Sex Strikes and Peace: Misunderstanding Lysistrata

The Washington Post reports that in the aftermath of Trump’s re-election,

…some young American women are turning to a radical Korean feminist movement that swears off men to reclaim a sense of agency.

In the hours after Trump’s victory, young women took to sharing posts breaking down the 4B movement on social media. As a concept, “sex strikes” go back at least as far as the ancient Greek play “Lysistrata,” in which women swore off sex to protest the Peloponnesian War. In the United States, singer Janelle Monáe suggested one in 2017. Actress Julia Fox has said that she’s been celibate for more than two years in response to the overturning of Roe.

Breanne Fahs, a professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, said that in the wake of the election, “Young women do not trust that their reproductive rights are secure, so they are turning to new ways to assert their agency and reclaim a sense of control over their bodies.”

I have chosen a late life celibacy, and I have given my reasons. Abstaining from sex and romantic relationship can mean loneliness, but it can also bring a balance and a stability to my life that I know from experience will vanish fairly quickly after a woman shares my bed.  I am not boycotting women. I love my mother, my daughter, my sisters, and my female friends. I am not sure that the 4B movement constitutes a boycott either. 

Calling 4B a “sex strike” suggests that the fundamental purpose of the movement is to change male behavior.  Best I can tell, 4B is more similar to my reasons for celibacy: a resigned acceptance of the facts on the ground. It is a calculated decision that the costs of sexual relationship exceed the benefits. It is less about transforming the hearts and minds of the opposite sex – probably a fool’s errand if ever a fool had an errand – and more about ensuring one’s own inner peace.

I do want to push back a bit more against the comparison to Aristophanes’ comedy, a play whose plot everyone thinks they knows but whose text they have not, in fact, read.

Lysistrata is set during the Peloponnesian War, which as you might remember (my students should!) was between Athens and Sparta.  I don’t want to push this analogy too far, but Athens and Sparta were the Red and Blue states of their time.  They had vastly different understandings of how to order the common life, of what it meant to be good, and of what it meant to be Greek.  At different times in their histories, they mocked each other, deliberately misunderstood each other, reluctantly cooperated with each other, and, in the end, fought each other in a prolonged and bloody civil war.

Ring any bells? 

I will not foist upon you the Cliff’s Notes summary of the play, but here’s the key point everyone misses.  It is true that in hilarious but effective fashion, an Athenian woman named Lysistrata gets women to commit to withholding sex (sex they themselves very much want) until the lads agree to stop the war.  What is also true is that Lysistrata knows that none of this will work unless she gets the Spartan women to join her.  It is Lysistrata’s alliance with a Spartan woman named Lampito that proves pivotal – at the first rally before the sex strike, most of the women are unwilling to agree to Lysistrata’s plan, until they see that the Spartan women will support it as well.  The plan only succeeds  because the Athenian women are willing to put aside their snobbery and contempt for Spartans, and work in unity with those whom they think of as barbaric, rough-hewn hillbillies.

Spartan and Athenian women, swearing a difficult oath together.

Whenever Lysistrata is produced on stage, Lampito’s character always speaks a rural dialect of the sort lampooned by urban elites.  When the play was done in 18th century England, Lampito spoke as a Highland Scot; when it was done in mid-20th century America, her accent was often performed as Appalachian.  Whatever accent signifies coarseness and ignorance to an affluent, smug, urban audience will work.

The problem, of course, is that the would-be Lysistratas of our age have done an outstanding job in recent years of cutting off the Lampitos to whom they were once connected by blood or affection or memories of drill team in high school.  The Trump Era has brought us the Great Unfriending, with the constant reminders that it was not only okay, but even virtuous to deny one’s warmth and one’s Facebook page to those who support the malign orange fascist.

That unfriending has accelerated once again since last Tuesday.  Lysistrata blocked Lampito on Wednesday afternoon – on the off chance that she hadn’t cut ties years ago.

Men and women generally don’t date across ideological lines – and I suspect, though it’s harder to prove, that more and more women aren’t sustaining friendships with other women across those same red/blue divides. To the extent that a sex strike could work, it would be contingent on establishing common ground with the very women you’ve derided for their bigotry, their blindness, and their complicity with the Great Crime. I see no sign of that happening.

Perhaps, though, the media make a mistake when they conflate the contemporary 4B movement with a sex strike. In his play, Aristophanes depicts the women of both cities as desperate for sex with their husbands. They are willing to suppress their own intense cravings for the sake of forcing an end to a bloody and protracted war.   In Lysistrata, denying sex is a painful but necessary tool for promoting peace.  The 4B movement seems to understand something different. The real peace is giving up sex itself.