Immediately after the first leak regarding the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against Roe v. Wade, images popped up all over social media pointing out how women having less sex with men was a logical consequence of this enormously regressive legal sea change. Indeed, women are once again being unfairly forced to carry a burden that should not be theirs alone, but need not even be a burden in the first place if our laws and society were just to begin with.
That said, a significant number of those social media posts go a step further, promoting an active #SexStrike resistance until women’s reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and personhood are protected. Many of these reference Aristophanes’ 411 BCE comedic play Lysistrata as inspiration for the effectiveness of sex strikes.
I want to be very clear that every woman has an absolute right to choose not to have sex or to have sex with any consenting adult for any reason. No one else has the right to make that decision for her.
Rather, I hope to illustrate the problematic nature of an organized sex strike and how it might actually be reinforcing the insidious narratives of patriarchy. Indeed, any casual perusal of the #SexStrike tag on Twitter will reveal Slavers’ giddiness over the concept of non-Slaver women abstaining from sex and having fewer children. Before you follow that link, I caution you that such posts are usually grotesquely and inhumanly abusive.
Taking a step back, I think it’s vitally important to start with the core conceit of Patriarchy- control of sex. Patriarchy asserts that sex must be restricted because it is a finite resource, the value of which must be protected at all costs. This is of course circular reasoning, since sex is not a resource. Sex is an action that people can engage in pretty much as often as they want to.
Rather, patriarchal hierarchies draw their power from coercing people into creating artificial scarcity of sex and then “promising” access to sex for those who do what those in power want. In other words:
If you do {the thing} you can have sex.
This is even a theme in George Orwell’s 1984, in which members of the “outer” Party are taught to abstain from sex to increase their emotional dysregulation- so as to make them easier to control. In fact, the Party puts most of the onus for this control on women- selling this abstinence as empowerment, even though it’s actually a tool of self-enslavement by the secretive “inner” Party.
So let’s revisit today’s sex strike as resistance to patriarchy.
What is the stated condition for ending the strike?
Protection of women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy- an unquestionable good.
Who is the strike intended to hurt?
Men who desire sex with women- this is logically limited to the women participating in the strike. Note that such men probably already agree with the striking women.
Who is the strike therefore intended to motivate into taking action?
The aforementioned men.
What does this imply about who has the power to effect the desired change?
It implies that men have the power.
What form of power could rapidly neutralize the individuals preventing the immediate legal protection of women’s rights and personhood?
For legal reasons, I’m not going to answer that question.
Instead, I’m going to explore the historical expectations of patriarchal societies, namely the aforementioned “{the thing}” expected of males in exchange for the “promise” of access to sex.
Historically speaking, most patriarchal societies required male participation in life-threatening activities, most especially organized antisociality (military violence), as a precursor to “manhood”. In other words, young men were taught to earn access to sex by putting their lives at risk and surviving.
This is the inverse of patriarchy’s expectation of women. For women, the expectation was that they earned sex through social conformity and their life-threatening ordeal (childbearing) followed from sex instead of preceding it.
There is a sick sort of “balance” to this system. However, there is still an imbalance in sociality/antisociality and therefore access to the levers of power.
While married men (in particular fathers) were generally expected to behave prosocially except in limited circumstances (“war were declared”), women in such systems are entirely denied opportunities to act outside the bounds of “propriety”. In many patriarchal societies, antisociality was even thought to be the default “hysterical” (from the Greek for uterus) state of women, which the social order was “necessary” to control. Hence both the controversy and popularity of things like Dionysian revels in which women became His maenads.
Returning to Lysistrata, this lies at the heart of Aristophanes’ humor. Let’s keep in mind that he was a well-privileged or even aristocratic playwright whose audience consisted entirely of like-minded men.
In Lysistrata, the core joke of the entire play is the inversion of Athenian patriarchy’s core “promise” to men:
“If you kill our enemies, you can have sex” becomes “if you stop killing our enemies, you can have sex”.
Lysistrata is certainly not a one-note play and generally speaking the masculine characters get just as heavily roasted as the feminine ones. However, it never challenges the one unmentioned and unquestioned assumption of patriarchies:
“All real power derives from male violence.”
This is a horrifically inaccurate and destructive idea on many levels. Yet even today, it remains largely unquestioned by even the most “progressive” members of our society. This not only reinforces the idea that “true” power is inherently masculine and antisocial, but that women can never access such power because direct action is considered antisocial and therefore inherently incompatible with femininity.
In other words, patriarchy requires us to believe that only men (because of their access to violence) can effect real and rapid change. It furthermore requires us to believe that women’s ability to cause change is limited to their sexual desirability to men.
Nothing could be further from the truth. While the average man is larger and stronger than the average woman, direct action is not and never has been limited to fisticuffs. The overwhelming weight of historical evidence shows that women have always had the ability to take decisive action when they felt it warranted- regardless of social sanction. The history of women’s suffrage in the U.S. and U.K. underlines this last point.
It is only the meme-complex of patriarchy that teaches us otherwise.
The irrelevance of physical strength has only continued to accelerate since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. By 1868, firearms had become so lightweight and accurate that a diminutive eight-year-old farmgirl from Ohio was feeding her family by hunting with them.
Does this mean that I, as Mao did, assert that all “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun“?
No.
My point is that no woman’s power is limited to just sex. Every woman is a whole and complete person who is capable of exercising each and every form of power that a man can muster.
Furthermore, I assert that turning a conflict about defending women’s personhood into a war about access to sex ultimately serves the very patriarchy that started the conflict. It reduces women’s agency to motivating men instead of recognizing and uplifting their inherent Natural ability to take and defend what is rightfully theirs.
Worse still, it reinforces the idea that women’s safety and security is entirely dependent on men. It encourages the most vulnerable and endangered women to “lie back and think of England” instead of fighting for their own interests, turning these critical allies into potential enemies.
Polls suggest about 1/3 of women support overturning Roe v. Wade. I suspect a sizeable portion of those women have internalized this unbalanced and unnatural distortion of their own agency and personhood.
In conclusion, I want to reiterate that every woman Naturally owns herself as well as her choices about whether or not to have sex and with whom. I am not arguing that women cannot or should not abstain from sex with men to protest the backsliding of American jurisprudence as regards women and their Natural rights.
Rather, I hope that I’ve encouraged any woman who reads this to reflect on the totality of her own power to effect real, rapid, and lasting change by whatever means makes sense to her, including those that society teaches her are “unladylike”.
-In Deos Confidimus
