romancing romania

June 18, 2008 5:58 AM

What is sex like in Romania?

What are the common attitudes towards various sexual practices in Romania? How is a person from Romania likely to feel about: oral sex, anal sex, different positions, gay sex, threesomes, etc.? Are there any attitudes, enthusiasms, or taboos that are unique to Romania?

posted by crazylegs to Human Relations (3 answers total)

I lived in Romania ten years ago and at the time, just a few years past Ceauşescu, gay sex was a bit of a taboo. That is to say there was a normal-sized gay population, but gay sex was quasi-illegal and you could get in some level of trouble for having gay sex [though not for being gay]. This was more of a problem for gay men than for gay women. I had a friend from the UK who was a writer for a travel guide who was gay and stayed with me for a while and talked about having a hard time meeting men because everyone was really hesitant to be open about their sexuality to strangers. This was, as you might expect, less of a problem in urbanized areas.

I am sure things have changed somewhat, but this is just a somewhat old data point. I was there with an American partner so I didn't have any experience with actual Romanians and as far as attitudes go, at the time people there weren't really open to talking about anything much, not just sex. I did not get the feeling that there were any particular taboos that reached outside of pillow-talk and private conversations. Romanian movies didn't betray anything particular.

The thing that I did find intersting, and this may be far afield, is that because of the rather unique and bizarre practices of the Ceauşescus where people were basically pregnancy tested in the workplace and encouraged rather strongly to have babies, now in the post-Ceauşescu world there is basically NO abortion debate. Abortions and birth control are (or were) very freely available and legal.
posted by jessamyn at 6:25 AM on June 18, 2008

Well, to Jessamyn's last point, you can see the recent Romanian movie 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, which is about a woman seeking an abortion in the Ceausescu era. For your other questions, I spent two weeks in Romania last summer - Bucharest and Pitesti. I myself struck out, however, one of my friends got a little attention. While the girl he met was rather religious, she was not exactly 'hesitant' to get it on shall we say. She was a sophomore in college. Additionally, the concierge at my hotel in Bucharest would not leave me alone about getting me a hooker. Every night when I came downstairs, he would be standing at the front desk and he would say "Sir, you need some girls tonight?" One night he showed my cell phone pics of his girls. He explained that many college girls do this to make money. Who knows what the truth is, but prostitution seemed to be pretty much rampant. I asked him one night to call me a cab and have the driver take me and a friend to a 'fun club or bar where we can meet people'. Apparently 'meet people' was a bad choice of words. When the cab pulled up to let us out, there was a pimp there waiting for us, who opened our door and said 'you are the americans looking for girls, yes? I have them.' Ok, thanks pal.

A little strayed from your actual question, but from the above experiences I would say the attitudes are a little more 'european' than american.
posted by spicynuts at 9:29 AM on June 18, 2008

Romania struck down its anti-homosexual laws as part of its EU entry requirements some years ago, but homosexual public life still seems pretty subdued. But I'm not gay, so I wasn't really looking . . . and to be honest, I had a lot of talks about all sorts of things and I never heard many negative comments, so maybe attitudes are changing.

Jessamyn's dead-on concerning abortion. There's zero debate about it, which sits well with me. It's not talked about a lot; people just know it's there if they need it, and they make use of it when they need or want or have to.

I think sex is perceived as much more naturally occurring phenomenon there than in America - but no more so in Romania than in most of Europe. That doesn't mean it's easier to find, necessarily. One difference between other places I noticed is that while Romania is poor by European standards and suffers from a lack of men (because millions are working in the UK, Spain, Italy, etc - and this isn't quite as true for women), there is not the seeming desperation on the part of women as I witnessed in Russia and Ukraine. So guys hoping to score some girl who'd be out of the league elsewhere may be disappointed.

And as with most post-Communist nations, there's a giant divide in attitudes between people old enough to have been "formed" by Communism and those young enough to be very Western in their thinking. So ideas about specific sexual practices vary by age to a remarkable extent. I don't know what you're looking for exactly, but my belief is that attitudes about specific sexual practices aren't much different in Romania than most of the rest of Europe.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 12:37 PM on June 18, 2008 [1 favorite]