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Reblogged:Great Socialist Sex: Debunked

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Over the holidays, I off-and-on read through Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World, by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell, and I highly recommend it. The book is overall entertaining and clear, and despite my lifelong advocacy of capitalism, I learned a few things, such as what, exactly, "exploitation" means to a Marxist. (I had never explicitly tied it to the Labor Theory of Value.)

That said, its chief value will be helping ordinary people who may not be that interested in economics or politics understand why capitalism is good and its opposite ... sucks. Along the way, the authors set straight a few sins against journalism, such as Kristen R. Ghodsee's 2017 New York Times piece, "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism," which I commented on at the time.

The below -- a quotation from a Leningrad-based sexologist -- is just a sample of their total evisceration of that despicable piece:

SovietApts.jpg
Soviet Apartments: Ugly on the outside, and with unwanted roommates inside. (Image by Marshal Bagramyan, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)
Soviet women may well have the highest rate of culturally repressed orgasm in the world... Look, what kind of orgasms do you expect in a society which, on top of all the shame we've loaded on sex, lived for decades in communal apartments? I have one couple for whom I've found no solutions; the mother-in-law still sleeps behind a screen in the same room, the young wife can't allow herself to make one moan, one cry... How, how to make love that way ... the mother-in-law lying there hearing every creak of the bedding.
And that's the lighter side of the problem (if you can call it that): The authors cite a poll revealing that 70% of Soviet women never had an orgasm and over half detested sexual contact. And yet, due to the gruesomeness (an understatement) of the "free" government abortions, there was a strong black market for illegal, private ones.

-- CAV

P.S., They rather ably take apart Walter Duranty, too.

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