Book review: “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. And Other Arguments for Economic Independence” by Kristen Ghodsee (2018)

A popular book claims that capitalism oppresses women, and that genuine gender equality can only be achieved under socialism. Do these claims have any merit?

One of the defining features of Millennial Socialism is that, even though none of its protagonists can tell us much about how it is supposed to work in practice (other than that it will be super-democratic somehow), they all know exactly what outcomes it will produce. It will end racism. It will end climate change. It will end mental health problems. And apparently, it will also improve people’s sex lives, especially women’s.

The latter is the claim of the book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. And Other Arguments for Economic Independence by Prof Kristen Ghodsee, a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I vaguely remember that I wanted to review it when it first came out in 2018, but there was so much other fashionable socialist nonsense coming out at that time (The Socialist Manifesto, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Why You Should Be A Socialist, Stolen, The People’s Republic of Walmart…), this one just dropped off the radar.