Some advice from Russia for the materially deprived women of Ireland: if you're wondering where it all went wrong and why you ended up not marrying a millionaire, let alone a billionaire, first take a look in the mirror.
Chances are that some, if not most, of the following attributes apply to you: you wear flat shoes; if you do wear earrings, they'll be plain old studs, not the dangly, sparkly sort favoured by men of taste; your hands and feet are unmanicured, your eyebrows unplucked; your hair is blow-dried only for weddings.
Doubtless you also favour tights over stockings, and if you have ever taken them off in front of a man, you haven't done so in pigtails while sucking a lollipop and in time to George Michael's Father Figure.
You haven't done so because feminist thought has led you to think that it is demeaning to be subservient.
But from Moscow comes the news that the most attractive part of a woman's body is "irrefutably still the arse".
This is Vladimir Rakovsky's view, and he thinks he should know. Over the past 10 years Rakovsky has become the leading authority on how to marry a millionaire.
His oversubscribed courses in Moscow, Kiev, and St Petersburg instruct women how to find, and hold on to, a Real Man.
I tell him that many people in Ireland think a Real Man is the kind of person who knows how to change a nappy or cry.
Rakovsky digests this with a grimace, for him it is more proof of the corrupting influence of the West, which he also holds partly responsible for the invention of the detested "metrosexual".
No, a Real Man in Russia is only three things: he is good in bed, he has emotion and he has money.
As long as he has these three things he doesn't even have to be attractive or sober.
Rakovsky is sober but less attractive in real life than he is on his website, which does a good job of obscuring his striking paunch.
Sign up for one of his $200 (€145) six-part "Stervologiya" courses (the word derives from the Russian for "*censored*"), says the website, and you can become "a strong, successful self-confident woman; a player who can skilfully manipulate a man".
She gets what she wants by "creating a whole system with which to play with a man" and making comments such as: "I have a big bum, do you want to touch it?"
We are in a back room in an empty Moscow theatre where Stervologiya classes take place. Everything that you need to know about post-communist Russian sexual politics is here.
Twelve women in short skirts and heels are taking rapt, meticulous notes.
Rakovsky is sympathetic but firm: "Russian women are psychologically repressed because of their history. The traditional Soviet understanding of a woman's role is that she should take the lead.
"Women have been told that to get something they have to try a lot. What I teach is a little bit different.,He asks the women to draw up on paper a plan of how to attract a rich man, to begin a relationship and make it serious.
One woman suggests joining a deep-sea diving club. Another suggests her local bar. Rakovsky is unimpressed by their lack of vision: "If you want a real man you have to have a real strategy. I'll give you an example of a genius plan," he says.
"A woman decides to open a VIP club and sends invitations to only rich, attractive men. On opening night she is the sole woman there. This is a plan with strategic realisation.,Irina, a 28-year-old, turned to Stervologiya after she was dumped for the first time in her life. It has, she says, given her confidence and, in Rakovsky's words, helped her to "identify her prey".
Tonight her enormous cleavage threatens to break loose from her low-cut frilly top.
In the corner, Ivgenia (23) Vladimir's wife, stands in a short black dress, casting her connoisseur's gaze over the assembled stragglers.
Once her husband has set this week's homework (return next week with the business cards of at least three interesting men), she will take the women next door for Part Four of the Art of Seduction, in which her charges learn to permanently walk as if on a catwalk and take off what few clothes they have on in an alluring yet sophisticated manner and in time to Britney Spears's I'm a Slave 4 U.
They will learn how to wiggle their hips, kneel in a posture of mock subjugation and eat a banana suggestively by practising in front of a mirror -- all with a view to some day applying those techniques to the anatomy of a very successful man.
Why? Because in one crucial aspect she outclasses them all. Besides Stervologiya, her husband owns several other thriving businesses.
He is middle-aged and overweight. But he is rich.
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