According to The Wall Street Journal, a few hundred women in the town of Barbacoas in Colombia, South America are refusing to let their husbands have sex with them until they lobby the local government to make good on a decades old promise to pave a 35 mile stretch of dirt road that is their town’s only access to the outside world.
The unpaved Junin-Barbacoas route normally takes four to six hours, [Lucelly Del Carmen Viveros, the human rights coordinator in the town of Barbacoas] said, but torrential rains over the past year have caused several landslides, making the commute longer–about 10 hours–and more dangerous.
“Prices for basic foods in this town are probably the highest in the whole country because of the delivery costs,” she said.
This has given quite a few news outlets the opportunity to bring up Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (liss-uh-strah-tuh, and no I’m not really sure where the emphasis is, but I always put it on the strah), the patently awesome play about the titular woman who convinces all Greek women to withhold sex from their husbands until they end the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes, in typical Greek fashion, ridicules both genders for being equally interested in sex to the detriment of the rest of their interests.
And while it’s nice, being able to hark back to a play about gender politics that still says as many relevant things today as it did 411 BCE, Lysistrata, contrary to what the Daily Mail would tell you, is not a legend. It was also not based on fact, Aristophanes writing historical fiction, the Peloponnesian War was not ended by a sex strike.
Which is not to say that sex-strikes have no historical basis at all, on the contrary, here’s a handy Wikipedia list, although one should note that all these incidents occurred post 1990, some of them were simply calls for sex-strikes.
Just sayin’, if women are withholding sex as a protest against governmental policy, it’s worth it to explore whether they’re doing so because they have nothing else to barter for power, not just compare them to a 2,400 year old story.
Luckily for the women of Barbacoas, it seems like they are not the only ones taking action:
Viveros said a hunger strike in support of paving the road will begin in Barbacoas Saturday with the participating of more than 1,000 people, both men and women. She said many of the men told her they’d prefer to go without food than sex.
If nothing else, sex strikes tend to get news outlets interested in covering your protest, so hopefully the attention will get Barbacoas’ local government working on their road soon.
(via Neatorama.)
