I love reading things that pull me out of my intellectual comfort zone. I really do. It’s healthy, it’s broadening, and it keeps the mind sharp. So, when I stumbled upon Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, I bought it out of genuine intellectual curiosity. I even approached it with a generous dose of good faith.
I initially assumed the title was just a provocative marketing gimmick designed to turn heads and sell copies. I eagerly opened it expecting a serious, multi-layered anthropological study, but instead, I was hit with an absolute jaw-dropping realisation: she actually believes this. She literally argues that a state-controlled economic system directly manufactures better orgasms and superior intimacy. Yes, she is completely serious. That was the exact moment I physically banged my head against the train window in sheer disbelief, leaving the surrounding commuters staring in utter bewilderment at my horrified face.
Ghodsee’s core thesis is built on a very specific set of utopian claims: that state-regulated economies inherently grant women total economic independence, liberate them from structural gender oppression, and effortlessly pave the way for unparalleled sexual satisfaction. To prop up this fantasy, her entire text reads like a relentless, repetitive crusade against “neoliberalism” – a term she weaponises constantly as the root of all human misery. The irony, of some major comedic value, is that the “neoliberalism” she spends hundreds of pages furiously attacking is a textbook economic strawman. It doesn’t actually exist in the real world; it is an ideological ghost operating purely within the vivid imagination of the academic left to avoid confronting the failures of actual collectivism.
As a classical liberal who was actually born in the Soviet Union, I believe Westerners deserve the truth about miserable sex in the freezing kolkhoz izbas, lice-ridden labour-camp barracks, and soul-dead Brezhnevka apartments.
If you’ve been tempted to spend your hard-earned money on this book, let me save you the cash and the heartburn. Here is how the grand illusion is constructed and exactly why critics have slammed it as a work of superficial, romanticised nostalgia.
Before diving into the historical arguments, it is crucial to understand the ideological framework driving this work. Kristen Ghodsee is an American professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies. Her academic background is substantial, yet her political perspective heavily aligns with contemporary democratic socialist movements, particularly drawing inspiration from political figures like Bernie Sanders. This book reads less like a detached scholarly inquiry and more like an attempt to find a historical precedent that supports a specific, modern progressive platform.
Because the book attempts to merge academic theory with popular political polemics, it establishes a remarkably defensive boundary early on. In the initial pages, Ghodsee explicitly addresses potential critics, writing:
In Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, this text will provide some eye-opening answers. If you don’t give a damn about women’s lives because you are a misogynist right-wing internet troll, save your money and go right back to your parents’ basement; this book is not for you.
Yes, libertarian readers, she is talking to you.
This rhetorical manoeuvre is telling. By preemptively categorising critics and intellectual opponents into a dismissive internet caricature, the text attempts to insulate its historical claims from serious, mainstream scrutiny. For classical liberals, historians, or individuals who actually lived through these regimes and wish to analyse the data with a critical eye, being met with an immediate, defensive boundary sets a troubling tone for what is marketed as a work of objective academic integrity.
Revisionist History with Jaw-Dropping Audacity
The book’s core premise is that women in the Eastern Bloc (like East Germany or Bulgaria) enjoyed structurally superior lives, liberating them to have blissfully satisfying sex.
To pull this narrative off, Ghodsee performs a masterclass in historical amnesia. She elegantly crops out the chronic shortages, the soul-crushing lines for basic groceries, and the absolute lack of personal autonomy. As French feminist critic Eve-Marie Lacasse correctly pointed out in À bâbord, Ghodsee’s thesis relies on a heavily “idealised” and sanitised embrace of these regimes.
But let’s talk about the most intimate elephant in the room: the complete and utter death of privacy. In the Soviet Union, the concept of a “private life” was a luxury the state simply didn’t provide. I am an only child for a very specific, entirely unromantic reason: we lived in a cramped, two-room apartment, and I had to sleep in the exact same room as my parents. For years on end, cramped Soviet living conditions deprived them of even the most basic intimacy. In fact, I am mathematically convinced that my parents only had sex exactly once in their entire lives – solely for the utilitarian purpose of manufacturing me. I ask readers not to disturb this comforting theory.
