WHY WOMEN HAVE BETTER SEX UNDER SOCIALISM

ZOOM Live Talk/FACEBOOK Live

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Kristen R. Ghodsee

WHY WOMEN HAVE BETTER SEX UNDER SOCIALISM
And other arguments for economic independence

A survey of East and West Germans after unification in 1990 found that women in East Germany had higher levels of sexual satisfaction than women in West Germany. Kristen R. Ghodsee argues that East German women had more personal autonomy in their romantic relations because they could rely on a better safety net. But Ghodsee’ analysis is more a critique of capitalism and certainly not a call to return to communism. Unregulated free markets disproportionately harm people who have primary responsibility for caregiving. Not only childbearing and child-rearing, but also care for the elderly and care for the sick. Free markets require or depend on the free labour that caregivers provide for free in the home, mostly because it’s very expensive to pay for. To move child care or elderly care more into the market, would require vast amounts of public resources - which means higher taxes - and many countries prefer not to do this. “Capitalism’s triumph is a calamity for most women”, writes Yanis Varoufakis: “Kristen Ghodsee’s incisive book brilliantly reveals their plight”.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a Member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have also been translated into over twenty-five languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, Quartz, NBC Think, The Lancet, Project Syndicate, The Washington Post, and the New York Times. She is also the author of ten books, most recently: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) Her latest book is Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions, co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein (Oxford University Press, July 2021. She is also the host of the podcast,  A.K. 47 - Forty-seven Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai.

Tessa Szyszkowitz, Historian, Journalist and Author; UK-Correspondent for PROFIL, Falter und Cicero. She is also Senior Associate Fellow at Royal United Services Institute in London.

Kristen R. Ghodsee:
Warum Frauen im Sozialismus besseren Sex haben
Übersetzung: Ursel Schäfer & Richard Barth, Suhrkamp Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-518-07514-2