Fem­i­nists have often felt neglect­ed or patron­ized by social­ists. A good por­tion of fem­i­nist writ­ing and pol­i­tics in the 1970s and ​’80s, for exam­ple, dealt with women’s expe­ri­ence of con­de­scen­sion from social­ists, some of whom saw fem­i­nism as a form of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics that dis­tract­ed from the real issues of eco­nom­ic and class inequal­i­ty in cap­i­tal­ist societies.

So long as women are economically dependent on men there can be no equality, and heterosexual relations will suffer.

Kris­ten R. Ghod­see, author of Why Women Have Bet­ter Sex Under Social­ism: And Oth­er Argu­ments for Eco­nom­ic Inde­pen­dence, is of a younger gen­er­a­tion; one that sees fem­i­nism as cen­tral to social­ism. This book, which grew out of a 2017 New York Times op-ed that went viral, starts with a study of social­ist states in East­ern Europe and their tran­si­tion to forms of cap­i­tal­ism. She charts a his­to­ry in which plans and poli­cies con­cern­ing women in coun­tries like the Sovi­et Union and Bul­gar­ia were cen­tral to visions of the future, to plans for full employ­ment and a flour­ish­ing econ­o­my. Such poli­cies were not, as in the West, pla­ca­to­ry respons­es to women’s demands.

Ghod­see, how­ev­er, is clear: ​“I don’t advo­cate a return to any form of 20th-cen­tu­ry state social­ism.” Her focus is on what was pro­posed and achieved in social­ist soci­eties despite every­thing that went wrong (and she is sure­ly right to do so), on the eman­ci­pa­to­ry poli­cies that ​“evap­o­rat­ed” under the pres­sure of famine and war and tyran­ny and fail­ure, and on what has hap­pened in those coun­tries since the breakup of the Sovi­et bloc in 1989. Shad­ow­ing this sto­ry is the slow and very dif­fer­ent­ly moti­vat­ed progress in not only the Unit­ed States but also Scan­di­navia, toward greater equal­i­ty between men and women — a progress that seems dan­ger­ous­ly stalled at the moment.

Despite slug­gish devel­op­ments toward gen­der equal­i­ty in the West and what Ghod­see sees as rever­sals of such poli­cies in the East, the speed and sur­prise of the events of 1989 and the ear­ly 1990s have made her opti­mistic. She believes we, too, may find our­selves sur­prised into change we can’t quite fore­see amid the cur­rent focus on equal pay and sex­u­al harass­ment and the all too like­ly reduc­tions in health secu­ri­ty and the avail­abil­i­ty of abortions.

Cap­i­tal­ism is assumed, Ghod­see sug­gests, as the base­line; polit­i­cal ideas may be offered only as minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions to that sta­tus quo rather than as a new and dif­fer­ent vision for soci­ety. Social­ism has been demo­nized to the point where it becomes risky even to con­sid­er cur­rent or past exam­ples of it.

Ghodsee’s focus in the sec­ond half of the book on sex and sex­u­al rela­tions, then, emerges ele­gant­ly from the argu­ment she has devel­oped: that a fem­i­nist pol­i­tics is cen­tral to social­ism because it can­not avoid its foun­da­tion in eco­nom­ic prin­ci­ples. So long as women are eco­nom­i­cal­ly depen­dent on men, there can be no equal­i­ty; with­out such equal­i­ty, she argues, het­ero­sex­u­al rela­tions will suf­fer and so will the expe­ri­ence of sex itself.

So long as fem­i­nism relies on issues of glass ceil­ings and employ­ment quo­tas for edu­cat­ed women, the real and dev­as­tat­ing inequal­i­ties that exist between men and women won’t change. We must instead see women’s work and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the econ­o­my and cul­ture — and how that is com­bined with the rear­ing of chil­dren — as absolute­ly cen­tral issues for a func­tion­ing society.

Such change shouldn’t be demand­ed or con­ced­ed sim­ply to make women hap­pi­er; it should be a cru­cial part of a pol­i­tics direct­ed toward max­i­miz­ing pro­duc­tive lives and poten­tial for every­body. Ghod­see presents fig­ures from a num­ber of sur­veys to sug­gest that, in coun­tries where women can and do earn as much as men and where the soci­ety sup­ports women as work­ers as well as moth­ers, women enjoy bet­ter sex. She claims that the ero­sion of women’s eco­nom­ic poten­tial since 1989 in some coun­tries of the East­ern bloc has result­ed in women report­ing less sex­u­al enjoy­ment and a dete­ri­o­ra­tion in their sex­u­al rela­tions with men.

There can be no doubt that for a major­i­ty of peo­ple liv­ing in what were once social­ist states (and are now strug­gling cap­i­tal­ist ones), life has become not eas­i­er, but hard­er, as the perks of cap­i­tal­ism don’t out­weigh its draw­backs. For many it is hard to see the pres­ence of 42 kinds of sham­poo in a super­mar­ket as just com­pen­sa­tion for those years in the Sovi­et sys­tem when they had to queue up for toi­let paper. As Ghod­see points out, the inhab­i­tants of those social­ist states were told lies about their own coun­tries, but the truth about ours.

We are so used to the social con­straints on sex­u­al rela­tions becom­ing part of the sex­u­al expe­ri­ence itself — for some, after all, taboos and dis­ap­proval may be vital to their plea­sures and sat­is­fac­tions — that it is hard to elim­i­nate all skep­ti­cism about the book title’s appar­ent claim.

Ghod­see, how­ev­er, invokes a uni­ver­sal sys­tem of ​“sex­u­al eco­nom­ics,” a the­o­ry devel­oped by Roy Baumeis­ter and Kath­leen Vohs in 2004. This ​“assumes an under­ly­ing cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my in which women have an asset (sex) they can choose to sell or give away either as sex work­ers or in less overt, but no less trans­ac­tion­al ways, as sug­ar babies, girl-friends, or wives” that is hard to dis­man­tle or neu­tral­ize. And she is sure­ly right to claim that we ​“would also assume that women liv­ing in a soci­ety that pro­vides its cit­i­zens with sub­si­dized access to basic needs such as food, shel­ter, health­care and edu­ca­tion would have few incen­tives to horde their sex in order to keep its price high.”