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Gift-for-sex (GFS) barters are a niche practice potentially representing the commodification of everyday dating practices. We inquire how GFS exchanges are practiced and understood in contemporary Russia. Second, we situate these in relation to contemporary economic culture. Our project provides answers in two steps based on online content. First, we identify GFS exchange practices within a major dating website. Next, we take the signals exchanged in those dating profiles and display their intersubjective meanings in Russia based on blogs and discussion fora. Our analysis focuses on gender roles and inter-gender conflicts, the use of economic jargon, the link between luxury consumption and sexuality, and understandings of gift-giving and generosity, in order to show how GFS barters, despite being contractual, carry emotional and romantic content. As such, love is under a constant conversion process, through the medium of the contractual gift, into the fictitious commodity form.

This article investigates how economic modernization affects normative regulation by spurring formal social control in the political, economic, and private spheres as well as anomie. Multilevel negative binomial regression modeling, using World Values Survey and country-level data from 2005, predicts individual-level anomie using country-level formal-social-control indicators as well as individual-level controls. Such control variables include education, survey interest, gender, age, income, collectivism, nihilism, fatalism, and the diversity of information consumption. This work argues for and implements a ‘don’t know anomie’ (DKA) index, the sum of ‘don’t know’ responses in relation to 15 attitudinal questions, as a more direct measure of individual-level anomie. Findings indicate that, when controlling for all factors, a country’s level of formal social control in the political sphere, measured as low levels of perceived government corruption, reduces anomie. In addition, country-level formal social control in the private sphere, operationalized as a society where individuals are not primarily striving to meet their parents’ expectations, enhances anomie.

This article frames the ''Post-Soviet Intimacies'' special issue collection. We begin through briefly using Russia as a special case for the wider Soviet sphere and situating recent Russian developments in sexual politics alongside its internal and external conflicts. Our key interpretive frame is that intimacy politics serve as a master key for understanding political and economic patriarchy. After this, we provide some definitions of our concepts, describe our approach and process of creating the special issue, and introduce important literature which is widely applicable for understanding this theme as a whole. Finally, we briefly introduce the seven articles of this special issue within three wider groupings of Harnessed-, Material-, and Scorned Intimacies. We suggest that readers analyze our contributions from a perspective that situates intimacies as the objects of state and market power, where the linchpin of such power is the patriarchically naturalized pursuit of rule.

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In Europe, individualist societies, in which people more highly value independence, have fewer people who are lonely. Yet these societies also have more people who live alone, a strong determinant of loneliness. Evidence suggests that some unrecognized societal-level resources or characteristics can explain this.We uncover multiple pathways toward a lower degree of loneliness among European societies using an ideal method for this purpose, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. Using data from the 2014 wave of the European Social Survey and other sources, we analyzed loneliness outcomes among 26 European societies. Our findings suggest two necessary conditions for a low degree of loneliness: high internet access and high association participation. Further, three pathways are sufficient for achieving less loneliness at the societal level. Most societies that have less loneliness follow both the welfare support and cultural support pathways. The third path, commercial provision, is mutually exclusive with welfare support because the former requires a weak welfare state.The surest policy for building societies that have lower rates of loneliness includes the expansion of internet accessibility, the fostering of civil society through association participation and volunteering, and a welfare state that protects potentially vulnerable populations while funding opportunities for social interaction. This article further contributes methodologically by demonstrating “configurational robustness testing,” a more comprehensive means to implement current best practices for fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis robustness testing.