Where reason fails, satire sometimes works — hence the sudden trend of tongue-in-cheek proposed sex laws, like the “personhood of semen” bill. And where satire fails — will a sex strike work? That’s the hope of a group called Liberal Ladies Who Lunch (love it!). They are proposing a national sex strike from April 28 until May 5 — tagline, “If our reproductive choices are denied, so are yours.”
Now, clearly this is a symbolic gesture more than anything else — after all, a week without sex sounds more like a long-term relationship than a sex strike to us. As compared to, say, the ancient Greek play Lysistrata, wherein the women of Greece go on an actual sex strike to end the decades-long Peloponnesian War. Meaning, they wouldn’t have sex until the war was over, whether that took a week or another decade. Or take Colombia, where in 2006 the girlfriends of gang members in one of the country’s most violent cities, Pereira (it had a murder rate at the time of 97 per 100,000 people), went on strike until their men gave up their weapons. As a result, in 2010, Pereira’s murder rate dropped by 26.5 percent, the steepest decline in the country.