When your entire domestic existence is shared with children, grandparents, or even other families in communal settings, the “sexual liberation” Ghodsee describes becomes a physical impossibility. For the vast majority of Soviet women, there was simply no space—physically or mentally—for a vibrant sex life.
If you want the ultimate reality check on this ideological fantasy, look no further than 1986, during a famous live satellite broadcast between Leningrad and Boston. When an American asked about intimacy behind the Iron Curtain, a Soviet woman proudly took the mic and proclaimed to the world: “In the USSR, there is no sex, and we are categorically against it!” While a panicked audience member scrambled to clarify that they did have sex but just didn’t advertise it, the phrase instantly became the defining cultural meme of the late-Soviet era – a perfect monument to a regime that managed to bureaucratize human intimacy right out of existence. It is the ultimate historical punchline: while a modern American academic sits in a comfortable university office fabricating stories about state-sponsored sexual utopia, the actual women who lived under that regime were literally announcing on live television that the state had managed to shut the whole operation down.
Let me be direct: it is impossible to take a theory about “liberated, ecstatic sex lives” seriously when a woman had to engage in complex logistical planning just to acquire a bar of soap, a roll of toilet paper, or basic menstrual hygiene products. Pretending these women were living in a feminist sexual utopia while ignoring that a pack of tampons was a luxury commodity is either staggering ignorance or deliberate malpractice.
Goalposts Switcheroo
The methodological backbone of the book relies heavily on semantic acrobatics. When it suits the argument, “socialism” refers strictly to the literal, 20th-century totalitarian communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc—specifically East Germany and Bulgaria—because the text desperately needs their state-mandated employment and fertility statistics to establish a baseline.
But the moment a reader brings up the slight inconveniences of those specific regimes, like the Gulags, the breadlines, the Stasi, and the total suppression of dissent – the definition magically shifts. Suddenly, the text retreats into a defensive fog, claiming it doesn’t mean historical reality, but rather an “idealised socialism” or modern social welfare policies.
You simply cannot have it both ways. You cannot ride on the coattails of real-world state data to claim moral superiority, and then sprint away from the bill when it’s time to pay for the human atrocities that generated that data. Critics have repeatedly caught this red-handed attempt to dodge heavy political baggage. As noted in the sharp analysis by Samuel Clowes Huneke in The Point, this creates an intellectual vacuum where real-world failures are swept under the rug of romantic nostalgia. If the thesis relies on the state machinery of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to prove its point, it must also own the coercive, autocratic nature of the GDR state machinery.
The “Empowerment” of Forced Labour & The Forgotten Double Burden
Ghodsee celebrates high female labour-market participation in socialist states as a crowning achievement of independence. She proudly proclaims that “women dominated the fields of medicine, law, academia, and banking”. Sounds amazing, right?
Except it is a flat-out exaggeration. As Huneke noted in The Point, this claim completely distorts reality: under these regimes, the vast majority of women were trapped in the lowest, poorest-paid tiers of the social hierarchy. In East Germany, for instance, not a single woman ever made it into the supreme ruling Politburo, and female judges were overwhelmingly confined to the lowest-ranking benches.
Renowned historian Mary Fulbrook’s extensive research in The People’s State confirms that most women under these regimes lived incredibly hard lives at the bottom of the ladder, earning a mere fraction of what men made while facing deep structural discrimination.
Worse, domestic gender roles didn’t budge a single millimetre. Soviet women didn’t just smash the glass ceiling; they smashed it so they could work an exhausting eight-hour shift in a factory, only to come home to a gruelling second shift of cooking, cleaning, and childcare without a shred of help from their husbands or modern household appliances. The Soviet woman was utterly exhausted, chronically burned out, and running on fumes. Where exactly was she finding the time, energy, or romantic whim for this supposed surplus of high-quality orgasms?
When Your Primary Contraceptive is an Invasive Medical Procedure
Yet the “sexual freedom” argument completely hits a wall when Ghodsee glosses over the reality of reproductive health behind the Iron Curtain. Modern birth control pills were virtually non-existent, condoms were notoriously scarce and of abysmal quality, and access to basic family planning was a disaster.
