Sexologist Crusading Against Ignorance
By Valeria Korchagina
Staff Writer
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Igor Tabakov / The St. Petersburg Times
Kon standing next to the wall outside his apartment that was vandalized this month.
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MOSCOW - Russians love to have sex, but hate to talk about it. So says the country's leading sexologist Igor Kon, who despite a spate of recent attacks is on a quest to get Russians to be more open about sex. Otherwise, he says, they will face the consequence of silence leading to outbreaks of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. "The rest of the world will survive, but I really can't say anything positive about Russia," Kon, 72, said in an interview. The country's chances of surviving the battle against AIDS and venereal diseases is low because the government is doing very little to promote sex education in schools and tolerance of homosexuality and other alternative lifestyles, said Kon. A sociologist by training, Kon rose to prominence over the past three decades with the publication of numerous books and articles. His works have brought him acclaim at home - but also enemies, who have tried to intimidate him into keeping sex an unspoken word. He was heckled during an open forum on sexuality at Moscow State University by a couple dozen youths with placards reading "Kick Kon Out of MGU" and anti-gay slogans. Kon, who had been invited to address the group, had innocuously titled his presentation "Man in the Changing World." Kon said the outburst on Jan. 31 made it impossible to continue the lecture. University officials used smudge pots to try to smoke out the youth. When that failed, they called the police. The young men fled before the police arrived. A week later, a package suspected of containing explosives was deposited at the door of his apartment in southern Moscow. Kon was away at the time and a worried neighbor alerted the police. No bomb was found in the package, but when Kon got home he discovered that his door and the surrounding walls had been covered with Satanic symbols including a giant 666. More recently, Kon received an anonymous death threat by telephone. But he said he is not going to let opposition force him into silence. Kon said increased openness about sexuality - not only diseases but about sexual relations, homosexuality and age of consent - is a common trend in all Western countries that seems to be passing Russia by. Those countries grappled with the issues 20 to 30 years ago but nevertheless chose to resolve them. But Russia fails to even acknowledge the issues, and the government and media write off sex as an evil influence from the West, Kon said. "Today's discussions of sex education in Russia are conducted at the same level as in the 1950s or even at the end of the 19th century," Kon wrote in a recent article posted on his Web site (sexology.narod.ru). "Many issues that are openly discussed by youth are not brought up at all and remain taboo in order not to tempt the younger generation." The government's hands-off approach has promoted intolerance to sexual minorities and made mentioning the topic akin to a sin, Kon said. This is worrying because sexuality is a significant ingredient of the nation's social health, he said. The level of tolerance and acceptance of social issues like sex can be used by sociologists as a barometer for measuring more general issues like the future of democracy in Russia - a measurement that does not put the country in a very favorable light. "The level of tolerance and acceptance is very low," Kon said. Public reluctance to accept the responsibility for enlightening the young also shows through a series of public opinion polls conducted by the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center, or VTSIOM. In 1992 as many as 18 percent of Russians wanted children to have sex education in school. By 1997, the number had dropped to 8 percent, and by 2000 had only increased by 1 percent to 9 percent. Tolerance toward homosexuality is very low. About 36 percent of Russians consider homosexuality immoral or a bad habit, while 31 percent perceive it as a disease or mental illness. Part of the misconceptions came from a complete lack of tolerance during Soviet times, Kon said. Only in 1993 - two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union - was the criminal punishment of homosexuality banned. And it wasn't until 1999 that homosexuality was no longer classified as a mental illness. "But many psychiatrists still insist that homosexuality is a disease," Kon said. But by all accounts Kon would be forgiven if he had long ago thrown in the towel in his efforts to raise the public's awareness about sexuality. Kon joined forces with the Education Ministry in the mid-1990s to help develop sex education courses for the country's schools. The project was plagued by underfunding and lack of expertise, but the final blow came in 1996 when the rest of the government and the public got a whiff of what was brewing. The ministry that year released raw pilot sex-ed programs that set off a wave of protests in the streets, the media and in government circles. "It started with the mass hysteria. Instead of trying carefully to understand the nature of the problem and the proposed programs, some journalists and politicians launched a crusade against it on the grounds that children's morality was under threat," Kon said. By 1997, the sex-ed program was dead in the water - but Kon was still pushing on. "The Education Ministry quickly cut its efforts, and some other people and organizations moved into the shadows. I, however, never quit stressing the importance of the problem," Kon said.
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