Sexual Economics Theory

 “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,”by Kristen R. Ghodsee, 2021

That title got your attention.  This book is based on an editorial Ghodsee wrote for the NYT.  She disentangles the lies and the truths about the former workers’ states, showing how women benefitted greatly from socialized day care, long paid maternity leave, socialized laundries and cafeterias, a guaranteed job when they returned from childbirth and open and free education and health systems.  This resulted in higher independence from men and poverty due to guaranteed employment, with pensions and advancement.  Because of closer equality between the sexes and the removal of economic forces behind relationships, better sex, more frequent sex and more orgasms were the result.

No small matter.  The workers’ states (which she calls by the common oxymoron ‘state socialist’) continued to have problems with women working the ‘double shift’ at home and at work.  Some countries, like Romania and Albania, had absolutely retrograde gender policies, while the USSR pretended it had solved “the woman question” in 1936, only to improve after 1955.  According to Ghodsee, in these countries abortion was the only contraceptive measure; jobs were still somewhat gendered; and a pay gap existed – though wages were not as important as in the U.S. or other capitalist countries because of the increased social wage.

Ghodsee claims adequate sanitary napkins for menstruation were absent, along with sanitary products like deodorants, decent soaps, nylons and other specifically female accoutrements.  

Hungarian dress scholar Katalin Medvedev corrects Ghodsee, pointing out that ‘light industrial’ products like deodorant, tampons, perfumes, blue mascara, sunscreen and somewhat sexy underwear became available in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Hungary, but also across the bloc.  The pill also came into use in this period, as did condoms, according to Medvedev.  However the early pills had too many hormones, a problem also common in the "West." Stalinist anti-abortion policies still continued into the 1950s in places, so back-alley abortions were common.  Prostitution existed, and was sometimes used by the secret police to ensnare Westerners.  Limitations on women’s products were true in the 1950s after WWII.  For instance, a sickeningly sweet, powerful floral perfume called “Red Moscow” was all there was in the perfume arena. It became a joke, though perhaps not in the USSR.  

SEX as a COMMODITY

Ghodsee refers to Scandinavian social-democracies as well as the workers’ states.  The former now have the highest level of social support for women, children and maternity in the world.  It took years for them to approach, but not pass, the high labor force participation rate of women in the workers’ states.  Incidentally the workers’ states had remarkable levels of women in STEM jobs and sports, unlike the West at the time.  Presently the Nordics are in the top level of women’s equality in the world, led by Iceland.  This has pissed off manipulative ‘dating coaches,’ who complain that Danish women see through their bullshit.  After all, if women can live lives without being economically dependent on a man, a man needs more than a bank account and smooth words. 

Marx and Engels both understood bourgeois marriage in their time to be the exchange of sex for financial security – i.e. legalized prostitution.  It commodified women’s sexuality into a contract. This still occurs to this day.  A class-based ‘market’ society naturally turns human sexuality into a product, as it does everything else.  Sex is not just used in advertising.  A non-market society based on equality has less material reasons to make sex a transaction.  Simple as that.  In this context, Ghodsee discusses modern ‘sexual economics theory’ which reflects Marxian insights.  It posits a negative link between sexuality, sex markets, a capitalist economy and the status of women.  Just compare modern Vietnam with Thailand to see the difference in the role of sex tourism. 

REASEARCH

Sociological analyses carried out by Russian researchers show the change in sexual relations before the implosion of the USSR in 1989 and after, in 2005. The older generation of Soviets had based marriage on child-rearing.  The later generations moved towards marriages based on love or friendship. This in spite of the lack of privacy, better birth control or erotica.  After the collapse of the USSR, researchers reported ‘gold digger’ classes popping up in Russia, an increase in prostitution, relationships and marriages based on trading sex for money, a thriving ‘bride’ export market, more ‘mistresses’ and a decrease in women’s financial independence.  

