Over the past few months, I constantly walked by Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence on the shelf at my library. I would pick it up, periodically, and flip through it, telling myself I’d check it out one day and read it. I finally checked it out last week and read it. Ghodsee lays her argument outset when she writes, “Unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.” Ghodsee succinctly presents her argument, and she does not shy away from the violence and trauma of socialism under Communist and authoritarian regimes specifically in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

Ghodsee points out that when women have economic freedom and stability, through paternity leave, equal access to the workforce, access to healthcare, access to child care, access to services that provide stability, they do not seek relationships based on transactional nature. By transactional, I mean that in a heterosexual relationship the man provides the monetary capital and that capital serves as a means of attracting and marrying a woman. When women have freedom and independence, they do not have to rely on men for stability, health insurance, or basic needs. Ghodsee argues that when “we better understand how the current capitalist system has co-opted and commercialized basic human emotions” we will begin to reject the idea that our bodies and emotions, whether consciously or unconsciously, are mere commodities in society.

At one point, Ghodsee presents the reader with Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs’ 2004 article “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions.” Ghodsee addresses issues with the article, but she also highlights, through numerous examples, its usefulness in helping us understand the ways that capitalism and other systems impact human relationships. Baumeister and Vohs argue that intimacy exist as nothing more than veils that hide, as Ghodsee writes, “the transactional nature of our personal relationships.” Ghodsee concludes, as earlier activists such as Alexandra Kollontai and August Bebel did, that “[i]ntimate relationships that are relatively free from the transactional ethos of sexual economics theory are generally more honest, authentic, and, well, just better.”

Ghodsee’s book encapsulates a lot of the thoughts we have been discussing this semester in my Banned Books class and themes that have arise in some of the books I have been reading recently. In my course, Ghodsee makes me think about Celie and Albert in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Albert wants Celie, and Celie’s stepfather uses her as a commodity, to help him raise his children. He wants her for domestic work. When he enages in sex with her, as well, Celie always describes it as him doing business, as a transactional act that does not provide her any pleasure. She relies on him, even though he is abusive, for some sense of stability because she does not have other options.

Likewise, Henry’s move to marry his teenage stepdaughter Naomi in Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness rests on a transactional foundation. Pastor Tom suggests that Henry propose to Naomi so that they can, together, raise the twins Beto and Cari as a family, again providing stability. Henry sexually abuses Naomi, and no one in the community knows this. Pastor Tom and the community encourage Naomi to accept Henry’s proposal, telling her that it isn’t wrong because they are not related by blood and that any woman would want to have someone as good looking as Henry. Even Naomi’s grandmother suggests she accepts the proposal. They do this in the hopes of providing Naomi with a stable existence, one that is dependent on Henry.

Ghodsee does not provide an intersectional analysis in her book, and she does address this deficit at various points. When we think about Celie and Naomi, we must think about race and ethnicity alongside their gender. We cannot remove them from the discussion. Celie, as a Black woman in the early 1900s in rural Georgia, lacks many options for advancement or escape from an oppressive system. Naomi, likewise, lacks any escape because she is Mexican, uneducated, and still a teenager.

Reading Kaye Gibbons’ A Virtuous Woman, I began to think more about the transactional nature of sex and intimacy. In Gibbons’ novel, Tiny Fran, a middle/upper class woman gets pregnant and her dad, Lonnie, tries to find a man for her to marry in order to save face. He approaches Burr, a workman on his farm, and propses that Burr marry Tiny Fran. Lonnie comes to Burr and says, “Marry Tiny Fran, whether you did it or not [got her pregnant], just marry her and take a forty-eight-acre block, a good piece, drains good, not clay, dirt, good loamy soil. Marry her and have something.” Burr agrees to the transaction and marries Tiny Fran, and this decison provides him with upward mobility and legacy. His daughter goes to college, and if he didn’t marry Tiny Fran, his children would merely work in the fields.

Each of these examples rests on transactions, an exchange of intimacy (i.e. love, romance, and sex) for a material good. With Celie and Naomi, that good becomes stability — a roof, land, groceries, etc. For Burr, it becomes tangible land and property that will benefit him and that he can pass down to future generations, creating generational wealth. If he did not have the land, he would have nothing to pass on, nothing that could acrue value. He would be like Blinking Jack Stokes, the narrator of this section, with nothing to pass on to his heirs.

None of these couples have the social safety nets that would provide them with stability and the ability to merely live their lives without having to constantly worry about losing everything. They cannot form intimate, equal relationships because they rely on their partner to provide basic needs, thus creating an unbalanced relationship. If they had equal access to their needs, then they could form intimate, successful relationships because neither one would be in a position of power or subservient.

I’m not saying that achieving gender equity and equality would solve all of the issues, but it is a start. Ghodsee says the same thing. She points out problems, but she provides statistics and research that strongly supports how socialism creates a society that fosters more intimate and human relationships, not based on monetary power dynamics but on true connections. There is so much more to say, but I’ll leave it here.

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.