As a direct result of the state’s failure to provide basic contraceptives, abortion became the primary method of family planning. Women routinely underwent multiple invasive surgical procedures out of sheer necessity, not liberation. In some extreme cases, like Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania in 1966, the state banned abortion outright by force to inflate demographic data. To brand a society as “sexually liberated” when its primary form of birth control is either a recurring, state-administered surgical operation or a total, forced ban on bodily autonomy is dystopian.
The Uterus as a State Asset
Ghodsee rightfully notes that socialist states invested heavily in maternal health, paid maternity leave, and public childcare. But she views this through a hopelessly naive lens: Public Health = The State Caring About Women.
Let’s look at the flip side of that coin. In many Eastern Bloc countries, reproductive health was a mechanism of heavy-handed state surveillance. Women in various industries faced mandatory gynaecological exams at their workplaces to track fertility, monitor pregnancies, and enforce demographic targets. It is not healthcare when the employer and the state bureaucracy know more about the state of your uterus than you do, but suffocating control.
The Ultimate False Dichotomy
To make her math work, Ghodsee relies on a classic strawman setup. She pits the idealised, airbrushed version of the Soviet bloc against the most hyper-capitalist, worst-case caricature of American capitalism, completely devoid of any safety nets.
As critics like Lacasse have argued, Ghodsee fundamentally ignores the actual champions of female well-being: the Nordics. The countries where women consistently report the highest quality of life, genuine gender equality, robust freedom of choice, and—yes—excellent well-being (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland) are firmly capitalist, free-market economies that happen to provide strong social safety nets. If the free market is the inherent enemy of women, how did free markets combined with political liberty manage to produce the best outcomes for women in human history?
A Textbook Methodological Trainwreck
The “scientific” backbone of the book relies heavily on subjective, retrospective surveys – most famously, data from post-Berlin Wall Germany claiming that East German women reported higher rates of sexual satisfaction (80% vs. 46% in the West).
To treat these isolated, self-reported surveys as definitive scientific proof that socialism causes better sex is highly problematic. Writing in Reason Magazine, journalist Cathy Young tore into this methodology, revealing that the findings are notoriously inconsistent, subjective, and highly suspect.
Other scholars, such as historian Josie McLellan in her book Love in the Time of Communism, have deeply questioned the reliability of these numbers, noting that the data is rather contradictory. Ghodsee consistently fails to isolate confounding variables like culture, religion, lower average ages of marriage, lack of alternative entertainment options, or regional social norms. It isn’t data science; it’s aggressively massaging numbers to fit a pre-packaged ideological conclusion. Even friendly reviewers like Amber Edwards in Philosophy Now had to admit that the book’s lack of deep, intersectional analysis regarding race and non-Western gender dynamics is profoundly disappointing.
Still, intellectual honesty requires admitting when a book has a valid point, and Ghodsee does hit upon one undeniable truth: a woman’s financial independence fundamentally alters her relationships and sexual autonomy. When a woman doesn’t depend on a man for her survival, she can make free choices about her intimate life.
But here is the ultimate irony: that isn’t an argument for socialism. That is the ultimate classical liberal argument.
True female independence thrives on equal opportunity, an open labour market, a booming economy, freedom of contract, and the ultimate right to self-determination. You don’t need a central planning committee, a secret police force, or a breadline to liberate women; you just need a free society that treats them as sovereign individuals.
And there is even some empirical evidence that American women with liberal economic views have more partners in an extensive survey conducted by Aella. Anecdotal evidence seems to align well with this view as well. Libertarian organisations I know sprawl with successful romance.
Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism didn’t change my political outlook, but merely reminded me why we must never accept romanticised rhetoric as a substitute for historical reality. You can critique capitalism all day long—it’s a free country, after all. But you cannot strip a totalitarian regime of its violence, its deprivation, and its coercion, and sell the leftover scraps as vintage feminism. Because the moment you do that, you’re no longer writing history. You’re just telling fairy tales.