East German Nude Beach

Germany itself is a good laboratory, as both sides of ‘the wall’ were similar.  East German researchers surveyed East German woman, who prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall reported more equal relationships that stimulated frequent and better sex. Part of this is that their stress and fatigue levels were lower.  Other East German studies found that young East German women had orgasm 2/3rds of the time, with another 18% usually achieving orgasm.  At the same time women in West Germany were limited from working and at the beck and call of their husbands due to this.  West German women were consistently more unhappy with their sexual lives according to these same researchers.   Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, prostitution, paid pornography, and female unemployment increased substantially, as women were sent back into the home - a phenomenon which Ghodsee calls ‘refamilization’. Orgasm rates were still 80% (E.G.) to 63% (W.G.) for women after reunification. 

In Hungary studies indicate that sex flourished under repressive circumstances.  Private life provided a certain refuge from the social realm, much as it did in other deformed and degenerated workers’ states.  Sex was ‘free’ and unencumbered by material resonance.  Prostitution was the most frowned upon by Hungarian youth, followed by male womanizers, while citizens were supportive of romantic love and single mothers.  Now according to Ghodsee Budapest is reported to be the ‘Bangkok’ of central Europe, as well as a hub for pornography.  She looks at Poland’s sexology studies in the 1970s and 1980s, which undermined capitalist medicalization and profiteering off of sexual problems, instead promoting equality and intimacy in gender relations.  She also looks at the sexual context in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia during this period, which produced similar results.  

The U.S.

Ghodsee understands that the ability to have children damages women in a capitalist context.  Pregnancy results in being discriminated against, earning less, missing promotions, dropping education and jobs, failing to get hired, trapped in bad marriages, being isolated and dependent.  The U.S. has no national paid maternal leave policy for instance, one of only 5 countries in the world.  In the U.S. health care is a commodity, not a public good, so child-bearing medical problems can become expensive. Day care is costly while many school districts do not have free pre-Kindergarten, making that problem even worse.  Now the right of abortion is under threat, and reactionary rumblings against sex education and contraception lie in the background.

Utopian Socialist Flora Tristan

The SOCIALISTS

Ghodsee includes the feminist work of various socialists – utopians Charles Fourier, Flora Tristan and Saint Simon; Social-Democrats August Bebel and Lily Braun; German Marxists Friedrich Engels, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg; Bolsheviks Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai; Bulgarian Communist Anna Pauker.

Ghodsee does not look into the work of the German Communist Wilhelm Reich, who posited that the sexual repression frequent in capitalist societies riven with churches, religion and archaic ideas about women diverted sexual urges into odd, distorted, criminal and fascistic directions. She also has a conservative take on Kollontai, who advocated a light and playful form of ‘friends with benefits.’  Ghodsee’s interpretation of ‘friends with benefits’ omits the friend part, likening it to more like a one night stand.

Ghodsee polemicizes against the ‘Stalin’ or ‘Commie” bogey every time someone like Bernie Sanders brings up an idea that limits capitalism.  She doesn’t gloss over the political or economic problems of these countries – all-encompassing censorship, one-Party rule, limitations on travel, economic backwardness, lack of workers' democracy and worse. Her solutions – other than the obvious - are mild tea:  quotas for women in corporations and political office; getting young Millennials and women to vote; making markets “do good.”  She also somewhat promotes the Sanders’ program for women: Medicare For All, subsidized childcare, paid maternal and paternal leave, limitations on college tuition and an expansion of public employment.

An excellent book by a social-democrat who is against recreating ‘state socialism.’ She is open to understanding how capital, due to its market orientation, oppresses women in many ways, public and personal - as a free or cheap labor force and as a sexual commodity, not as an independent human being.    

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Alexandra Kollontai,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “A Socialist Defector,” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Capitalism on Campus – Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” (both by Atwood); “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy); “Godless – 150 Years of Unbelief,” “Love and Information,” “The Bachelor” or the word ‘feminism.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

June 4, 2022