Upstream - Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism w/ Kristen Ghodsee

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall was toppled, a lot was unearthed and a lot of interesting information became available to scholars and researchers in the West. One of those little bits of information was the answer to a question that a lot of people had never really thought of even asking: did women have better sex under socialism? Well, spoiler alert, but maybe not so much if you’ve read the title of today’s episode: Yes, it seems like they did. And in today’s episode, we’re going to explore why. Why do women have better sex under socialism? The answer to this question is the topic of the highly acclaimed book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, by Kristen Ghodsee. Kristen Ghodsee is a Professor and Chair of the department of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of twelve books, including Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women, and Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life.  In this conversation, in celebration of International Women’s Day, we explore how capitalism shapes not just sex, but relationships, care, and much of the life of people who identify as women. We explore how under capitalism sex becomes commodified and transactionalized, and look at the harmful impact that this has on society as a whole. We also explore how socialism, particularly under the Soviet Union, differed, and how economic stability and having one’s basic needs met let to a kind of liberation that resulted in, well, much better sex for women. Thank you to Bikini Kill for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond Further Resources: Books by Kristen Ghodsee Upstream: Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee Upstream: [TEASER] Socialism Betrayed w/ Roger Keeran and Joe Jamison Upstream: Feminism for the 99 Percent (Documentary) Upstream: Against White Feminism with Rafia Zakaria Upstream: What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Documentary: Do Communists Have Better Sex? News Clip: Women in Some Countries will Mark International Women’s Day with Protests featuring Kristen Ghodsee Article: “Have You Wished Your Mother a Happy International Women’s Day Yet?” by Kristen Ghodsee This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode is brought to you by a Bookkeeping Cooperative. Want to learn about values aligned financial management? A Bookkeeping Cooperative offers engaging online workshops on organizational finances to develop the skills and confidence of those working towards a just world beyond capitalism. www.bookkeeping.coop. That's B-O-O-K-K-E-E-P-I-N-G.C-O-O-P. And just a quick note before we get started, Happy International Women's Day. We're releasing this episode a few days early, as you might have noticed, because it's an episode in celebration of this particular day. So, we hope you enjoy this slightly early release. Thank you. Research from across the socialist countries really bears this out. That when women feel secure in their lives economically, socially, they don't have to

choose partners that they don't like. They don't have to have sex with people that they're not attracted to. It's not that complicated, right? It's actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's not rocket science. In societies where women have more economic independence, they are not in any way. I mean, sometimes they may be compelled for other psychological reasons, but in terms of the transactional nature of our relationships,

it's just not there. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall was toppled, a lot was unearthed, and a lot of interesting information became available to scholars and researchers in the West. One of those little bits of information was the answer to a question that a lot of people had never really thought of even asking. Did women have better sex under socialism? Well, spoiler alert, but maybe not so much if you've read the title of today's episode. Yes, it seems like they

did. And in today's episode, we're going to explore why. Why do women have better sex under socialism? The answer to this question is the topic of the highly acclaimed book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arrogance for Economic Independence by Kristin Gottsey. Kristin Gottsey is a professor and chair of the department of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of 12 books including Red Valkyries, Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women, and Everyday Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life.

In this conversation, in celebration of International Women's Day, we explore how capitalism shapes not just sex, but relationships, care, and much of the life of people who identify as women. We explore how under capitalism, sex becomes commodified and transactionalized, and the harmful impact that this has on society as a whole. We also explore how socialism, particularly in the Soviet Union, differed in how economic stability and having one's basic needs met led to a kind of liberation that resulted in,

well, much better sex for women. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes at least one a month, but usually more, at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax-deductible recurring or one-time donation at our website, upstreampodcast.org.

Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Della in conversation with Kristen Gottson. So welcome Kristen, Kristen. Happy International Women's Day. Let's start with an introduction. How would you introduce yourself today, right now, in your life? Today, right now, in my life, I am a professor of Russian and East European studies.

I'm currently in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I am celebrating International Women's Day with friends and colleagues here. I teach at the University of Pennsylvania, and I am the chair of the Department of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology. And I've written 12 books, and the book that people probably know me the best for is why women have better sex under socialism and other arguments for economic independence, which I believe we'll be talking about today. But I also have two other sort of more trade books. Most of my books are pretty academic. One of them is called Red Valkyries with Verso books. And the most recent book is called Everyday Utopia.

And so I think I'm known for lots of different things, but I primarily identify, I think, myself as a professor and a writer. Thank you. And yes, we loved having you on for that conversation on Everyday Utopias. And so many people have said, since, that they love diving into that book and just the visionary and imagination and hopefulness that it brought them. So thank you for that. And so yes, today we are speaking about why women have better sex under socialism. We thought this was a great topic to bring to International Women's Day. So why write a book about the kind of sex women have under socialism?

What sparked or spurred or brought you to that point? Right. So I have to say that I kind of got backed into this book because in August of 2017, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times. And if you know anything about writing for a major newspaper, you often don't have a choice of your title. And you often don don't have a choice of your title. And you often don't also have a choice of your images. And in many cases, you don't actually see the title until it's actually been published.

So in August of 2017, I think just a day or two after the events in Charlottesville, the New York Times published an article called Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism by me, which was sort of an excerpt from a book that I had written in 2017 called Red Hangover, which was about the legacies of 20th century communism. And it was the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

And so The New York Times was doing a series called The Red Century. 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. And so the New York Times was doing a series called The Red Century. And it was sort of looking back on the legacies of this 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. And my piece was about women's rights. There were other pieces about environmentalism. There were lots of different, you know, kind of glances back.

