Other than that, Frau Schmidt, how was the sex?

One of the strange essays that I read in the NY Times was this one on "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism."

The title had all the warnings for me--as an old pinkie, I am highly suspicious of anything that hints of how life was/is awesome in a socialist/communist society.  Which is why, for instance, I usually have nothing but criticism for the rah-rahs about China, where people aren't free.

Anyway, the essay talks about how the old USSR and East Germany and others were progressive, and how "women under Communism enjoyed more sexual pleasure."

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.

The author explains more with comparisons of women from those socialist years and their daughters who live in liberal democracies:

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 women’s emancipation as central to advanced “scientific socialist” societies, as they saw themselves.

This is like how commies like to refer to, for instance, Cuba as an awesome country for healthcare.  Or, even until a couple of years ago, how Venezuela is a paradise for the poor.  And they always induce the same response from me: I want to puke!

Because they championed sexual equality — at work, at home and in the bedroom — and were willing to enforce it, Communist women who occupied positions in the state apparatus could be called cultural imperialists. But the liberation they imposed radically transformed millions of lives across the globe, including those of many women who still walk among us as the mothers and grandmothers of adults in the now democratic member states of the European Union. Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.

"may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities"?
"may"?
"seem"?
What the hell is wrong with such people?

Apparently I am not the only one who found it to be puke-worthy:

I would have chosen to commemorate 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union in a different way. Over one hundred million people have died or were killed while building socialism during the course of the 20th century. Call me crazy, but that staggering number of victims of communism seems to me more important than the somewhat dubious claim that Bulgarian comrades enjoyed more orgasms than women in the West. But, as one Russian babushka said to another, suum cuique pulchrum est.
I am, however, intrigued by the striking similarities between the Times articles. To the greatest extent possible, they seem to avoid the broader perspective on life under communism (i.e., widespread oppression and economic failure). Instead, they focus on the experiences of individual people, some of whom never lived in communist countries in the first place.

Exactly.

But don't take my word for it. You can still visit a few communist countries, including Cuba and North Korea, and compare the social status and empowerment of their women with those in the West. Had the esteemed editors of the Times done so, they would have, I hope, thought twice about publishing a series of pro-communist excreta.

Exactly!