/lit/ - Literature

>>14293711
I don't know, but I do hope it has many feminine lesbians

>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.
threadly reminder