Did women have better sex under socialism? And why would that be relevant?
This post takes up Kristen R. Ghodsee’s thesis and articulates it with current day homeownership data in Australia.
It concludes that providing equal access to basic necessities produces more room for genuine freedom in human relationships, including sexual relationships.
In other words, were material conditions to be changed towards a more equal society, there would be no need for a ‘political correctness’, because the world itself would be politically correct.
Starting observation:
“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.”
This is strange given that East German women had to face the double burden of formal employment and housework, while their Western counterparts “stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy.”
Consider Bulgarian Ana Durcheva’s statement:
“Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance […] 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.”
In comparison, she says that her daughter, born in the 70s only works and works: “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.”
The argument made for this disparity in the book/article is that: “Russia extended full suffrage to women in 1917, three years before the United States did. The Bolsheviks also liberalized divorce laws, guaranteed reproductive rights and attempted to socialize domestic labor by investing in public laundries and people’s canteens. Women were mobilized into the labor force and became financially untethered from men.”
Relatedly, “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). “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, says that pre-1989 Polish sexologists “didn’t limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure.” They argued that “Even the best stimulation will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.” State socialism in the USSR was key to work-life balance of men and women, and thus directly impacted their relationship and sex life, both in terms of ‘energy and availability’ as well as in terms of ‘power dynamics’.
In other words, if women are made to take the status of a dependent in society, they are likely to be treated as such, in bed and elsewhere. The link to bad sex and sexual abuse is the same.
One might want to ask how we fare in Australia today?
Well, given the recent news of widespread abuse against women at the highest levels of power as well as in our schools, it is fair to say that we can and should engage in the moral assessment and condemnation of the perpetrators, after all, not all men do this right?
As crazy as it may sound, we are not even at the stage of strongly affirming the well-meaning but vague promise of ‘educating men’ (which of course, must also be done), indeed, we still have voices advocating for parents to talk to their daughters about ‘risk-taking behaviours and self-respect’ as a means to solve the problem of abuse. Once more, it is the victims’ behaviour that should change, not the perpetrators nor the customs and the system as a whole.
The point I wish to make here shifts the debate away from the question of whom should bear responsibility — which of course is also an important question. If the argument above holds, we must also acknowledge that both men and women are in part the product of a system of male entitlement.
Commenting on Attorney-General Christian Porter rape allegations, CEO of Women’s Safety NSW Hayley Foster says: “Research has consistently found that men who hold traditional, hierarchical views about gender roles and relationships are more likely to perpetrate violence against women.”
“Foster says that asserting dominance was a big factor; it leads to a sense of ownership and entitlement to a woman, including for sexual gratification and exploitation. She believes lying, bragging and chipping away at Jane [Victim]’s self-esteem could have been John [Christian Porter] asserting his dominance.”
So let’s have a look at the structure of material ownership and entitlement. Here are some Aussie facts to consider (taken from here, here and here).
“State of Play, has revealed that only 26.2 per cent of 4.7 million properties analysed belonged to women, as opposed to the 29.9 per cent owned by men.”
This may not seem like much disparity at first sight, but let’s look at some further intricacies.
“With the current pay gap sitting at 13.4 per cent, women would require an extra 10 months — a total 79 months — to save for a 20 per cent deposit than men due to lower incomes.”
“[This] means men get access to housing sooner, they have more time in market, and therefore have greater wealth accumulation as well […] Women are more likely to exit property ownership after the dissolution of a marriage and that’s where we see women over 50 among the highest growing rates of homelessness in Australia.”
“This wealth gap becomes a particular challenge around retirement, and it’s well documented that if you still have rental or mortgage costs at the time you retire, then you have a much higher incidence of falling into poverty.”
Indeed: “Women retire with lower average superannuation balances than men due to a range of social and economic factors including the gender wage gap and time taken out of the workforce to care for children or family members[…]Female-dominated industries are more likely to be low paid, casual or part-time, while experiences of family violence, gender and age discrimination more likely to impact their work.”
Further, “Australia’s gender pay gap calculations only consider full time earnings, not part time and casual employment where women represent 67.2 per cent of the workforce.”
“This suggests the true gender pay gap in Australia is actually closer to 30 per cent because of the different composition of men and women in the labour force.”
