Studies from the mid-1980s reported that 80 per cent of East German women always experienced orgasm during sex, compared to 63 per cent in West Germany.
One of the most popular tourist attractions in Berlin is the D.D.R. Museum, which opened in 2006 and aims to show visitors what life was like for ordinary people in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The museum uses interactive installations and cleverly designed displays of documents, photographs, and household goods to summon the recent past.
The tone of superiority—as if the decades of socialism in East Germany were nothing but a misguided aberration—is hardly limited to the curators of the D.D.R. Museum. It is, in fact, a pervasive attitude found in contemporary liberal democracies toward the leftist political alternatives that existed in many parts of the world during much of the twentieth century. In “,” Kristen R.
The two Germanys, whose populations were ethnically and culturally identical before the political division, offered researchers an irresistible natural experiment through which to explore women’s rights and experiences. Ghodsee discusses several fascinating studies that suggested East German women reported higher levels of satisfaction, even the non-orgasmic kind, than their West German sisters.