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The ghost of Walter Duranty still lives at The New York Times, and it has a perverse sense of timing. Last week, on the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Times continued its bizarre nostalgia series about communist dictatorships with a piece titled Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism. The author, Kristen Ghodsee, points to a single, post-reunification study to allege that women under the iron fist of East Germany had twice as many orgasms as women in capitalist West Germany.

Highlighting a single bright spot of communist life while mostly ignoring its many dangers, indignities, and rights violations would be bad enough. Ghodsee takes it a step further, however, by speculating that the totalitarianism she euphemistically refers to as a top-down campaign was actually the secret sauce in the communists successful female liberation.

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.

The leftist ideologue is forever being disappointed. Just as Vladimir Lenin was frustrated with the less-than-revolutionary Russian peasantry, the oppressed whom the modern left tries to liberate never seem to quite live up to expectations. Concerned with such frivolities as putting food on the table and spending time with their families, people always fall short of someone elses vision of liberation.

Even today, womens choices about work-life balance and the wage gap those choices create cause many furrowed feminist brows. Actual womenwho in surveys still indicate that their ideal work-family balance is part-time work, despite all the social pressure nowadays against this viewsimply arent as radical as they ought to be when left free to choose their own paths. Ghodsees solution, like the GDRs, is simple: women must be forcibly liberated for their own good.

There is just enough truth in The New York Times article to bolster its radical message. Just as the Roaring Twenties in the United States swept in many changes in womens social roles, so too the 1920s in the Soviet Union brought a period of genuine sexual libertinism and experimentation, encouraged by the vanguard of communist intellectuals that populated Russian cafes. In the early days after the Bolshevik Revolution, peopleespecially those far away from the bloody revolution itselfcould be more easily forgiven for thinking that communism was going to lead to a happier, more prosperous future, given that most of the twentieth-century examples of its barbarism had yet to occur.

But the reality of life in the Warsaw Pact was decidedly different than the picture Ghodsee paints in her column. My father, who grew up in Communist Poland, describes the women he recalls, married in their 20s and 30s, as exhausted, spending most of their time outside of working hours standing in lines and feverishly combing contacts to scrape together the bare necessities for their households.

If American feminists think their second shiftworking full-time and still remaining primarily responsible for domestic dutiesis a burden, they should try to imagine the average womans life in communist paradise, where women went without capitalisms time-saving household appliances and frequently confronted empty grocery shelves.

The laundry list of progressive policies listed in the articlegovernment-paid maternity leave, mandated equality in work, daycare centers to remove parental responsibilities and rear the new generation of homo sovieticusnowhere near made up for being turned away from the toilet paper line.

And as soon as female liberation came up against the needs of the communist state, those benefits were reversed, as happened in Ceausescus Romania. Romania was one of the most sexually liberated countries in the Warsaw Pact, but when its government leaders decided it needed more Romanians, contraception and abortion not only lost state support, but became punishable by law virtually overnight.

Yes, Ms. Ghodsee, in communist societies, men and women were equal: equally poor and afraid of their own government.

In the face of a disheartening future, with little hope of being financially successful, intellectually curious, or artistically exploratory outside of dogma-sanctioned boundaries, young people in communist societies leaned more strongly on their personal relationships for happiness. They found joy where they could, in the excitement of a new romance, or in the right bunch of flowers to bring a smile to a wifes face and a little color to a gray home. Its possible they also found it in more frequent sex, as Ghodsees article claims, although her single data point and two interviews are hardly convincing evidence.

But even these personal joys were infected by the Communist state, as movingly demonstrated in the plot of 2007s Oscar-winning film, The Lives of Others. Trust was broken between husbands and wives, as the secret police found ways to play their fears against one another to control the population. In Ghodsees alleged sexual utopia, the GDR, it is estimated that almost one in six people was an informant for the Stasi. Many were coerced, bullied, and broken into betraying the lovers with whom they were having those all-important orgasms.

There is nothing romantic about life in such a system. It is incompatible with the basic dignity of the human being. Instead of tallying up orgasms, Ghodsee should instead listen to the words of one of Russias greatest female poets, Anna Akhmatova, who had a truer impression of life under communism.

Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth Through which one hundred million people scream; Thats how I wish them to remember me when I am dead On the eve of my remembrance day. If someone someday in this country Decides to raise a memorial to me, I give my consent to this festivity But only on this condition do not build it By the sea where I was born, I have severed my last ties with the sea; Nor in the Tsars Park by the hallowed stump Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me; Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours And no-one slid open the bolt. Listen, even in blissful death I fear That I will forget the Black Marias*, Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman Howled like a wounded beast.

* Black Marias is a reference to the vans used by the secret police, which made people disappear, whether to interrogation cells or to the gulags.

Inez Feltscher Stepman is an education policy analyst in Washington DC. Her work has been published in Orange County Register, The Resurgent, RedState, Breitbart.com, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @inezfeltscher.

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Quit Glorifying Communism. There Is Nothing Romantic About Life In A Police State - The Federalist