A guide to socialist sex in a Tory age

Arti­cle tak­en from The Face Vol­ume 4 Issue 003. Order your copy here.

At 10pm on 12^th December 2019, the dream of a radical utopia (read: mild social democracy) lay dead at our feet. The Conservatives won the UK general election and the Labour Party returned to doing what it does best: squabbling on Twitter about which leadership candidate is least cancelled.

The Tories scored what professional political commentators are calling a ​“massive fuck-off majority”. Many things are going to change over the next five years, most of them for the worse, judging from the work the Tories have already set about doing (which includes making sure child refugees aren’t reunited with their families and throwing £120 million at some sort of Brexit Glastonbury). It’s a bleak forecast that leaves many feeling lost as to where the fight-back might begin.

The answer, reader, is in the bedroom.

In 2016, YouGov surveyed 19,000 respondents living in European countries (including the UK) and suggested that conservatives are actually more satisfied with their sex lives than left-wingers. In hindsight, this should have been the first warning shot that the progressive left movement of the 2010s was in trouble. The left is meant to be the cool, sexually open side. They campaign for sexual education in schools and the right to watch porn in peace. How the fuck can they be having less satisfying sex than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg?

The time has come to fuck for socialism! The personal is political, and sexual politics are a microcosm of society as a whole. So to kick off the next half-decade of resistance, and to redress the sexual imbalance, we’re proposing a radical manifesto. It begins with making women cum.

Making women cum is potentially the most socialist thing you can do. It could only get more socialist if Bernie Sanders were the one doing it (#DaddySanders2020). In fact, making women cum is so socialist that it formed the central argument of anthropologist Kristen R. Ghodsee’s 2018 book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.

Ghodsee argues – among other things — that the liberation and equality engendered by state-driven socialist policies mean that the women living under them don’t just reap the rewards in the public sphere. They benefit in the bedroom, too.

Ghodsee’s evidence derives from 20^th-century Eastern Europe and its transition from state socialism to capitalism. It includes findings such as the 1990 discovery that East German women living under communism were cumming at double the rate of their West German counterparts. According to our calculations, this means that East German women were cumming at least once a year. Incredible.

And it makes sense. Sex might be a private act but it still exists within a political, cultural and social context. Change the context and you’re likely to change the way people feel about, and experience, sex.

In her book, Ghodsee also explores how women under socialism are more likely to be released from the shackles of sexual economic theory – a repellent idea that many of us unconsciously buy into even today.

According to this theory, under capitalism, sex is a commodity that women, in particular, trade in exchange for ​“valued goods” (including ​“love, commitment, respect, attention, material favours, opportunities, course grades or workplace promotions, as well as money”). This does not refer to sex work, which is a direct business transaction, but the unconscious deals that are struck between people of differing economic statuses when they have sex.

There is, however, at least one quick and easy way to have socialist sex while under the libido-killing reality of Tory rule: spread it around. If free-market economics dictate that sex is a commodity that can be exchanged like any other, the best way to subversively devalue that commodity is to fuck every single person going, maybe even at the same time. It’s time to share the great sex wealth. Let’s call it cummunism.