TBILISI, Georgia - It is not steady work being a professional sex kitten in Georgia. If she had not learned this as a cover model for Georgian Playboy, which closed after eight issues , Shorena Begashvili understood perfectly after her erotic television talk show was shut down after six months .

It is typical in a country caught between colliding forces: the pro- Western transformation undertaken by Mikheil Saakashvili’s government and the deep, tidal pull of a conservative culture centered on the Orthodox Christian church, which is more popular than the government.

Few subjects highlight these crosscurrents as starkly as sex, and a generation of young Georgians is caught in between, said Ms. Begashvili, 28. “They don’t understand - are they allowed to do it, or not?” said Ms. Begashvili, a husky-voiced actress who manages, like Marilyn Monroe before her, to be simultaneously knowing and daffy.

Since the days when amorous men routinely kidnapped their brides, families in the Caucasus have been characterized by what sociologists politely refer to as “gender asymmetry.” Women were expected to remain virgins until marriage - the groom’s mother checked the sheets - while men enjoyed exuberant sexual freedom, typically continuing after they were married.

These customs persist to a surprising extent. Young men in search of sexual experience are taken by older relatives to prostitutes, and there is a healthy market for hymen reconstruction, known euphemistically as “jewelry work.” In a survey of 3,000 college students from across Georgia conducted last year by the Institute of Social Studies and Analysis, 91.4 percent of men said they had had sex at least once; the number for women was only 15.1 percent.

But the traditions are being questioned, especially in a capital city that is emphatically tilting West. Television gently pushes cultural norms in a liberal direction; the new season of a “Friends”-inspired sitcom has added an unmarried couple living together, for instance.

Ms. Begashvili is one of the few public figures to have tried a full-on assault on virginity.

She marshaled her arguments during a broadcast of “Night With Shorena” in January 2010, when she said on her show that it was “scientifically proven” that couples who married without first having sex were more likely to divorce.

She made the case that Georgian women had never been particularly chaste, citing a historian who said that when the Persian shahs were replenishing their harems, they had to use different rules for Georgian women, “probably because it was difficult to find virgins.”

At that point, conservative activists began picketing the station. In a formal complaint, the Union of Orthodox Parents denounced the “Shorenization of society.” After the show was canceled, Georgian society returned to its default mode on the matter: silence.

“It’s terrible for women,” said Iago Kachkachishvili, who heads the sociology department at Tbilisi State University.

“You can really find women not having sex in their lives at all. ”

Ms. Begashvili has her own opinion about virginity. She was a 16-yearold virgin when she married her boyfriend - mainly, she says in retrospect, because she wanted to have sex. At 18, she was at home with a baby, watching her husband get dressed to go out for the night.

“I watched serials on television, and looked at myself in the mirror, and I understood I had to do something,” she said. “I understood that it would go on in the same way. He would cheat on me, and I would be at home. I thought for five years. After five years, I got divorced.”

Thus began a career in scandal.

“She found a niche that was ready to be occupied; she was ready to take her clothes off and be seen as a sexual person,” said Nico Nergadze, Georgian Playboy’s editor .

A quirk of timing landed her in the center of a culture war. Mr. Saakashvili and his coterie, who took office in 2004, seek to transform not only Georgia’s geopolitics but its society.

Their success has been breathtaking in some areas; in Georgia, once considered among the most corrupt regions of the Soviet Union, petty bribery has been banned so effectively that some workers refuse the boxes of chocolate exchanged at New Year’s.

That transformation becomes risky when it shifts to private life. Georgia is an Orthodox Christian country, and morality has proved an effective rallying cry for critics of the government, Mr. Nergadze said. They express “a general feeling of sex forced on the Georgian nation, something like that,” he said.

Ms. Begashvili, who has moved on to acting in films, doesn’t seem worried about which group will win in the end. She rolls her eyes at the religious activists, remarking that “their children do what they want, they just do it quietly.” Georgians themselves will opt for a more frank, modern approach to sex, she said.


By ELLEN BARRY