And they wanted me to kind of adapt a chapter in this book, Red Hangover, that I had, which was about this really interesting documentary film called In English, Do Communists Have Better Sex, which I believe is from like 2007 or 2008. And so it's a long story, but essentially that column in the New York Times just exploded internationally and I got like so viciously trolled. And it was such an interesting experience because I'm not a social media person. And so I actually kind of missed a lot of the worst of the trolling, but there was a lot of blowback from that. And one of the things that happened was, I think a month or two after the column came out,

I got a call from a publisher in New York who said, hey, would you like to develop this, you know, thousand word op-ed into a book? And initially, my thought was, how no? Because I'm just gonna get even worse trolls and death threats and rape threats and all the crazy things that had been happening to me. But one of the things that had happened as well is that I got attacked, not surprisingly, I suppose, by my academic colleagues. And some of my academic colleagues grumbled because I hadn't fully substantiated every single one of my claims in this 1000 word op-ed. And so in conversation with the press, which at the time was called Nation Books, it's now called Bold Type Books, I said, look, I'll write this book if you allow me to have unlimited

end notes. I want to fully substantiate every sociological, anthropological survey claim that I make in this book with the appropriate citations. And so for me, that was the real inspiration, the real reason I wanted to write this book. Part of it was because, quite frankly, in my world of Russian and East European studies, and particularly gender studies in that part of the world, everything that I wrote in that New York Times column was just obvious. In our world, it just wasn't that big of a surprise.

Whereas I think in the United States, particularly, people had this completely different view of women's rights in the Eastern Bloc. And so it struck people as patently absurd that you could talk about women's sexual pleasure under communism or women's rights under what many people consider a kind of like violent, dystopic, totalitarian world. And so that disjuncture between people's stereotypes about communism and the very pretty garden variety research that's been done for the last 30, 35 years about the situation of women and women's rights and women's emancipation in this part of the

world, like that cognitive dissonance for me really made me realize that there are a lot of young people out there who don't know anything about this whole experiment with socialism and how it really did materially transform people's lives through a particular set of policies. And then, you know, also, I guess, Trump. So I wrote this book when Trump was in office and it was before the midterm elections. At that moment, there had been so much energy around Bernie Sanders' campaign for the Democratic primary and people were obviously really disappointed with the election of Donald Trump. And I think there were a lot of young people who had a lot of energy and momentum from the Sanders campaign. And I was really worried that they would not vote

in the midterms. And it felt like the midterms were a really important moment. And this was before people like Ocasio Cortez, right, the squad got elected. And so part of the message of the book was get out there. And yes, Bernie lost, but that doesn't mean you can't still try to change things. And so it was a book that was very narrowly targeted to young American, primarily people who identify as women, in 2018 when it came out. And then like the op-ed, I suppose, it ended up having this life well beyond my initial vision of the book. So it ended up now it has 15 translations and 16 foreign editions. And so, you know, this plethora of languages, different social circumstances, you

know, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish, lots of East European languages. So it's just been a really weird ride. And it's this book that, you know, I published at a particular moment in time that I wrote fairly quickly synthesizing, you know, what has basically been 20, 25 years of my previous research. But now it's kind of taken on a life of its own. So it's a strange experience to have that sort of a story of just like this small little intervention that I was hoping to make kind of balloon out into this much bigger intellectual project. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. And I love that. Yeah, that that one of the true inspirations was backing up this claim to your colleagues.

Yes. And also that there's so much demystifying or unlearning that we must do around alternatives to capitalism. Right, I'm thinking of Margaret Thatcher, Tina, there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. So there's just so much work to be done in that. And this is absolutely part of that.

And I also love that you said the original op-ed was had and then I know the title is have. So that is cool in itself that you're bringing it more out of the past tense and more into the present and even the future, which I love. So unfortunately, I will say that the stereotypes that we have of really existing socialism as it was practiced in Eastern Europe in the 20th century, all of the kind of Stalinist tropes about gulags and famines and consumer shortages and secret police, all that kind of stuff, much of which is actually true. But that baggage, I would say kind of a Cold War baggage, it really bludgeoned people in the West from thinking creatively about alternatives to capitalism.

That's why Margaret Thatcher can get away with Tina, right? That's why people can say, well capitalism sucks, but it's better than everything else. And I really think that part of my project in this book and quite frankly part of my project in all of my earlier scholarly work was to complicate this really negative view that people have of the state socialist experiments in Eastern Europe. First of all, they were very different in different countries. And second of all, everything wasn't that bad. It was a much more complicated experience than most people believe. And so while there were many bad things about communism, there were some kind of redeeming things. And that was part of what I was trying to

capture with this book. Absolutely. And just to uplift that with a quote from your book, you write, to be clear, 20th century state socialism failed. And no one with a sincere interest in the well being of our societies wants to recreate those versions of autocratic states with their clunky, centrally-planned economies, draconian travel restrictions, and snooping secret police. Rather, new technological advances allow us to reimagine the relationship between markets and states in more just, equitable, and sustainable ways. But we aren't about to do this so long as the horror stories about the past stymie our ability to dream. For too long, our political leaders have

told us there is no alternative to capitalism, while at the same time suppressing and distorting the history of potential alternatives. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, that's the crux of it. And again, people in Germany, which is one of the places that I study, the ways in which reunification allowed for people to do kind of sociological studies on these two populations that were culturally, linguistically the same, but only divided by 40 years of different political and economic system, you know, many people in West Germany, even those who are incredibly anti-communist, even they recognize that there were some things like women's rights that the East Germans did relatively well compared to

the West. So the fact that that was such a news flash in the United States strikes me as a particular residual of McCarthyism, kind of this Cold War mentality, anti-communist mentality, so that we see no nuance, we only see black and white. And it's precisely this sort of horrible stereotype that persists of the way that life was behind the iron curtain, that does prevent many people from having even, you know, kind of vague ideas or willingness to kind of throw out the bad parts and try to rescue some of the good parts of what these policies might have been able to achieve. Yes.

