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.
Source: NYT 8/12/17.
The full article, worth reading, makes the point that Eastern European communism was a stultifying economic system where even toilet paper was hard to come by, citizens didn’t have to work to the point of exhaustion each day, as they do in the post-1989 capitalist economies, thereby leaving them time for recreation.
See for example, my earlier post of rising overtime hours of US manufacturing workers.
Quoting a former citizen of East Germany who compared her life to her daughter living under capitalism.
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 doesn’t 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.”
