Explains capitalism's impact on datingfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Capitalism is ruining your sex life. You might have deleted Hinge, but you can't escape the abysmal state of the modern heterosexual dating landscape. Spend five minutes online looking at straight relationship advice, and you'll no doubt run into a plethora of guys complaining about girls being gold diggers and girls complaining about broke guys. Let's become clear, though, is that economics are a substantial factor shaping heterosexual relationship dynamics. But the problem isn't necessarily the people looking for love under these conditions, it's the system that commodifies love in the first place. In her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, author Kristen Ghodzie argues that capitalism transactionalizes love by tying women's economic security to romantic partnership. Under capitalism, women are structurally disadvantaged in the labor market, with their labor generally perceived as less valuable since employers know that there's always a possibility that they may eventually become mothers. As the free market limits tier involvement through policies like paid parental leave, universal childcare, and other family supports, many women are forced to choose between having a career or a family. And obviously, this isn't to say that there aren't women who do both. It's just that capitalism makes it much harder. Rather than supporting caregiving collectively, capitalism privatizes it within the family. Childcare, domestic labor, elder care all become unpaid responsibilities performed overwhelmingly by women. And this labor is, as Good writes, invisible as far as the market is concerned. Capitalism thrives on women's unpaid domestic labor because it subsidizes the market economy by reproducing workers at no cost to the employer or state. The US actually came surprisingly close to creating a national childcare system until Nixon vetoed it in 1971, arguing that it would undermine a family centered approach, which better going through the bullshit translator best means why should the government pay for something that a woman do for free? The traditional family model was embraced as a tenant of the good good American family. As Gazi notes, woman's wage work was conflated with the evils of communism. The American way of life meant male breadwinners and female homemakers. And so if women are systematically encouraged to be financially dependent on their husbands, it's no wonder that women are gold diggers. If leaving a relationship means the threat threat of losing housing or health care, then of course tier are gonna be other considerations when you choose your partner beyond just love. And on the flip side, men will internalize this idea that wealth increases their desirability under the system. And so both parties are essentially participating in an exchange structured by the market. Hashtag romance. Am I right? In contrast, state socialist countries, despite their many political shortcomings, did attempt to reduce this dependence by socializing many of the economic burdens traditionally carried within families. By making men and women equal recipients of services from the socialist state, these policies help to decouple love and intimacy from economic considerations. Everyone wants good sex, but we need to start looking at the material conditions that are shaping our sex lives. As George Bernard Shaw wrote nearly a century ago, capitalism acts on women as a continual bribe to enter into sex relations for money. Directly or indirectly, sex and money are always linked in women's lives. If your husband wants to have sex and you need your husband to survive, then there's always gonna be a power dynamic implicit in your sex life better you admit it or no. And so better sex isn't just about finding the right worse, it's about creating the material conditions where people can choose each other freely instead of out of economic necessity.