So let's dive into the question first by looking at what does sex look and feel like under capitalism? Because maybe there's not something wrong with it. We don't even need to look at socialism. So how would you describe the kind of sex women have under capitalism? Okay. There's a two-pronged answer here. So the first part of this answer is really about how human relationships are commodified and transactionalized under capitalism. So

that increasingly in a neoliberal market economy, things like affections and attentions and emotions are commodified things. We trade them on markets and so sexuality becomes a commodified thing. And in a society where women are economically disadvantaged because they may not have economic independence because of limitations and opportunities or because of public policies like lack of child care or lack of access to education, professional opportunities. This is in different countries to different extents, but also because of their huge contributions to society through the unpaid labor that they do in the home. Now, this isn't only for women, but caregivers, anybody with a primary caregiving responsibility, which happens to largely be still people who identify as women, all of that puts women at an economic disadvantage.

And so that means that one of the ways that she can meet her basic human needs for things like shelter and food and access to medical care is through transactionalizing her emotion, her attention and her affection. And that also means her sexuality and her body. And so very clearly, if you are in a circumstance where you are trading your emotions and attentions and affections for sustenance, right? For support. You are not choosing your partner on the basis of whether or not you find that person attractive or interesting or funny that you share

mutual interests or whatever. You're choosing that person on the basis of whether they're going to be a good provider. And we do sociological surveys in the United States, and it's very clear that upwards of 70% of both men and women in the United States think that for a man to be a good partner or a good husband, he has to be a financial provider. So that puts an incredible amount of pressure on men

who may not be able to live up to those standards. And it also puts an incredible amount of pressure on women who are choosing their partners on the basis of financial considerations rather than on the basis of affection or attraction or mutual interests. So that's one part of it is that we are commodifying something in ourselves that then makes us choose differently than we might otherwise if we didn't have those economic constraints within which our choices are being made. The other side of this, and I think this is really important, and this is where somebody like Alexandra Kalantai who was the first commissar of social welfare in the Soviet Union, her work is really important because the other

thing that she really puts her finger on, I think it is one of the most interesting observations, is that we freight our romantic relationships with social reproductive labor. So what that means is when we want to have kids, when we decide to form families, we believe that the appropriate container for parenthood is a heterosexual monogamous relationship between two people. Now we've sort of expanded that a little bit and we try to make that a little bit more equitable so we have same-sex couples, but it's still very much this idea of the monogamous nuclear family. And what that means is that the romantic relationship becomes the container for parenthood and that the romantic relationship is then responsible for

all of the unpaid labor that has to be done in order to raise the next generation. And so what people like Colin Tye thought was that if you could separate out the socially reproductive labor that you need in order to raise the next generation from the romantic relationship, then our romantic relationships would be way more fun and we wouldn't have as much pressure on our couple relationships. We wouldn't have as much pressure on our couple relationships. We wouldn't have as much pressure on parents. They could actually love each other and enjoy each other at a much greater degree than they do because they don't have all of the responsibilities of also dealing with social reproductive labor of childcare, of chores, of all the things that we do in the home that

make us tired and exhausted. So that at the end of the day, after you get your kids to bed and you've done the chores and you've paid the bills and you're stressed about the bills and all the things that capitalism makes us do, you might be working a side hustle, you might have more than one job. Like the last thing on your mind is having sex with your partner, right? Because you're just tired. You're totally exhausted. And so I think capitalist sex is it's transactional for all sorts of complicated reasons. But it's also just tiring.

We have less time and freedom and ability to connect with our partners because we are so burdened by not only our work and experiences in the formal economy, but also by our work and experiences in the home and in the informal sector, so to speak. So yeah, it's definitely something that is crushed, I think, for a lot of people by the realities of capitalism. You know, and, you know, just to throw something else out there, and I think I mentioned this in the book, it turns out that a lot of people also have, you know, mental health issues that

sometimes might require, you know, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, right, certain kinds of medications that we take to help us deal with the anxiety and the stresses of capitalism also suppress our libidos. People talk about lots of different compounding factors, but I definitely think that sex under capitalism, and this isn't just my opinion. I think plenty of people are writing about this. This is why there's the sex recession. There was a cover story of the Atlantic a couple years ago about the sex recession. There was a cover story of the Atlantic a couple years ago about the

sex recession. People are having less sex or the fall in marriage rates and the fall in couple of them, people are just sort of saying, okay, yeah, no, romantic relationships are just not going to happen. And people blame lots of different things. But I think a big part of the story is capitalism. And I love that I'm hearing the seeds of the alternative in what you're sharing, you know, the solutions. And also, one reason why this might be hard to explore, at least for me, is because I'm swimming in it, right? Like, I don't even know what I'm struggling with that is connected to capitalism without knowing why women have better sex under socialism. So I just want to uplift two other quotes related to what you're saying from your book

that you cite from George Bernard Shaw, which I thought were great. One of them, capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money, whether in or out of marriage. And against this bribe, there stands nothing beyond the traditional respectability which capitalism destroys by poverty. And the other one is, because as capitalism made a slave of the man, and then by paying women through him made her his slave, she became a slave of a slave, which is the worst sort of slavery. Anything you want to say about those quotes?

I mean, you know, I mean, obviously these are kind of dated, but I just think it's so interesting that it's there in writing. And, you know, people have different opinions of Shaw, but I definitely think he put his finger on something, which is that the economic system that we live in, it is a system that generates inequalities and it generates all different kinds of inequalities. And then it exacerbates those inequalities through the market mechanism and then it uses the state to maintain those inequalities. I mean, capitalism is an incredibly powerful and insidious force in our lives. And so I think a lot of people believe that when you go home or when you get in the bedroom, you get under the sheets, somehow capitalism doesn't follow you in there, right? That you can close the door on that world

and retreat into your own world of being outside of the market. But clearly capitalism is in our bedrooms. Capitalism is between the sheets. I think there's a, one of my chapters is called Capitalism Between the Sheets, because it's really clear that we relate to each other in this market way. The political theorist Wendy Brown talks a lot about sort of neoliberalization of everyday life and the ways in which nothing

falls outside of the economy. And so what's interesting is that that's a concept that's a relatively recent, right? Neoliberalism is a relatively recent phenomenon historically speaking. But here's George Bernard Shaw or people like Alexander Kalantai or even people like August Bebel or Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century or early 20th century, they were recognizing this. They understood that women were kind of uniquely disadvantaged under capitalism because of the reproductive labor that they do in the home. And that the only way that you could truly liberate women was through the socialization of some of that reproductive labor.

