This book has a simple premise: 'Unregulated capitalism is bad for women,' Kristen Ghodsee argues, 'and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.' ... Her argument, however that socialism leads to 'better sex is harder to substantiate ... Ghodsee’s book could not have been published at a better moment. In many wealthy countries, people are getting married later or not at all, they are having fewer children, and a higher percentage of those children are born to unwed parents ... Ghodsee spells out the capitalist incentives behind policies that are so often disguised as 'culture wars', and ends her book with the exhortation to 'push back at a dominant ideology' that confuses social bonds with economic exchange: 'we can share our attentions without quantifying their value, giving and receiving rather than selling and buying.'
The book isn’t nearly as silly as the title suggests. Ghodsee’s real argument in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism is that capitalism is bad for women. It is bad for women for the simple reason that it dumps us with the childcare, pays us less and so makes us financially unequal and dependent on men ... Is modern capitalism perfect? Of course it isn’t — which is why it never stops evolving. It has survived because it works better than all other systems. Sex may be better under socialism (who really knows?), but so far history tells us clearly that nothing else is. As Ghodsee notes, one reason that East Germans were thought to have better sex lives than West Germans was not just because everyone had an equality of economic security (or in most cases economic misery), but because the 'East German regime encouraged people to enjoy their sex lives as a way of distracting them from the monotony and relative deprivation of the socialist economy'.
... the book is a straightforward account of how capitalism harms women—including, yes, in our intimate lives—and why women (and men) are comparatively better off 'in nations where state revenues support greater levels of redistribution and larger social safety nets' ... Ghodsee’s reclamation of this socialist history is timely, particularly as capitalism’s defenders attempt once again to wield it like a cudgel ... After starkly outlining the degree to which women suffer under capitalism and stressing that not only is another world possible, but it has already, at least partially, existed (and continues to exist in the social democratic countries of Northern Europe), Ghodsee’s prescription for contemporary American women feels anemic ... This points to the limits of Ghodsee’s political imagination: by her own admission, she’s no advocate of revolution ... Reading these limp prescriptions, I found my thoughts returning again to Kollontai, and what she had written back in 1909 about 'the bourgeois women's movement...'
At heart this is about what happens when women are no longer economically dependent on men and childcare is collectivised ... In this eminently readable account, Ghodsee points towards the way our intimate lives are embedded and commodified. Our attention, our affections, our love, our pleasure, our bodies are traded in ways that make many of us extremely unhappy ... That Ghodsee also makes this a joyous read is the cherry on the cake.
The US academic Kristen Ghodsee has lived in several eastern European countries and brings the necessary scepticism to her thesis ... Ghodsee is not naive ... So did women really have better sex under socialism? As Ghodsee notes, if you have economic equality, your relationships in the bedroom change. No longer dependent on men, you are free to choose — and dump — your mate. Her thesis comes into sharp focus when she looks at what happened after the Wall fell 30 years ago...
Ghodsee sums up her thesis in the introduction: 'Unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.' And if you disagree with the author, she clearly doesn’t care ... Ghodsee’s in-your-face tone sets the stage for a book that takes readers on a pointed examination of the Soviet experiment. Using her years living in Bulgaria as fodder for the narrative, along with decades of research, she makes the case that there are lessons capitalist countries can and should learn from socialism ... Ghodsee makes a convincing case, though she fails to investigate how socialism addresses LGBTQ and people of color. Perhaps she’s saving that for another book ... While the title is the literary version of click-bait, the book is chock-full of hard-hitting real talk.
Eastern European studies professor Ghodsee expands her viral New York Times op-ed into a passionate but reasoned feminist socialist manifesto for the 21st century. Drawing lessons from the history of women’s experiences under mid-20th-century state socialism and then under the capitalism that followed its collapse, she argues that 'unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.' ... Pointing to successes not only in Communist countries but also in Scandinavian social democracies, Ghodsee’s treatise will be of interest to women becoming disillusioned with the capitalism under which they were raised.
