One of the most popular tourist attractions in Berlin is the D.D.R. Museum, which opened in 2006 and aims to show visitors what life was like for ordinary people in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The museum uses interactive installations and cleverly designed displays of documents, photographs, and household goods to summon the recent past. Schoolchildren line up for the opportunity to sit in the driver’s seat of a Trabant simulator, to perch on a couch in a reconstructed East German apartment, or to see examples of the games played and the foods eaten by Germans who lived behind the Iron Curtain.

The exhibits are generally fascinating, although embarrassed middle schoolers may scoot quickly by the extensively illustrated display dedicated to the East German enthusiasm for nudism. The less savory aspects of the East German regime are chillingly represented: there’s a mock interrogation room of the sort that would have been used by the Stasi, and a prison cell with a grim, narrow bed, underlining the brutality of the regime for anyone who crossed the secret police. The descriptive panels accompanying the displays, which are in German and English, often have an oddly pejorative, snarky tone, even in exhibits on the more benign aspects of everyday East German life. In a re-created kindergarten classroom with books, wooden cars, a shoe rack, and a linoleum floor, the wall text notes that attending kindergarten was an exercise in conformity rather than an opportunity to develop individual skills—presenting the fact that children were all required to nap at the same time as damning evidence of a repressive state, as opposed to an eminently sensible practice observed by caregivers of small children in societies even as capitalistic as the United States.

The tone of superiority—as if the decades of socialism in East Germany were nothing but a misguided aberration—is hardly limited to the curators of the D.D.R. Museum. It is, in fact, a pervasive attitude found in contemporary liberal democracies toward the leftist political alternatives that existed in many parts of the world during much of the twentieth century. In “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence,” Kristen R. Ghodsee, who teaches Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, seeks to counter this narrative, arguing that for all the crushing repression under a political system like that of the former East Germany, women in those countries enjoyed certain freedoms, both material and existential, that were and remain largely unavailable, or even unimaginable, to women in liberal democracies.

Ghodsee’s title is a memorable one, with its suggestion that under socialism women might all be having as much fun as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pirouetting on a Boston rooftop. As in the Times Op-Ed from which the book originated, the title refers to the results of studies conducted in Germany from the mid-nineteen-eighties onward, which reported, among other intriguing findings, that eighty per cent of East German women always experienced orgasm during sex, compared to sixty-three per cent of women in West Germany. Ghodsee cites the work of a number of scholars of sexuality, who have addressed these topics in greater depth. But her own point is a larger one. “Unregulated capitalism is bad for women,” she writes. “If we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.”

The two Germanys, whose populations were ethnically and culturally identical before the political division, offered researchers an irresistible natural experiment through which to explore women’s rights and experiences. Ghodsee discusses several fascinating studies that suggested East German women reported higher levels of satisfaction, even the non-orgasmic kind, than their West German sisters. The division of domestic labor in the East was more equitable, in part because of a system of state-funded creches that allowed East German women to remain a part of the workforce. Because men in the East could not depend upon wealth or economic success to win over a mate, they had to rely upon other attributes, including, Ghodsee argues, a greater sensitivity to the needs of women. Divorce was easier in the East, so women could liberate themselves from unhappy relationships with less difficulty. And, as Ghodsee suggests, the very aspects of East German life that struck the West as the most repugnant—the totalitarian foreclosure of the public sphere—meant that the domestic and private spheres became, perforce, more important and more worthy of care and personal investment.

Elsewhere in the state-socialist East of the twentieth century, women’s rights and freedoms were extended—not with the intention of cultivating women’s self-actualization, as Western mainstream feminism sought to do, but for more basic economic reasons. Women made up half of the potential workforce—and more than half in countries where the male population had been ravaged by war. In 1950, fifty-two per cent of Soviet workers were female, compared with twenty-eight per cent of North American workers. While American women were being encouraged to find fulfillment as wives and mothers, Soviet women were being sent to universities to become scientists or trained to become cosmonauts. Women in the Eastern Bloc were, like their Western counterparts, encouraged to have children. But they were entitled to state-funded maternity leave, a provision that, outrageously, still eludes American women. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States remains one of only a handful of countries that lacks legislation guaranteeing any kind of paid maternity leave. (The others include Suriname and Papua New Guinea.)

Ghodsee acknowledges that women who lived under the various iterations of state socialism in Eastern Europe were often worse off in many specifically feminine ways than their Western sisters—from shortages of sanitary towels in Bulgaria to the tragic natalist policies practiced in Ceausescu’s Romania, where women were forced to bear children they couldn’t afford to raise, then obliged to give them up to orphanages. Yet, stressing that she is by no means advocating a return to the repressive practices of the Communist Bloc, Ghodsee points out that some aspects of socialism, such as the provision of state-funded parental leave and free higher education, have been successfully implemented in Scandinavian social democracies without being accompanied by shortages or enforced childbearing, let alone the cruelties carried out by the Stasi. She seeks to remind her readers that, as difficult as it may be to imagine an alternative political structure from within an existing one, even countries committed to neoliberal capitalism are capable of having different priorities; she cites the example of Finland, which has had legislation providing maternal job protection in place for a hundred years.

The virtue of Ghodsee’s smart, accessible book is that it illustrates how it might be possible for a woman—or, for that matter, a man—to have an entirely different structural relationship to something as fundamental as sex, or health. The United Kingdom, for example, has hardly shied away from capitalist enterprise, but thanks to the National Health Service, or N.H.S., Brits reflexively assume that the government will provide free health care—an unimaginable expectation among Americans. (Two of the most cherished institutions in the U.K. are the N.H.S. and the monarchy, proving that it is possible for a populace to see simultaneously the appeal of socialism and feudalism.) Ghodsee approvingly notes the growing appeal of socialist ideas among young people in the United States and Western Europe, and her book is a useful reminder that the spread of these ideas would not just advantage the Bernie bros but might also better women’s lives in significant ways. More orgasms alone might be a fine thing. But a change in the structural conditions under which more orgasms might be possible is another level of turn-on entirely.