11 lines
3.7 KiB
Plaintext
11 lines
3.7 KiB
Plaintext
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# Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
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> Kristen R. Ghodsee
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Depending on your life experience and point of view, the thesis suggested by the title is either ridiculous, or it is obvious. My bias puts me in the latter camp, so I when I found the central argument - economic independence leads to relationships formed from emotional connection rather than financial necessity - expressed succintly within the first few paragraphs, I read on to see what the rest of the book could be about, if not reiterating the same idea several more times. To its praise, what followed was an insight into the impact of twentieth state socialism on women and their relationships behind the Iron Curtain, and the following impact of those societies' converstion to neoliberal capitalism post-1989.
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The text doesn't advocate for a return to state socialism, and contrasts different attempts at Eastern European state socialism with each other and their contemporaries in the West. For example, it describes how though attempts were made at reaching parity between genders employed in a particular field (with the use of quotas, sometimes successfully), educating and encouraging women into the labour force, they were expected by their surrounding culture or by the state itself to continue to inhabit the gendered role of mother and housewife. As well as the fact that in most places, women's salaries didn't reach equilibrium with men's, this lead to dual stresses on women of having to manage domestic and often emotional labour with their professional lives. However, the book outlines that this was (and importantly, today, *is*) not seen as a worse state of affairs than their Western contemporaries, or the modern capitalist states such countries have become. Women's increased economic stability in these states, due to being included in the labour force, wide-reaching state childcare programs and generous parental leave policies allowed women more freedom of choice in their social lives, being able to draw from professional social circles and able to leave unhappy relationships without worry for being able to care for children.
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A part I particularly liked was the book's epxloration of sexual economics theory. In broad strokes, this theory models sex as a commodity controlled by women and desired by men. Sex work would be an overt financial exchange, but sex can be - and, in the majority case, is - "sold" by women for non-monetary compensation, such as a roof over her head, food for her children or health insurance. As all markets, the sexual market is subject to supply and demand, affected by all sorts of factors which influence the "price" of sex. The highest price being, of course, marriage, in which a man acquires generally exclusive access to a woman's sex in exchange for guaranteeing her well-being forevermore.
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The reason sexual economics theory is interesting is because, in capitalist societies, it works - but, when taken with socialist critiques, it lays bare the flaw in the capitalist way of thinking. It literally commidifies sex, a supposedly emotional, romantic, symbolic ritual, and forces individuals to act with self-interest. Is a woman likely to enjoy sex if she's doing it, consciously or unconsciously, because she doesn't know how she might keep a roof over her children's heads otherwise? The forces that act to reduce the price of sex are those that grant women economic independence - equal access to the job market, ubiquitous childcare, readily available and socially acceptable contraception and abortion. When they reduce the price of sex sufficiently, it ceases to be a saleable commodity, and once again because that which one can pursue for pleasure, for emotional bonding, for procreation - but no longer to keep the lights on.
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