And that was predicated on having a much more socialistic economy, having the state regulate and control more of the economy than was the case, either then or now. So let's illustrate sex under capitalism with a story, just to really bring it from the theoretical to one person's life, but maybe shared by others. Yeah, so one of the stories that I tell in the book is of a friend of mine from when we were in our 20s. And we sort of grew apart

because she ended up getting married and becoming a stay-at-home mother. And I obviously went on to have, I've been working, you know, I did have a kid, I'm a mom too, but I'm definitely in the working mom side of the column. And so that's always been a tricky situation. So there was this one weekend where we went out, our kids were fairly little at that time, our kids are roughly the same age. And we were going to go out to see a film. And her husband at the time had agreed quite generously, kindly, to watch the kids so that the two of us could go out and have dinner and see a film. So I was upstairs at their house.

And, you know, the kids were playing off somewhere. And I was in the bathroom trying to, I had just taken a shower and I wanted to blow dry my hair before we went out. And I wanted to ask where the blow dryer was. And so I was kind of coming halfway down the stairs and I overheard her fighting with her husband, which is awkward, always really awkward. So I kind of like turned around and sort of started tiptoeing back up the stairs. And I overheard basically she was asking him for money because she wanted to have, you know, some money for dinner and for the movie and maybe to do a

little shopping because we were going to the movie at a mall and he basically said no. He refused to give her any money beyond the money for the dinner and enough just exactly enough money for the movie ticket, which was really kind of weird. Basically said, no, I'm not giving you any money. Wouldn't give her the credit card. And she didn't have a credit card of her own. Like he had control over that. So we ended up going out and we were at dinner

and I don't remember exactly what the conversation was, but at the end of dinner, I offered to pay because she was worried about having enough money. She wanted to, you know, go to the cosmetics counter and some department store before we went to the film and buy something. And I said, okay, well, I'll get dinner. And she sort of turned to me and said, okay, that would be great. You know, I'll have sex with my husband tomorrow and I'll pay you back. You know, she just said it so casually as if it was like the most natural thing in the world that if she had sex with her husband that night that he would be more generous

the next day and she would be able to get some more cash out of him. And I just remember thinking, ooh, wow, that is a really awkward circumstance. And this is somebody, you know, she was a well educated woman who had a really good job before she decided to stay home with her kids. And she put herself in this relationship of dependency quite knowingly. And I don't know, it struck me that that kind of transaction. Now, I, at that point, faced a real dilemma because I wanted to say, okay, this is not a healthy relationship. Like you really need to think about what you're doing. But on the other hand, I didn't know how I didn't, couldn't admit that I'd sort of heard

the fight the day before. And I, and I wanted to reach out to her and, you know, I think I said something like, is everything okay with you? Or and you know, I think I said something like is everything okay with you Are you know is this and she was like? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Yeah, don't worry about it You know so those kinds of moments are really hard, but it taught me this really powerful lesson Which is oh my god, I can't even imagine what that might be and you know I later took that story and I Sort of talked to other people and sort of started thinking about what does it mean when you're in a relationship of an incredible economic

dependence on your partner. And so many women are, for instance, economically dependent on their husbands, particularly for health insurance. If women, that quote that you read, right? That women are dependent on their husbands who are dependent on their employers. Well, in the United States where we don't have national healthcare, that means that women cannot get divorced

because of healthcare considerations. And I can't believe after having heard this story of this friend of mine, how many people I know personally who either got married for health insurance or who are not getting divorced because of health insurance. So the thing about capitalism is that it's not just that a lot of women can't afford to move out because they don't have enough money to pay first last month rent and deposit on an apartment of their own,

but they will lose their health insurance coverage if they get a divorce. So a lot of people in this country are not only dependent on their employers for things like health insurance and obviously, you know, for their living paycheck to paycheck, their bread and butter, so to speak. But then there's this like secondary dependent relationship that happens within the home because of the way we structure our economy. Whereas in places like Canada or the UK or basically any other modern country, everybody has access to health care as a right of citizenship. And so if you leave a unhealthy or unhappy or otherwise abusive or unsatisfying relationship, you

don't risk losing your health insurance. At least that part of your life is going to be stable. And so I just don't think that people really think about that, the ways in which capitalism shapes the choices that we make romantically. The things that we put up with, like you said, you live it, it's around you, you don't really think about it. I think that was true of my friend,

that she didn't quite realize that this was not a healthy relationship that she was having. This was not an ideal set of circumstances, but for her, it was just normal. I mean, I think she had a fairly satisfying life in other ways. But it was this transactionalized relationship with her partner that just felt like, well, that's just how it is for a lot of people.

And so it's normal. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Kristin Gottzi. We'll be right back. That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood She got the hottest drag in town That girl, she holds her head up so high I think I wanna be a best friend, yeah Rebel girl, rebel girl Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world

Rebel girl, rebel girl I think I wanna take you home, I wanna try on your first one When she talks, I hear the revolution In her hips is revolution When she walks, the revolution's coming And I kiss, my kids are the revolution My feet are in a lager Let them go, let them go Let them guide you on the green of my world Let them go, let them go I know I wanna take you home I wanna drive you close on That girl thinks she's a queen at the neighborhood I got news for you, she is This is, she's a dyke, but I know

She is my best friend now Rebel girl, Rebel girl Rebel girl, you are the queen of my world Rebel girl, Rebel girl I know I wanna take you home, I wanna tie on your clothes Love you like a sister, always your sister I won't go, coming in my best friend Really, Rebel girl, I really like it I were running in my best band, really rebel girl. I really like it, I really want to be your best band, be my rebel girl.

