Books: "Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism," by Kristen R. Ghodsee.

Prague, 1989.

This isn't Kristen R. Ghodsee's first appearance at NA Confidential. See this post from 2017: Women, sex, socialism and Slavenka Drakulić's How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.

Today's article appeared at Jacobin about a year later, and the topic still fascinates me.

No Scrubs ... an interview, by Meagan Day, with Kristen R. Ghodsee (Jacobin)

In her new book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee recounts a popular joke that’s told in many East European languages:

In the middle of the night a woman screams and jumps out of bed, eyes filled with terror. Her startled husband watches her rush into the bathroom and open the medicine cabinet. She then dashes to the kitchen and inspects the inside of the refrigerator. Finally she flings open a window and gazes out onto the street below their apartment. She takes a deep breath and returns to bed.

“What’s wrong with you?” her husband says. “What happened?”

“I had a terrible nightmare,” she says. “I dreamed that we had the medicine we needed, that our refrigerator was full of food, and that the streets outside were safe and clean.”

“How is that a nightmare?”

The woman shakes her head and shudders. “I thought the Communists were back in power.”

Hundreds of millions of living Eastern Europeans, including many who abhorred the political reality behind the Iron Curtain, report that their basic standard of living was higher under authoritarian socialism than under contemporary free-market capitalism. Taking a cue from them, Ghodsee’s book starts from the premise that some aspects of life were better under twentieth-century state socialism than they are today, even as others were worse. Appreciating the bad parts doesn’t require ignoring the good parts, her thinking goes. One can acknowledge simultaneously the horrors of the secret police and the comforts of a strong social safety net.

One of the most positive features of state socialism, Ghodsee argues, is that it gave women economic independence from men ...

Suzanne Moore reviewed the book in 2018 at The Guardian.

... This zippy little book argues that not only is unregulated capitalism bad in itself, it is also disproportionately bad for women.

The US academic Kristen Ghodsee has lived in several eastern European countries so she doesn’t wear rose-tinted spectacles, acknowledging that Albania and Romania have always been awful places for women, but she seeks with great brio and nuance to lay out what some socialist states achieved for women.

At heart this is about what happens when women are no longer economically dependent on men and childcare is collectivised ...

In The Nation: "Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism’s relationship to class politics."

Know The Nation:

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, and the most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, with the stated mission to "make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."

A message earlier this week from Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation.

Today, we rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists of principle and conscience. Today, we recommit to mobilizing against hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and economic pain. And as we have at other times of crisis in our nation, we will move forward in solidarity and in the belief that stronger communities arise in times of crisis. We rededicate ourselves to thinking anew, to putting forth a compelling vision of fundamental change.

We stand for an inclusive and progressive populism—one that addresses inequality and economic insecurity. We stand with women and with Muslim, African-American, and immigrant communities who have been threatened by the blatantly racist, sexist, and bigoted campaign Trump ran.

As Nation writer Ian Haney-López reminded us just a few weeks ago, “Remaking our politics and economy will depend on a broad coalition that must include substantial numbers of racially anxious whites. Ignoring their fears, or worse, pandering to them, further impoverishes all of us. Instead, we must have a unified message for whites as well as people of color. Fearful of one another, we too easily hand over power to moneyed interests, but working together, we can rebuild the American dream.”

The answer to what some have called Trump’s “whitelash” is not to retreat on social liberalism, ever; it is to double down on an economics that speaks to working and poor people.

The immediate response to Trump’s election is one of opposition—we commit to obstructing, delaying, and halting any attacks on people of color, women, or working people that may come from a Trump administration. But we must also understand why millions are angry and anxious, and why they voted for the cruel hoax that is Trumpism.

We knew this was an election about change and a revolt against political elites. Yet it is also a revolt against what elites in both parties have done or accepted—global trade and tax deals of, by, and for the corporations; Wall Street bailouts; big-money politics and crony capitalism; decades of promises not kept. It is a time for great reflection and an even greater reformation—of the Democratic Party, of our politics, of our society. The Nation's work will continue—as it has in good, not-so-good, and bad times—to offer alternative visions and ideas, to deepen our journalistic mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further the work of the political revolution in a nation divided.

A current excerpt of relevance:

Inequality Between Women Is Crucial to Understanding Hillary’s Loss, by By Kathleen Geier (The Nation)

Working-class women who voted for Trump tell us a lot about feminism’s relationship to class politics.

