contact Day.” A day dubbed by locals as “Conception Day,” in which employers were urged to give couples the day off so they could be home making babies.

This is no joke. President Vladimir Putin and his comrades are taking this effort quite seriously. They’re giving away prizes to couples who give birth exactly nine months after “Conception Day” and are even throwing state-sponsored concerts to promote it — which, I suppose, makes sense because my sister and I were conceived at Jimmy Buffet and Hank Williams Jr. concerts, respectively.

This may all sound like a clever idea, but I hardly think they’ve found a practical solution. You can’t just bribe people to have sex. Trust me, I’ve tried, and it doesn’t work. Plus, it usually results in a court appearance and having to notify your new neighbors whenever you move.

No, the Russians need to go beyond offering Outback gift certificates and free T.A.T.U. concerts to boost their lagging population. They need to get to the root of the problem: They need to get Russians to want to screw each other.

While us virile Americans need little motivation to have sex, it’s not the case over in Russia. Think about it. If you spent your days freezing, toiling in a potato field, drinking vodka and smoking unfiltered cigarettes, would you be highly motivated to have a child? Of course not. You’d want to kill yourself, or get AIDS.

So, short of creating an extensive program to turn out super-Russians like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, how do you get a country brimming with freezing substance abusers to procreate? Glad you asked.

I know of a proven method used here in the States that will surely get Mr. and Mrs. Rasputin putting on pornographic versions of Swan Lake in no time: watching American television.

Nothing is more sexually charged than American TV. You’ve got shows about sex (both in the city and in other geographical locations), music videos depicting sex and talking about sex, sporting events with sexy cheerleaders — and pretty much everything on MTV, Cinemax and Disney Channel.

And between all these sexually charged shows you have commercials for pills that will help you have more sex and college girls showing their boobs for no apparent reason other than that they’re “horny” and “on Spring Break.”

Hell, if I can barely make it through an hour of watching television without using up a box of Kleenex, what do you think a bunch of sexy, barely legal teen girls prancing around in next to nothing will do to some cart pusher named Ivan out in Ulyanovsk?

Believe you me, a few hours of good old American television each day and every man from St. Petersburg to Provideniya will be salivating like the Kremlin was about to issue ration cards for . . . you get it.

American TV can also help out all those handsome Russian women. They, too, need some motivation to have those little Faberge Eggs fertilized by the finest of Soviet sperm. And good thing they’ll be able to watch two ladies who could put any Russian mail-order bride to shame — Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

These two fine young American heroines and their personal quests to contract every venereal disease conceivable to man are great role models for Cossak women as in need of a good dusting as an unread Tolstoy novel.

In no time at all, our Eastern brethren will have bodily fluids flowing with the intensity of a western Siberian oil field. And in nine short months, there’ll be a whole new crop of little Dragos and Natashas to carry on their newly learned American sex drive.

Then there will be no need for ridiculous holidays to promote sexual intercourse. With the proper American education, every day in Russia can be “Conception Day.” And when that day comes, in every home in Russia will be the sweet smell of success, and it’ll stink like sex.

Brian Fudge, a senior in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at bfudge@bu.edu.