Anne Applebaum Lightens Up

Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, one of the saddest, heaviest books I've ever read has an interesting piece in Slate today about why Russian tennis players are so attractive. To say it's a bit of an about face for her would be an understatement, but she does offer an interesting theory:

To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa.

Makes sense to me. I can't wait until radical Islam is over in the Middle East and all those Saudi women start winning the US Open.