Spoiled Milk
Banned
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A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women. Researchers marveled at this disparity in reported sexual satisfaction, especially since East German women suffered from the notorious double burden of formal employment and housework. In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.
Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria, who was 65 when I first met her in 2011. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians ability to develop healthy amorous relationships.
Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance, she said. After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didnt need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased.
Ms. Durcheva was a single mother for many years, but she insisted that her life before 1989 was more gratifying than the stressful existence of her daughter, who was born in the late 1970s.
All she does is work and work, Ms. Durcheva told me in 2013, and when she comes home at night she is too tired to be with her husband. But it doesnt matter, because he is tired, too. They sit together in front of the television like zombies. When I was her age, we had much more fun.
Last year in Jena, a university town in the former East Germany, I spoke with a recently married 30-something named Daniela Gruber. Her own mother born and raised under the Communist system was putting pressure on Ms. Gruber to have a baby.
She doesnt understand how much harder it is now it was so easy for women before the Wall fell, she told me, referring to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. They had kindergartens and crèches, and they could take maternity leave and have their jobs held for them. I work contract to contract, and dont have time to get pregnant.
This generational divide between daughters and mothers who reached adulthood on either side of 1989 supports the idea that women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era. And they owed this quality of life, in part, to the fact that these regimes saw womens emancipation as central to advanced scientific socialist societies, as they saw themselves.
"As early as 1952, Czechoslovak sexologists started doing research on the female orgasm, and in 1961 they held a conference solely devoted to the topic, Katerina Liskova, a professor at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, told me. They focused on the importance of the equality between men and women as a core component of female pleasure. Some even argued that men need to share housework and child rearing, otherwise there would be no good sex."
Agnieszka Koscianska, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Warsaw, told me that pre-1989 Polish sexologists didnt limit sex to bodily experiences and stressed the importance of social and cultural contexts for sexual pleasure. It was state socialisms answer to work-life balance: Even the best stimulation, they argued, will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.
Although gender wage disparities and labor segregation persisted, and although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy, Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined. Eastern bloc women did not need to marry, or have sex, for money. The socialist state met their basic needs and countries such as Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany committed extra resources to support single mothers, divorcées and widows.
Ms. Durchevas adult daughter and the younger Ms. Gruber now struggle to resolve the work-life problems that Communist governments had once solved for their mothers.
The Republic gave me my freedom, Ms. Durcheva once told me, referring to the Peoples Republic of Bulgaria. Democracy took some of that freedom away.