Americans, or perhaps mostly those who are young and heterosexual, are suffering a sex drought. The reasons are complicated, but according to an exhaustive and copiously well-researched article by the Atlantic’s Kate Julian, the problem is a queasy cocktail of social alienation, technology, anxiety, depression and neoliberal pressure to succeed. And the Wall Street Journal reports that lingerie retailer Victoria’s Secret is struggling because “Sex Isn’t Selling.”

Capitalism has been trying to sell sex since its beginnings. Now we’re not buying. Julian quotes the Swedish health minister after a recent study found a similar problem in that country: “If the social conditions for a good sex life — for example through stress or other unhealthy factors — have deteriorated . . .  it’s a political problem.” In this context, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee’s short, crisp and wonderfully engaging polemic, couldn’t be more urgent.

“Unregulated capitalism is bad for women,” Ghodsee argues, “and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives . . .  yes, even better sex.” It’s a historically grounded argument, based on her extensive scholarship on the former USSR and Eastern bloc countries.