‘Hey Gavrilo,’ I call out to my partner, who is busily scrubbing himself in the shower. ‘Would it be wrong to title my next post ‘Stalin Was a Party Pooper? The industrializing Soviet leader was, after all, a mass murderer. ‘Hell no,’ he replies. ‘Honey badger don’t care.’ So there you have it: his fault. I was about to ask him another question, but finally decided against it. The purpose of his new Old Spice shower gel, suspiciously called ‘The Playmaker,’ is his business. Honey badger don’t care about that either. She is nevertheless intrigued by the poetics of both historical and contemporary displays of manliness, scented or otherwise. More about that below.
First let’s explore my subtitle: ‘Russian Celebration.’ Is that phrase also potentially offensive to millions? Not at all. It refers to a remarkable moment in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 Soviet film, Alexander Nevsky, which features a thirteenth-century prince who defended ‘Mother Russia’ against invading Swedes and Germans.


