A Ukrainian friend who speaks German derisively linked to “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism” (NYTimes):
A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.
Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria, who was 65 when I first met her in 2011. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.
“Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,” she said. “After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased.”
Ms. Durcheva was a single mother for many years, but she insisted that her life before 1989 was more gratifying than the stressful existence of her daughter, who was born in the late 1970s.
“All she does is work and work,” Ms. Durcheva told me in 2013, “and when she comes home at night she is too tired to be with her husband. But it doesn’t matter, because he is tired, too. They sit together in front of the television like zombies. When I was her age, we had much more fun.”
“As early as 1952, Czechoslovak sexologists started doing research on the female orgasm, and in 1961 they held a conference solely devoted to the topic,” Katerina Liskova, a professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told me. “They focused on the importance of the equality between men and women as a core component of female pleasure. Some even argued that men need to share housework and child rearing, otherwise there would be no good sex.”
Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” It was state socialism’s answer to work-life balance: “Even the best stimulation, they argued, will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.”
Although gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined. Eastern bloc women did not need to marry, or have sex, for money.
Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the research results may be peculiar to Germany and German culture (if we assume that law is a reflection of cultural attitudes, note that German family law is completely different from the U.S.; alimony has been substantially eliminated and child support is capped at a small fraction of U.S. levels).
The Ivy League university professor who wrote the Times piece blames Capitalism for ruining female sexual satisfaction. What would a Buddhist peasant say, though? Perhaps that the suffering described could only stem from materialism and greed. An American content to live at the same material standard of living as a former East German wouldn’t have a “work-life balance” problem because a superior standard of living can be obtained today without working at all, either by collecting welfare or collecting child support. The American who doesn’t work can then spend his or her time doing whatever he or she wants. Does The Redistribution Recession show that there are millions of Americans who have figured this out and are therefore smarter than the professor?
The professor says that only Bigger Government can give women bigger sexual satisfaction. But what if the factors are simpler, e.g., working hours for the person seeking satisfaction, working hours for the sex partner(s) of that person, the availability of no-fault divorce so that one is not chained to a boring sex partner, and social approval and financial support for single parenthood so that one can enjoy children without being chained to a single sex partner. Every U.S. state offers no-fault or “unilateral” divorce. U.S. society offers social approval and either publicly or private-supplied cash for single parents. That leaves the working hours factor to explore.
Before declaring the Capitalist experiment a failure (what’s the point of money if you’re not enjoying life, right?), why not look at sexual satisfaction as a function of hours worked by the people studied and their sex partners? Maybe it will turn out that people who work at a government or union job with a strict 35- or 40-hour week can achieve the same level of sexual satisfaction as the women of former East Germany while simultaneously enjoying a higher material quality of life.