... Class differences among women are an all but taboo subject. But scholars such as Leslie McCall have found that economic inequality among women is just as large, and has been growing just as fast, as economic inequality among men. This economic divide among women has created one of the most significant fault lines in contemporary feminism. That’s because professional-class women, who have reaped a disproportionate share of feminism’s gains, have dominated the feminist movement, and the social distance between them and their less privileged sisters is wide and growing wider. In the decades since the dawn of the second wave, educated women gained access to status jobs, but working-class women experienced declining wages and (because of the rise of divorce and single parenthood among the working class) shouldered an increasingly heavy burden of care. Yet mainstream feminist groups and pundits have consistently stressed the social and cultural issues that are most important to affluent women, while marginalizing the economic concerns of the female masses.

"Sanders’s suggested policies are better for the struggling people of this country, particularly women."

There simply isn't much to add.

My Kind of Misogyny: I Don’t Care If They Call a Warhawk “Cankles”, by Amber A'Lee Frost (The Baffler)

... I’d obviously be pleased to see a politically decent woman president, and if Hillary gets the nomination, I’ll happily cast my protest ballot for Jill Stein from the safety of my blue state. (Truth be told, as a Cold War social democrat, Bernie’s already my “compromise” candidate anyway.) Obama’s presidency has not yielded much in the way of material gains for black people in America, and it’s hard to imagine what a symbolic feminist victory like a female president would guarantee for all but the most privileged of women. As it stands, I’d no more vote for Hillary than I would for a Margaret Thatcher or a Sarah Palin.

And isn’t that the simpler explanation of left dissent from Team Clinton? It’s not that critics of Hillary are largely misogynist or even that they’re obsessed with political purity. It’s that she’s a proven neoliberal warhawk, a Wall Street sycophant, and a consistent enemy of the poor.

I'd rather harbor a healthy contempt for all the angry men.

Recently it occurred to me that I'm angry, too, except my reasons for being angry seem to differ quite markedly from my fellow middle-aged white guys.

I'm angry at them for being such wankers, and I find this consoling, indeed.

Why are some men so angry? From Gamergate to mass shootings to domestic violence and the NFL, the common denominator is male rage, by Jessica Valenti (The Guardian)

... It’s no coincidence that anti-feminist backlash happens most often when women’s rights are on an upswing. And male anger towards women isn’t going anywhere – if anything, it’s gaining steam. Online forums that provide anonymity are creating spaces for men to say the things they no longer can in “real life”, police and courts that disbelieve and blame women for the violence done to them give men the impression their bad behavior is acceptable and a conservative movement that refuses to let go of traditional gender roles teaches our children that being a man is synonymous with being “tough”, having guns and, yes, being violent.

Baum, Oz and radical feminism.

I must concede that as a young lad, reading Baum's "The Marvelous Land of Oz," the whole transgendered "Tip reverts back to Princess Ozma" story line freaked me the hell out. Subsequently, I came to understand just how progressively clever Baum really was, as explained here.

What 'Oz' Owes To Early Radical Feminism, by Michelle Dean (The Nation)

 ... Given that these are all early-century books, the progressiveness of it might seem remarkable, but then Frank Baum was unusually well-connected to one of the more radical figures in early American feminism. He’d married a woman named Maud Gage, whose mother, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a feminist who worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But Matilda Gage was more than a simple suffragette or birth control activist; she was a philosopher and a theosophist as well as a historian. She believed in reincarnation, and developed an entire theory that “man” had suppressed traces of an earlier history of matriarchy, particularly among First Nations people:

"Femen's topless warriors start boot camp for global feminism."

NAC continues to watch this story, and to try desperately to imagine it unfolding here in New Albany.

Nope. Just can't do it.

Femen's topless warriors start boot camp for global feminism; Ukrainian activists set up an international training centre in Paris to teach women the art of naked protest, by Kim Willsher (Guardian's Observer)

Was it not also inconsistent, another asked, that the new feminists were using nakedness to rail against female exploitation? In a week that had seen the banning of photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge, it was certainly topical.

Previously at NAC: Insert New Albany Bicentennial protest joke here. (May 26, 2012)

Insert New Albany Bicentennial protest joke here.