“In that sense women, particularly single women, may be even more disadvantaged in trying to access property ownership because they need that income to save for a deposit.”
Of course, “this problem is exacerbated by Australia’s lack of appropriate and affordable housing.” Which means “that increasing numbers of older women are left with nowhere to go.”
Therefore, they may have to remain or enter abusive relationships in order to simply have a place to live (which is why the argument that, in order to solve these issues, people should simply remain married does not entirely stand up to scrutiny).
Indeed: “the most common type of ownership is two people together, and in most cases it’s a male and a female. That speaks to affordability constraints and infers you often need dual incomes to achieve property ownership.” Yet “women make up over 60% of either single-parent or lone adult households. [And] at the Australia-wide level, sole property ownership among women is less than their male counterparts, which means women are over represented in lone households but they’re underrepresented in property ownership.”
“The core of this analysis and its findings is that it’s all about wealth inequality and income inequality, and that doesn’t just span between men and women, it spans among women as well — including those that are single, sole parents or part time workers.”
On top of ongoing structural inequality, “[The] data shows that women continue to bear the brunt of any crisis, whether it be fires, a pandemic, or an economic recession,” Chair of Homelessness Australia Jenny Smith says.
For the record: “The largest discrepancy between exclusively male and female ownership in property was across regional Western Australia [where I live], where female owned property represented 19.8 per cent of those analysed compared with 29.3 per cent owned by men.”
So yes, workplace sexual abuse, domestic violence, work-life balance, mental health and sexual pleasure all find part of their explanation in structural inequalities that place women in a position of a dependent, while men are placed in a position of entitlement and thus ‘naturally’ tend to behave as such, it is literally what the systems asks men to be.
What is important here, is that the behaviour of entitlement and abuse of power is not reducible to human nature, male or female; as shown above, these structural inequalities can, at least in part, be addressed.
“The solution to homelessness is more housing, it is as simple as that.”
Yet “[M]inimal construction for most of the past 25 years means that national social housing supply has effectively halved since the 1990s.”
“A UNSW City Futures Centre study […] found that among the best ways to broaden Australia’s economic recovery strategy would be a large-scale national social housing program.” Kate Colvin, national spokesperson for Everybody’s Home says: “A seven billion-dollar investment in social and affordable housing would unlock more than $18 billion in economic expansion, creating more than 18,000 jobs a year over four years, and making a serious dent in homelessness”.
Further: “federal government would need to build 12,000 homes a year to help cover the shortfall for over 65s and that’s not including the support needed for younger Australians.”
In conclusion, framing housing as a human need rather than as a speculative asset would lead to better economic outcomes for the entire nation as well as better sex, for both men and women.
To hell with political correctness and moral assessment of individuals as a primary means to address systemic failure, address material conditions of all!
International Women’s Day (IWD) is a good time to remind ourselves that we should all work hard year round as individuals not to fall into systemic patterns and belittle women and other groups (list of examples of such gestures here).
Yet let’s not forget that IWD finds its roots as a movement making systemic material demands for equality at work and in the household, it does not restrict itself to symbolic and/or individual gestures, it has socialist roots. It isn’t primarily about deciding what specific groups can and can’t do, should and shouldn’t do, it is primarily about guaranteeing equal rights to all.
Strong women across the ages have asked that we address more than individual men’s morality and behaviour (although we should do that too).
While much of our contemporary cultural and political debate focuses on political correctness and the excessive cultural policing and the cancel culture of so-called cultural marxists mobs, it is quite striking that if the argument just presented holds, most of that debate would become largely irrelevant.
If women were indeed considered equals in the material facts of life, at work and in the household, they’d likely be much happier to engage in ‘sexualised banter’ and crude ‘locker room talk’, because they could engage in it as equals, not as dependents or outright male property, thereby completely changing the power dynamic of the exchange and its potentially harmful consequences.
To paraphrase a famous popular author:
“Humour and satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are genuinely hurting, it’s not humour any more, it is bullying.”
Consequently, remove the material asymmetric power dynamics, and there is suddenly much more room for play, tease and experimentation — i.e. political incorrectness and Rock ‘n Roll— coming at no cost to ethics and mutual respect, simply because there is much more genuine freedom on both sides of the relationship.
To paraphrase another famous figure:
“The realm of (sexual) freedom begins where the realm of (sexual) necessity ends”.
