Sex, it depends...

Lysistrata: There are a lot of things

About us women that sadden me,

Considering how men see us as rascals.

Calonice: As indeed we are!

Aristophanes suggested in one of his plays, Lysistrata (411 BC), that women should withhold sex as a mean to force men to end the Peloponnesian War.

Here we are in 2009, and Kenyan women have followed Aristophanes' advice: they have withheld sex to protest “their country’s bickering leadership”. Just like Lysistrata called upon all Greek women to go on sex-strike; a women’s activist group called upon all Kenyan women (including the Premier's and President's wives) to boycott sex until the principal leaders would sit down, talk and get their act together. The women are sick and tired of the political instability that stormed through their country (which already sickled more than 10,000 lives in 2008) and want their politicians to focus on the country's welfare and security rather than on their personal ego and tribal issues. After all, they are concerned with their children's future.

The women used sex-withholding to get their message across and...It worked. At the end of 7 days President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga met, and began to set up political reforms.

In Aristophanes' work, Lysistrata and the women won...and in real life so did the Kenyan women.

In Lysistrata, after a certain amount of time women began to get desperate for sex and so they started to desert; however their leader restored discipline upon her comrades and so the fight went on.

I wonder what would have happened if the Kenyan men would have managed to get by without sex for more than week...would the Kenyan women have started to desert as well?

This issue raises a few questions: is sex more important to men than to women? Can women take the Sex-Fast longer than men? Are men more sexual than women? Is sex the solution for women to solve political issues? Let’s try to answer them...

Is Sex more important to men than to women? In my opinion, sex is important to both genders. They both have sexual desires, they both get the fever from times to times, they both enjoy copulating, and they both aim at the orgasmic final.

Can women take the Sex-Fast longer than men? There are men who take the Sex-Fast longer than women; and then there are men and women who can handle it just fine (through a lot of meditation and physical exercise; or simply because they have no sexual appetite at all). So, again...it is not a question of gender; it is either a question of mental strength or pre-disposition for sex (or lack of it).

Are men more sexual than women? Society has brain-washed us into thinking exactly that; but it is simply not true. Women are as sexual as men; only women were taught that it is not nice to express their sexual urges unless they fancy being called tarts: rubbish. It is not in the best interest of society to have a bunch of castrated, repressed, women walking around: these are as dangerous as serial-killers.

Is sex the solution for women to solve political issues? Well, it depends on who is running the country. You see, in Lysistrata it is assumed that all Greek men were heterosexual and desperate for sex, hence the women’s plot worked.

Nowadays, we should not assume that all men are heterosexual (even those who are married), so if activist groups were to call upon women to go on a sex-strike, this would work on heterosexuals and sapphics, but would not work on homosexual political leaders (who, if married to women, would even be grateful if they’d leave them alone); therefore activist groups would have to call upon everybody to go on a sex-strike. Would this work? In a free society, perhaps; in countries where political leaders (only now) have perceived that women use sex as a tool for manipulation and so are considering to pass bills that allow men to rape their wives in case they do not feel like having sex, I guess it would never work.

So, why did it work in Kenya? It worked because Kenya is like the Greece depicted in Lysistrata: it is assumed that all men are heterosexual; and if someone comes out of the closet...it is shot dead.

«A Kenyan man has sued activists who called on women to boycott sex to protest the growing divide in the nation's coalition government. James Kimondo said the seven-day sex ban, which ended this week, resulted in stress, mental anguish, backaches and lack of sleep, his lawyer told the state-run Kenya Broadcasting Corp.» (source: CNN)

Image: Faust trying to seduce Margarete by Eugéne Delacroix