Why women have better sex under socialism

Hi all! I just moved! So, I wrote an ode to my old room because I miss it.

The floor in my old bedroom wasn’t level.

The left side of the room was just slightly higher than the right. It wasn’t anything dramatic, nothing you’d notice with a naked-eye, but it was there.

My sisters helped me move into 121 Madison in November of 2023. My room was a flex room, meaning it was supposed to be part of the living room but a thin, temporary wall separated me from the sound of the TV and the smells of the kitchen. The building on the corner of Madison and 30th was one of New York’s first Co-ops. Completed in 1883, each of the apartments were originally duplexes, but the only remnant of this once lavish apartment building was the fireplace on my west wall covered in several layers of peeling paint.

The broker showed us the apartment on a warm day in mid-October, and by November 1st, my roommate and I were moving in. The planks that made up my white lacquered Ikea furniture were shoved into the elevator with a naked pillow. I built the dresser as my sisters worked on the bed.

In my five years living in New York City, I have lived in five different apartments.

By the time I reached Madison Ave., the Swedish building instructions were long gone. There was a very specific configuration in which the drawers had to go in. The top drawer was just slightly taller than the one below it. As the light waned, I was on my third combination. Nicking my fingers trying to get each drawer to attach to the metal mechanism that ensured it could actually be pulled out.

The dresser looked winded, tired after a long run. It was together, but gray scuff marks were slashed along the top and packing tape residue wrapped around the sides. Standing, but not standing completely straight. I had spent at least two hours putting it together.

“This can’t be right,” my sister said, critically eyeing my hard work.

The chest was shaky. Reminiscent of the most annoying table at a restaurant to cut steak. When one corner was pressed the other would shoot up.

“It’s the floor, not the dresser.” I replied.

I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t start shoving clothes into something unstable. My belongings were still in boxes. I had nothing that could perfectly level the dresser. I grabbed a book and shoved three-quarters of it underneath the front right corner.

“This is just temporary,” I told my sisters.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, by Kristen Ghodsee lay open underneath the front right corner of my dresser for the year and a half I lived in 121 Madison.

It was open to the 119th page. The book looked embarrassed, as if it had been caught without its clothes on—an accidental oopsie under the armoire. Splayed open for the world to see its contents. Its pages yellowed, water-stained, but still legible.

I was given the book four years before I used it to level the dresser. A friend saw it in a bookstore and thought of me—at the time being a communist was one of my biggest personality traits. She’d laugh as I ranted about the inequities of the world around us. My passion, an obvious performance. The ideology, an ill-fitting pair of jeans. She is a banker now, and despite the book being in my possession for years, I had only ever read the first two chapters before using it to straighten my furniture, denoting our respective commitments to the cause.

Every day, I’d pull out my drawers and get dressed, thinking that maybe once I’d move again I’d finally read the book. This May, I listed the Ikea Nordli 8-Drawer Dresser for free on Facebook Marketplace and spent a morning undoing the work my sisters and I did on the day I moved in. A young mom came to pick it up after dropping her son off at daycare explaining they’d just moved to New York and were using a plastic dresser that kept tipping over from the weight of overstuffed drawers.

She piled the planks into a friend’s car and I went back upstairs to my apartment. The book, permanently turned to page 119, was the only thing on my floor. I tossed it in the trash.

I guess I’ll never know why women have better sex under socialism.