That was Rebel Girl by Bikini Kill. Now, back to our conversation with Kristin Gottzi. In your book, you introduced this idea of sexual economics. So, for folks including myself before the book who have never heard of sexual economics, can you share what that is and also how that connects with this conversation that we're having about sex under capitalism. Oh, yeah. So I mean, I want to say, first of all, I don't agree with sexual economics theory. It was put forward in the early 2000s, and it's a way of really thinking about sexuality as a market transaction.

And one of the things that I find really interesting about sexual economics theory is that it essentially, it validates the socialist critique of capitalism. So here are these, you know, economists basically saying in social psychology saying, okay, here we go, we've got a market for sexuality. It's based on a premise that men want sex more than women do. And that I think it's actually, it's been heavily critiqued for that reason. And once you look at women's libido in the absence of slut shaming and things like that, it turns out that libido,

at different periods of people's lives, it varies. But for young people on a dating market, it's actually fairly equitable, right, if women weren't being penalized, so to speak, for their desires or wanting to show their desires. So there are a lot of critiques of this from the point of view of sort of sexuality studies, but just from the pure economic point of view, what sexual economics theory basically says

is that when women have a lot of economic independence, when they are free and when they are able to access things like abortion, when they have reproductive freedom and they can control their fertility, when they have access to jobs and education that allow them to be economic independent, the price of sex is low, meaning that women can actually have sex with whoever they want.

They can choose their partners on the basis of love, affection, attraction, and mutual interest. When women have very few economic rights, when they're very dependent on men in a society, when they are limited in their access to education, when they're limited in their access to employment, when they don't have birth control, when they can't get an abortion, the price of sex is very high. That means that women don't have sex unless there's marriage, unless there's a commitment, right? And so that's the basic theory is that there's a kind of a sexual marketplace and that the

value of sexuality, the way that the price of sex is determined by women's relative social and economic position in society. Again, this is precisely what socialists will say. That's why I find it so interesting. Where this is kind of a nefarious idea is when it comes to, some people will argue that when the price of sex is too low that men lose incentives to work. And there's actually a lot of studies on this that show that when the price of sex is high, men are more economically motivated to get money so they can buy themselves a wife basically, so they can buy themselves

access to women's sexuality. Subconservatives say, well, because of feminism, because women are so independent and they can have sex whenever they want without having to worry about getting pregnant or having to, you know, they don't need a man to provide for them, well, then men don't have any incentive to work hard. So basically, our society is falling apart

because women are too independent. And I think that actually fuels a lot of misogyny in our society. In the context of the United States, I think it underpins the overturning of Roe v. Wade. I think, you know, attacks on women's rights, on contraception, you know, there are ways in which we are seeing the rise of influencers like Andrew Tate, these very misogynistic people online, who want to blame women for everything. In my view, that is so classic right-wing move is rather than blame capitalism. The capitalism is the problem here. It's because it's creating this market that only values men for their ability to provide.

And rather than targeting the core cause of the problem, they're blaming women, right? Classic right-wing thing is to blame others for the economic system that is creating the problem. So you blame women, you blame foreigners, you blame religious minorities. You always find somebody to blame or scapegoating instead of blaming the economic system that creates

these inequalities in the first place. And so when you look at sexual economics theory, there are studies that look at women's rights in different countries, and then they also look at sexual practices. And what they find is very clearly that in societies where women have a lot of freedom,

people are having more premarital sex, they have sex at a younger age, they have more partners. Whereas in societies where women have very little economic freedom, where they're really constrained to things like marriage, then there's very little premarital sex, there's very little in the way of multiple partners, people tend to have sex only after is very little in the way of multiple partners. People tend to have sex only after they get married and so on and so forth.

So they can actually sort of substantiate when they look out and survey the world that there is a way in which there is a market for sexuality. But that doesn't mean that that's natural. And that's the biggest problem with sexual economics theory in my view. And this one of the reasons why I wrote this book is that they take a capitalist market for sex and they say, this is just how it is everywhere at all times around the world. And in fact, that's just not true because we have the natural experiment of Eastern Europe that shows that in countries where women have more social and economic independence, they generally

tend to choose their partners on the basis of love, attraction, and mutual affection, versus on whether or not they can pay the rent or pay the grocery bill. And that's where sexual economic theory breaks down. It describes very well the world that we're living in in the United States of capitalism, but it does not describe very well other societies and cultures where human relationships have not been transactionalized to the same extent. And so we've been alluding to it, but I must ask it outright. So why is it that women have better sex under socialism?

And you can bring in the had, of course, there too, because I know that's your research. So let's break it down. Why is that true? Okay, so very concretely, this comes back to the thing that I was speaking about earlier with Alexandra Calantyne. Now, she was the first commissar of social welfare

and what she really wanted to do was to disentangle what is called social reproduction from our romantic relationships. And so what that means very concretely in the context of the Soviet Union is that you have massive expansion of kindergartens and creches. Creches are like nursery schools for babies between one and three. You have a massive expansion eventually of paid, job protected parental leave. You have public cafeterias and canteens. And you have public laundries. You have certain institutions in society which helps socialize some of the unpaid labor that women do in the home in order to raise a family. So very concretely, in places like

Poland, they had these things called milk bars, which were little neighborhood restaurants where you could get really kind of basic Polish food that was heavily subsidized by the government. And after work, you know, men and women could come home, grab their kids, and they could go out to the neighborhood milk bar and eat a kind of healthy meal and not have to worry about cooking or shopping or cleaning up afterwards, which was an incredibly popular thing. So popular under communism that after 1989 in Poland, some people are trying to bring them back because they were such a good idea.

