This month in 'books the allos made me read'

The politics book club decided it was time to read something fun and spicy and possibly Valentine’s Day appropriate? I forget if that came up in the discussion, as I periodically forget about most holidays that aren’t Halloween. 

 

Anyway, for February we landed on Kristen R. Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, and Other Arguments for Economic Independence. 

 

It’s a pretty short, pretty easy read, and it lets you know where it stands right off the bat. Page 1 has two paragraphs. The first paragraph sums up the book’s core argument. The second paragraph explains what various sorts of readers can expect to get from reading the book, except trolls, who can fuck off. The opposite page features a picture of a smiling Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, in full cosmonaut gear with “CCCP” prominently visible on her helmet. So far, so good.

 

Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies, uses the term “under socialism” in its broadest possible sense, looking at the effects of changes won by socialist parties, politicians, and agitators on women’s achievements and personal lives in a variety of countries touched by socialist movements. 

 

Some of her specific definition choices strike me as a little odd—she refers to countries ruled by Communist parties as “state socialist” rather than “communist” because they never achieved full communism, but she refers to countries where democratic socialist parties held power and implemented programs via parliamentary means as “democratic socialist” countries rather than their usual name of “social democracies,” even though they never achieved full democratic socialism either. For most of the book I was able to mostly take it in stride that in this work we’re using words the way the author defines them, as is good and normal, but it got noticeably weird when talking about, like, there being a higher proportion of female CEOs in Scandinavian countries. “Socialist countries have more of some type of CEO” is the sort of framing that makes a big record scratch noise go off in my brain, even if it is immediately followed up with a discussion of how focusing on elite women leaves the vast majority of women behind.

 

In the “smart editorial choices” column, the book is structured so all the “other arguments” are in the earlier chapters and the stuff about Soviet sexology is in the later ones, thus ensuring that readers are motivated to read past the first few chapters. Although if I weren’t reading this for a book club I might have been tempted to skim some bits; I have been doing this feminism thing for quite a while and I’ve read most of the stats on labor force participation rates before. It’s cool that Ghodsee brings in more stats about Soviet countries than you usually see in mainstream progressive feminist discourse, which most often just compares the US and Western Europe, though. But there’s still just a lot of Feminist Political Program ground I’ve seen covered before—maternity leave policies, hiring discrimination, wage gaps, correlation between numbers of lady bankers and firm performance in the 2008 meltdown, sexual economics theory, public policy and birth rates, etc.

 

It therefore probably shouldn’t have been surprising that I actually found the parts of the book that were explicitly about sex more interesting than the bits that weren’t; it would appear that because it is less relevant to my usual interests than the stuff about career paths and birth control access, it was also the material that I wasn’t already familiar with. Apparently there was some pretty intense Cold War rivalry going on in the field of sex research in the mid-20th century. I had no idea. I was also fascinated by the different taxonomies (here called scripts) of sexual behavior that researchers found when conducting interviews with Russian women of different ages, which changed dramatically in different periods of political history. Researchers found five, one of which (“instrumentalist”) appears to have not even existed under the Soviet system. (The only one of the scripts that sounded even remotely tolerable to me was the “friendship script,” which Ghodsee insists is not the same thing as a friend with benefits, meaning it would appear that I don’t understand what a friend with benefits is either. Apparently I am Too Socialist in addition to Too Aromantic to understand literally anything about contemporary pairing behaviors.) (This is why I don’t usually read about this stuff—it just leaves me more confused.)

 

One of the explicit goals of this book was to inject some nuance about how we talk about the USSR into American political discourse, where it is generally seen as a one-dimensional black hole of Evil Empire by most Americans (and then as an unimpeachable workers’ paradise of anti-imperialism by a small but loud handful of anime avitars on Twitter, but the less said about them the better). In this respect I think she does a pretty good job for American readers, even if she does occasionally hit levels of Explaining Very Clearly that would make me feel a little talked down to were I not acutely aware that I have been rendered unable to talk to normal people and am myself no longer a normal people. Also I like the term “blackwashing” and will be adopting it immediately.

 

Overall I am pretty glad we picked this book since I probably wouldn’t have read it on my own, but it was an interesting read and I learned some things.