No, Sex Wasn't Better for Women Under Socialism: It's hard to get in the mood when you're sharing a bedroom with your mother-in-law.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: BOOKS - Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism - Book review

ONE OF THE most mercilessly mocked New York Times op-eds of recent memory was "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism," a 2017 article by Kristen R. Ghodsee. Undeterred by a flood of snarky Twitter commentary ("Before or after their husbands were sent to the Gulag?"), Ghodsee has now expanded her article into a short book with an almost identical title--it is now in the present tense, presumably for a more forward-looking approach.

She gets points for persistence, but the thesis doesn't really fare better in book form.

Make no mistake: The "socialism" in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism is not the "capitalism + welfare state" Western European model. It's the hardcore Warsaw Pact variety that was dispatched to the proverbial ash heap of history in 1991. The book's introduction opens with a photo of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who became the first woman to fly into space in July 1963; the caption earnestly states that she later "became a prominent politician and led the Soviet delegation to the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women."

Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, approvingly notes the rising popularity of socialism; she clearly intends her book as a contribution to ongoing debates over socialist systems. But there is no reason to think that American millennials who favor "socialism" are thinking of Soviet-style state socialism, as opposed to, say, Scandinavian social democracy. Surely one can advocate for the latter (wisely or not) without trying to rehabilitate the former. And yet Ghodsee, who accuses "conservative cold warriors" of trying to discredit alternatives to capitalism by "screaming about Stalin's famines and purges," tries to do just that: "Although it's important not to romanticize the state socialist past, the ugly realities should not make us completely oblivious to the ideals of the early socialists, to the various attempts to reform the system from within (such as the Prague Spring, glasnost, or perestroika).... Acknowledging the bad does not negate the good."

"The good" allegedly includes female empowerment in general and good sex for women in particular. Ghodsee's thesis is that capitalism inevitably commodifies sex, cheapens female labor (because women, thanks to childbearing and other factors, have less bargaining power in the market), and relegates women's caring tasks to unpaid drudgery while forcing them to depend on male earnings...