UrbanUpdate

Surely by now you’ve heard, millennials are having less sex. So, as a countermeasure, we’re out here swiping like maniacs on four different apps, worrying about whether the jokes in our bios comes off as funny or dickish. But what if all it takes to get laid more is to embrace democratic socialism? That could very well be the case, at least according to Kristen Ghodsee, Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.

In it, Ghodsee demonstrates how, historically, women have reported greater sexual satisfaction under democratic socialist (and even communist) governments. “In a society that’s less time-pressed, that’s less economically precarious, where people don’t see relationships as potentially adversarial, where people don’t think ‘you’re taking advantage of me’ or ‘you're just with me for my money,’ people—and men in particular—are going to be happier in relationships, partially because the women that are with them, are with them because they like them, not because they [enable them] to afford rent,” said Ghodsee. If relationships are stronger and more equitable under democratic socialism, it would follow that sex should be better, too. Intrigued? I spoke with Ghodsee to learn a little more about her theory, and ask her about the specific policies she thinks would make the biggest impact.

GQ: Help me define our terms. What is socialism?Ghodsee: In the book I very clearly define “state socialism” versus what I call “democratic socialism.” State socialism is generally what we think of when we think of 20th century socialism in Eastern Europe. Like the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union who came to power and the [Eastern Bloc] countries that became socialist after 1945. So in Eastern Europe socialism really looks like state owned means of production and planned economy and a one party state.

Democratic socialism is more like the countries of Scandinavia so Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Denmark. There’s a big spectrum there. In Norway, for example, about 30% of employment is public employment, which means the Norwegian government controls a lot more of the economy than somewhere like Sweden, where there are more private markets and a lot of taxation. So the word socialism is kind of slippery.

Is sex better for women under both systems? Or is it better in one over the other?Yes, in both places, but obviously women fare a lot better in a democratic socialist society because you have rights and freedoms. You can travel. You have freedom of the press. You have freedom of religion. All those political rights are maintained while you still have governmental regulation of the economy.

In state socialism, obviously, you have a lot of negative things like central planning, travel restrictions, consumer shortages, secret police. But you also have a state commitment to women’s equality and you have a state focus on sexual education and on guaranteeing of women's reproductive rights (with some notable exceptions like Romania and Albania and the Soviet Union under Stalin).

In your book you talk about how capitalism commodifies women. Why does a capitalist system create non-ideal conditions for women’s sex lives?When women are not supported in their reproductive roles, when childbearing and rearing is completely put upon women individually and there’s no collectivization of that, whether that’s through raising children with your friends and with your family, or through state sponsorship of kindergartens and crèches (ed. note: basically a fancy French term for day care), there’s an incredible economic burden placed on women. These women then basically become economically dependent on men because it’s difficult to combine their reproductive labors with their productive labors in the formal economy.

So when the state creates a more robust social safety net, what that does is ease the burden on women in terms of having to do all the care work. Also, extend this out to think about elder care and care of sick people, which is something that often falls on women. So women become economically dependent on men because they’re doing all this unremunerated labor, this care work in the private sphere. And when women are dependent on men, men have less of an incentive to care about women’s intimate lives/pleasures because they are essentially paying for the care and upkeep of women, almost as property.

How do social safety nets make for better sex, then?Once women enter the labor force and have the resources and education to be fully self-actualized beings, then they don’t need men to survive, they don’t need men to pay the rent, and they’ll be much more picky when it comes to their partners. Women can marry based on if they like someone or not, or if they’re attractive or not, rather than marrying someone based on: “They can pay the rent [and] feed my kids.” The obvious end point of that is when women are choosing partners they like, they’re going to be more attracted to them and they’re going to be having more, better sex.

When women have the economic ability through these enhanced social safety nets to leave a bad relationship and not pay a penalty—meaning they’ll still have health care, and housing, and they’ll still be able to take care of their children—that also means that women have more freedom to choose partners that will satisfy them, including in the bedroom.

Does this mean men would have better sex under socialism as well?Better is a dicey term. It’s very difficult to do sex research because most of it is self-reported. If we think of better as more, the quantity of sex increases in relationships where men and women are equal. We have really good sociological studies in Germany and the US, that suggest that when there’s a perception of shared housework, couples are having more sex. So if men like having more sex with their partners, then the answer is yes, socialism and safety nets that mitigate the imbalance between heterosexual couples is going to result in more sex.

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When we look East versus West Germany when they did these sexological studies in late 80s, early 90s, after the fall of the wall, is that men and women in East Germany had very similar preferences when it came to marriage, starting a family, and life decisions, where men and women and West Germany had much more adversarial relationships. Preferences are more matched when people feel like they’re equal, because you’re not in a relationship where someone feels like they’re being taken advantage of.

In your opinion, what are the key policies and safety net programs the United States could institute that would contribute to couples having better sex?We are one of the only countries in the world without job-protected paid maternity leave at the federal level. That’s an absolute necessity for women in this country that will allow them to find a work-family balance, and make them less economically dependent on men.

Similarly, we need some sort of federally mandated early childhood education or daycare. Once maternity leave is over and the kids are one or two, we have to be able to support women. What happens now is individual women are paying for child care costs out of their own salaries, so there’s this terrible contradiction, which is, “Is it even worth it to work when all of your salary is going to childcare?” This means women end up staying home and becoming economically dependent, and then all this resentment starts to happen.

We need to have single payer health care. We talk a lot about people who lose their health care because they lose their job, but we very rarely talk about women who stay in unhappy marriages because if they divorce their husband, they’ll lose access to his health care.

Those are reasonable things that we could easily do that Canada and the UK—which are not socialist—do.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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