Pornosophy: Das Kapital and Orgasm

A recent Times Sunday Review piece asserts that women had more orgasms under socialism ("Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,"NYT, 8/12/17) The piece points to important research that was done in Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Significantly it doesn’t even mention the notorious refractory period and the ideologies that affect the lengthening time between male orgasms in both capitalist and Marxist economies. “A comparative study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in l990 found that Eastern woman had twice as many orgasms as Western women,” comments Kristen R. Ghodsee, the writer of the piece. “In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and benefited from 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.” Is Colonel Rosa Klebb, who appears in the James Bond film From Russia With Love (l963), a good example of the kind of women’s liberation and role reversal that occurred under the influence of Russian Communism? The actress who played Klebb was Lotte Lenya, the wife of Kurt Weill. Weill had collaborated with Bertolt Brecht, founder of one of East Germany’s proudest cultural institutions, The Berliner Ensemble. In the movie, there’s an iconic scene where Klebb goes after Bond with a poisonous spike that emerges from the toe of her otherwise grandmotherly shoe. The phallic symbolism is unmistakable. Russian women would now have their pleasure even if it was at the expense of the male. It's a little like the female Praying Mantis who bites off her lover’s head during sex.