Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence

- Blurb -

Kristen R. Ghodsee's Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism explains why capitalism is uniquely bad for women and shows that if we adopt and update some ideas from socialism, women's lives will be better - at work, at home and even in the bedroom.In the late 1980s and early 90s, sexologists discovered that East German women living under socialism reported greater sensual pleasure and higher rates of orgasm than their Western counterparts. The horrors and deprivations of Communism are infamous. Less well known is that the socialist insistence in many Eastern and Northern European countries on bringing women out of the home and into the work force - through state provision of education, maternity leave, childcare and domestic support - transformed their lives for the better. Releasing them from financial dependence on marriages and men, socialist policies allowed women to choose partners on their own terms in a way that generations of women before them had been denied. Drawing on decades of research, Kristen R. Ghodsee conveys what this was like for women at the time and shows how women in capitalist societies today are experiencing the opposite: with systematic restrictions on their access to well-paid work and to child support, women face an impossible choice; for the majority who become mothers, marriage is their primary financial resource. When it's your only way of paying rent or feeding your kids, little wonder that sex is not so great. This expert, witty and empowering book provides all the evidence and arguments you need to reclaim your time, emotional energy and self-worth from the reductive logics of capitalism - and shows how collectively young women have the power to re-shape society in their favour.