It also means that there were really great supports for school-age children. There were things like homework clubs so that when kids got out of school, they would go to a homework club where it was clear that the purpose of this was that they helped each other and then there were tutors around to get all of their homework done

so that by the time they got home, their parents would come home from work. And the last thing parents wanna do when they get home from work is nag their kids to get their homework done. Right. So they were trying essentially to free parents from the responsibility of nagging their kids to get their work done, which as, you know, somebody, my daughter is now a young adult, but I remember that was one

of the hardest things. I barely got to see my daughter during the week because she was at school and she had extracurriculars and then I would be at work and we'd come home and we'd have dinner. And then the first thing that I had to do was like, okay, what is your homework? So our relationships were always freighted with me nagging her to make sure she was getting all her homework done, which is awful. The other thing that a lot of socialist countries did is they had after school programs and they had summer camps and they had things for kids to do so that parents could get a

break so that parents could have a little time on their own to do things like enjoy each other's company in the absence of their kids. They also really thought long and hard about supporting young families through things like child allowances. We had briefly, you know, this child tax credit, which we know went a really long way in reducing child poverty. And I can't even believe that we're having a debate about why we shouldn't have this thing, right? So they had tax incentives, but they also just had child allowances. They gave young couples basically they called them sort of honeymoon loans and they would give you a basic grant so that you could, it was like a little bit of amount of money so that you could buy an apartment at a fixed mortgage

rate and then it was like a little bit of money so that you could buy some furniture, you know, sort of furnish your apartment and then the way in different countries it works differently, but they gave like if you after you had your first kid, a certain percentage of this honeymoon loan was forgiven. And after you had your second kid, I think in money countries, it just went away. And certainly by the third kid, it was just completely gone. So there were these sort of incentives to have more kids, but it was also a way of supporting young families. I think the other thing that's really interesting, and I spent a lot of time looking at also fertility patterns in these Eastern Bloc countries, is that many women in these Eastern

Bloc countries had their children very young. So usually if they were going to university, or if they were doing any kind of technical school, there was always a kindergarten attached to the university or the technical college where basically you could have your kid when you were like 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. And by the time you finished doing your education, and most of these countries you had like a two year sort of national service after you graduated from university. But by the time you were sort of ready to start your career, your kids were old enough to go to kindergarten. And so the fertility pattern was very

different. They had their kids much younger and then they didn't have any more, so they usually stopped after one or two. Whereas in the United States, we have this different fertility pattern, which is that we wait much longer because it's, you know, we're trying to build our careers and then once we're hopefully a little more financially established, then we have our kids. So it's a very different fertility pattern. And that had to do with the way the social state

sort of organized reproduction. And lastly, I also just think, you know, there was a ton of support for single mothers in places like the GDR. GDR stands for the German Democratic Republic, which was East Germany. Now, I really wanna make it clear when I talk about these different policies,

that there was a huge difference in different parts of the Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia was different from Bulgaria, which was different from Hungary, which was different from Poland, which was different from the Soviet Union. But for the most part, in every single one of these countries,

with the exception of Romania after 1966, and Albania, and the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1955, abortion was totally accessible. The Soviet Union becomes the first country in 1920 to give women access to first trimester abortion, legally. It's briefly rolled back during the Stalin years between 36 and 55 and then as soon as Stalin dies they bring it back. So women have reproductive freedom. Women have access to education and professions. Women are

economically independent of men in their lives. There are all sorts of policies that are put into place in order to make sure that women with children are taken care of, that they don't fall below some poverty threshold. Now, I'm not saying that this is like a luxurious life. This is a pretty basic existence, but there's, you know, sort of basic things like health care, public transportation. There are shortages of housing. Certainly that's the case. Again, different places, different times that's variable, But people have access to very humble abodes, but they are there. And I think that there's a sort of floor under

which people are not allowed to fall. And so that means, very specifically, and research from across the socialist countries really bears this out, that when women feel secure in their lives economically, socially, they don't have to choose partners that they don't like. They don't have to have sex with people that they're not attracted to. It's not that complicated, right? It's actually, it makes a lot of sense. It's not rocket science.

It's just about basic human security. And I spend some time in the book actually talking about places like Sweden and Finland and Norway, some of the Scandinavian countries where there are also an incredible Iceland is another great example, Denmark, where there are also these massive sort of social safety nets that allow women a lot of economic independence. In fact, one of my favorite examples of the book is this pickup artist. I can't, I think his name was like Roosh or something like that. He had these sort of pickup artist guides where he would give you information about how to pick up women in different countries.

And he had one called Don't Bang Denmark, which was basically, look, you can't pick up women easily in Denmark because Danish women are too economically independent because the state supports them. That's his argument, right? So like, don't go there if you want to be a pickup artist and just randomly have sex with women. All of the tricks and tips that I am teaching you as an expert, well-experienced pickup artist aren't going to work in Denmark because in Denmark, women are too damn independent.

I just think that's really, that's also a really interesting piece of data that shows that it's clear that in societies where women have more economic independence, they are not in any way, I mean, sometimes they may be compelled for other psychological reasons, but in terms of the transactional nature of our relationships, it's just not there. And so one other thing that I want to say is a lot of people sometimes will argue with me and say, well, does that mean that sex is worse for men under socialism? Like, is it better under capitalism? And I think it's a tricky question, because on the one hand, if you like buying women, if you like the power that money

affords you over other people, and women are not going to be impressed by your money in a system where they're more economically independent, like this example of this pickup artist going to Denmark, clearly like the flashy things that he was doing in order to attract women didn't work in Denmark because they just didn't care. So yeah, if you're a pickup artist or if you're somebody for whom real love and affection is not important, you just want the attentions of women, then yeah, I suppose you're right. The Andrew Tates of the world are not going

to like having economically independent women around. But if you are a guy or anyone who actually wants to have an authentic relationship with somebody and be loved and feel like this person that you're with is actually attracted to you and actually interested in what you have to say and think and, you know, really wants to genuinely spend time with you, then it's going to be better for you. It's just going to be better because those relationships are going to be just, you know, we are so obsessed with things like authenticity. And yet we don't really think about the ways in which our relationships can become

inauthentic because of the economic system within which we live. Yeah. And when we go back to the story of Lisa, it's like, you know, could her husband perhaps feel the disingenuanness of her saying, let's have sex, right? Can he feel of what her motives are and that she may not really truly love him authentically, like you're saying? I think that, you know, there are a lot of men in that situation. Yeah, absolutely.

