How Transactional Relationships Harm Intimacy

Over the past few months, I constantly walked by Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence on the shelf at my library. I would pick it up, periodically, and flip through it, telling myself I’d check it out one day and read it. I finally checked it out last week and read it. Ghodsee lays her argument outset when she writes, “Unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.” Ghodsee succinctly presents her argument, and she does not shy away from the violence and trauma of socialism under Communist and authoritarian regimes specifically in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

Ghodsee points out that when women have economic freedom and stability, through paternity leave, equal access to the workforce, access to healthcare, access to child care, access to services that provide stability, they do not seek relationships based on transactional nature. By transactional, I mean that in a heterosexual relationship the man provides the monetary capital and that capital serves as a means of attracting and marrying a woman. When women have freedom and independence, they do not have to rely on men for stability, health insurance, or basic needs. Ghodsee argues that when “we better understand how the current capitalist system has co-opted and…