So, it does. Thank you for bringing that question in. And another thing that I found interesting in your book was that you also looked at what happened when communism ended, like when you talked about East Berlin and then women from East Berlin going into West and the wall coming down. And just so tell us a little bit about what you learned from those experiences because I find that really illuminating. Yeah.

So, you know, again, social scientists, we talk about this thing called the natural experiment, right? We can't take two populations of women and like put them in some sort of like weird circumstances where one of them lives under capitalism, one of them lives under communism, and then we watch them see how they have sex, right? And whether they enjoy it and relative to each other, are they enjoying it more or less and why? Like those kinds of studies are really just basically unethical.

So we look for something called a natural experiment. And this situation in Eastern Germany, as I said, it's just this wonderful documentary film which I think everybody should watch. It's called in English, Do Communists Have Better Sex? I believe is what it's called. And in German, it's like the love of Eastern others or something like that. But the key thing is that you had these two populations, both of which were culturally the same because Germany was one country before 1945, after World War II was over.

And, you know, 1949 Eastern Germany gets founded and these countries are separate for 40 years until 1989 when the Berlin Wall falls. So then what happens is really interesting because in 40 years you have one side that is really committed to women's economic independence and the emancipation of women and all these policies that socialize social reproduction. And on the other side in Western Germany, you have a pretty traditional kind of family. Women are basically kind of, there's this saying, children and kitchen and church. That's women's roles is to be with the children and in the kitchen and in the church. So very socially conservative.

And then, you know, later in the 60s, there's this sort of sexual revolution, but it's still happening within a very capitalist context in the Western German case. And in the Eastern German case, the historian Dagmar Herzog talks about East German's sexual evolution, that they have a kind of different sort of pathway into sexuality because of the different political economic system. So of course, when the wall falls down, the first thing is that a whole bunch of sociologists and anthropologists and sexologists rush to Eastern Germany to do all sorts of different studies on these populations to see what difference does 40 years of communism make.

And, you know, one of the things that they asked is about sexual satisfaction. Now, of course, this is self-reported sexual satisfaction. And it's important here to point out that these sexual satisfaction surveys were done before 89, and it was very clear that before 89, Eastern German women were having better sex, like just in terms of clearly reporting levels of satisfaction much higher than their Western German counterparts. Then these studies are done in 1990 after the wall falls and then they are replicated because the West Germans are really disturbed basically by this fact that these East German women are just basically having a lot more fun in

bed than West German women. And the question kept being like why, why, why, why, why. So, but what's interesting is so that was that very specific series of studies. You know, again, as I said, they start before 89, they're replicated in 90, and then 92, 93. But there's also the entire Eastern Bloc. So slowly in, you know, 1989 Poland, all the other countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, all these other countries move from being state socialist countries to being nominally democracies and free markets. And then in 1991, the Soviet Union falls apart and you have all these new successor states of the Soviet Union. And so suddenly all of these women, 180 million women suddenly are in a free market economy or the kind of wild, wild

East, you know, whatever this sort of emerging capitalism is, because it's this kind of crazy time of structural adjustment and shock therapy, what they call shock therapy. And yeah, so as a social scientist, I spent 25 years, if not more now, studying the effects of the transition from centrally planned state-owned economies, again, to a greater or lesser degree in different countries. You know, Hungary was much more liberal than the Soviet Union or the GDR. Yugoslavia was very different. But to a certain degree, they all become market economies in a very short period of time. And that has a huge negative impact on women. It's very, very clear and the data is unequivocal. Again, I don't think anybody contests this. So

the question then becomes, was this the unique result of the way the transition happened or was this the move from socialism to capitalism? And I argue in the book that it was the introduction of free markets and the reimposition of this idea that human emotions, affections, and attentions are a commodity and that their prices are determined on a market through the laws of supply and demand. And that women who are living in a market economy make rational decisions to pursue professional qualifications or to pursue wealthy husbands,

depending on the return on the investment in either of those things. And it becomes very clear, very quickly in these East European countries that given the upheavals of the economy and the creation of this new class of oligarchs that for many women the economic calculation is such that it makes sense to commodify oneself versus continuing with this previous way of being in the world which was really supported by the policies and the generosity of a socialist

state that was really committed to the socialization of reproductive labor in the home. And once those infrastructures, those kindergartens and those creches and those canteens and public cafeterias, those summer camps, those homework clubs, once those things are taken away, women have very little choice but to go home. It's also true that there's massive unemployment as state-owned enterprises are privatized and many women lose their jobs. And so then there's also a kind of push to get them back into the home so that they don't compete for scarce jobs with men.

So there's this whole retraditionalization that happens in Eastern Europe. Now, for some women, and I want to make this clear, for some women, this is an incredible opportunity. They can travel to the West, they can get jobs in the West, they can marry Western men. I mean, there are incredible opportunities for a lot of women who pursue higher education in the UK or in Australia or in Canada or the United States, and they have wonderful trajectories. They really make something of themselves in this new world of global economy. So not everybody suffers, but the vast majority of women, I would say, if we look at the entire region, Central Asia, the former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and then all the former socialist countries in like the Baltics and the Caucasus, this whole region, many, many women lose an

incredible amount of freedom and independence and their life choices are incredibly constrained by the introduction of markets. And that's where you start to see all sorts of, I talk about lots of different things that happen to women in the region discussed in the book. And I think we can debate whether the success of a handful, I mean not a handful, let's say, you know, 20% of women or 30% of women is worth the 70% who are a lot worse off now than they were before because of the way that markets were introduced in this part of the world. Thank you so much for that.

And it's so hard to hear. One thing I love in the book is you do talk about some of the famous women, right? You uplift like the stories and the women who really fought for the economic rights of women, social rights, and even political rights of women in the USSR and more generally in former communist and socialist countries. And so what I'm hearing naturally is like in the learning from the past, which is what we've mostly been talking about, how does this inform the future, right? Not had better sex in socialism, have better sex in socialism and will have, right?

So we're thinking about post-capitalist. So, you know, I'm hearing, let us weave in feminist Marxism. Let us bring in not just economic and social equality and independence, but also political, right? Cause that's something when I learn, when I go into Soviet or communist history, there are mostly men, right? In the like highest leadership position.

So I'm already hearing like what we add or how we adapt or how we evolve. So maybe as we come to a close and we think about today being International Women's Day, you know, how do you take what you've learned through this process of this op-ed and then this book and then this like really powerful, you know, exploration around the world and reception to the book? How do we move it forward? What are the kind of policies or ideas that the other strands that you'd weave in, you know, what would be your like, you know, hope for or direction for sex under socialism or sex in general for all women and all people going forward. Right. And I think there are so many unsung heroines that I talk about in the book and then I also talk about in Red Valkyries, people like Alexander Kalantai who I've mentioned, Inessa

Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaya, people like Alen Oleg Adinova in Bulgaria, there are these really important figures that were out there on the international stage arguing for the socialization of this sort of reproductive labor that women do, all of this sort of social reproduction that happens in the home. And I think that's still got to be squarely on the agenda. When we think about feminism, we have to realize that the kind of girl boss feminism, kind of liberal feminism that we've gotten in the United States is such a watered down version of what this other kind of feminism, which has deep, deep roots

in the 19th century, it runs parallel to what they would call bourgeois feminism or what we call liberal feminism. And, you know, since it is International Women's Day, I really want to say it's so frustrating to see International Women's Day being extracted from its socialist roots. This was a radically socialist holiday. And it was always about thinking through intersectional kind of concerns of women and class and race and ethnicity and religion. All of those factors were important to socialists because they wanted this really broad-based movement. And they saw women as a fundamental part of restructuring the economy after the demise of capitalism.

And so it's really important to remember that International Women's Day has this other meaning. And it harkens back to women like Clara Zetkin, who was one of the people who proposed the International Women's Day. And in Germany, she was big part of expanding the network of kindergartens and creches that the Social Democratic Party of Germany really brought in before World War I and inspired people like Kalintai to bring it into the Soviet Union, which then expanded it into Eastern Europe and then from there into places like Cuba and Angola or Tanzania or Nicaragua or any of these places that became sort of socialist-aligned countries during the Cold War, that package of policies around the

socialization of reproductive labor gets implemented. And so when we think about what is to be done, you know, this is the 100th anniversary of Lenin's death. He died in 1924, so we're in 2024 now, and we need to come back to this question. What is to be done? And I have two sort of sets of thoughts on this. The one is really embodied in why women have better sex under socialism.

If we have a government that is responsible and responsive to citizen demands, if we had like a democratic socialist government, you know, something along the lines of maybe Sweden or, you know, places where there's citizen participation and people in government actually do what people want them to do. And we had things like universal health care. We had things like federally subsidized child care, if we had things like job protected, federally mandated parental leaves, if that were compensated, if we had policies that we could put in place, certain kinds of housing subsidies, certain kinds of expansion of public transportation, things that would actually increase our quality of life, reduce our precarity, and really build a society within which both men and women are stable and less precarious and thereby

able to make decisions about their personal lives that don't always reference back to whether or not they can pay rent or whether they can afford groceries or whether or not they can survive. So that's one avenue, I think, is working through the state. Now, it so happens that I also have a lot of colleagues and friends who are anarchists and who are very suspicious of the state. And for good reasons, historically in Eastern Europe, sometimes these state policies lead to a much bigger, more brutal, undemocratic

state than we might want. And so in everyday Utopia, which is my more recent book, I think about the things that we can do on a more local level, the sort of prefigurative politics that people like David Graber really talk about. How do we change the world? How do we live in the world as if the world that we want to see already exists? And you know, for that conversation, I refer you to my previous upstream episode, but I do think that there are other ways of instantiating some of these policies that people like Colin

Tynes, Etkin, and Babel advocated for in the 19th and early 20th centuries and really thinking about things that we can do in our own private lives to expand our lateral networks of care and love and support to raise our kids more collectively, to live and share more communally, you know, our things and our spaces to really reimagine the way that the world could be. So I do think there are two pathways forward. And I really honestly truly believe in both cases, it's about citizen participation, it's about hope, it's about believing that we can change the world. Because too many young people,

and you know, quite frankly, you know, me too, sometimes I just get so despondent. I'm so despairing about the state of the world. It can be so overwhelming. This is an election year and I'm speaking to you from Bulgaria where we're not very far from this war in Ukraine that has been going on for a really long time. And I don't have to tell you about all the other things that are happening in the world right now.

So it's so easy to allow ourselves to be completely overwhelmed by, the Germans have this wonderful word, Weltschmerz, right? The world pain, it overcomes you and it can immobilize us. We lose our ability to dream, we lose our ability to think our way collectively into the future. And so so much of my writing, so much of my teaching, so much of my just basic being in

the world is fighting off the despair and trying to grasp at this possibility of a different way forward. And I really believe that a big part of finding our way into the future is revisiting the past. And thinking about these alternative experiments, these ways in which capitalism was truly profoundly challenged in the 20th century by different groups in different places for different reasons. There were alternatives and there are still alternatives.

We just can't lose sight of them. And too often, I feel like the kind of constant negativity of the media and social media and just the general way in which the world happens to be operating right now, it robs us of the ability to dream our way into a better future. And I think that we have to capture that.

We have to recapture that and move our way forward. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Kristin Gotze, a professor and chair of the Department of Russia and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She's the author of 12 books, including Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence, Red Valkyries, Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary women, and Everyday Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life.

We do have an episode with Kristin on her book Everyday Utopia, so make sure to check that out if you enjoyed this conversation. We also have a Patreon episode exploring some of the themes discussed in this episode around quality of life in the Soviet Union. That episode is Socialism Betrayed with Roger Keirin and Joe Jameson. And we also have several episodes on Socialist Feminism and Feminism for the 99% that are very relevant as we celebrate International Limits Day today. Please check the show notes for links to those episodes

and to any of the other resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Bikini Kill for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes,

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