The Lysistrata Option? No, Thanks.

Most of the women I know are full of rage at this moment. We fucking screamed that if he got re-elected, women were going to pay for that election with their bodies. We yelled at our fellow leftists that the right to privacy was important enough to go to the mat for, but we were told to shut our fucking pie-holes because there were more important issues to get worked up about. And now, well, now we have two more anti-choice asswipes on SCOTUS, and states are lining up to gang-rape Roe v Wade. South Dakota got its dick out first, but apparently, other states like Tennessee and Missouri don’t mind sloppy seconds.
As an expression of that rage and disbelief, it’s been floated that it's time for the Lysistrata option. That is, since women cannot be trusted to make a choice, our choice should be:

We won't have sex until we have our birth control pills filled at pharmacies.  We won't have sex until we have the right to make decisions about our bodies.  We won't have sex until our health care and our health rights receive equal attention and protection to men's health and health care.  We won't have sex until there are health care, day care, and child-friendly policies in the United States that make it possible to raise a well-cared for child.  We won't have sex until we have an educational system worthy of our children.  We won't have sex until No Child Left Behind is repealed.  We won't have sex until the money we've spent on Iraq is put into education and women's health.  We won't have sex!

While I empathize with the rage and the frustration, my response is simple: Give up fucking?? FUCK, NO! I respect the choices that some women will make in the coming (or non-coming as the case may be) weeks ahead. Choosing to not have heterosexual sex as a protest against policies that restrict women's abilities to have autonomy over their bodies, and also as a protest against men who ostensibly support leftist causes but can't quite wrap their heads around this one, may be the most effective way for these women to express their rage.

But it won't work for me. The obvious reason is that I like sex too much to give it up. I almost feel as if I have to defend that statement; after all, I've had no problem boycotting products that I actually kind of miss having access to. I'm willing to make some sacrifices if I believe it's for a greater good. And if someone were to tell me that if all women were to suddenly decide to deny men access to sex would guarantee that the abortion debate would come to a screeching end, I could be called selfish for my refusal to participate. But I still wouldn't do it.

I am uncomfortable with a number of aspects of the "no sex until we're free" campaign. For one thing, it feels as if it affirms, in a backwards way, the goal of the right-wing, theocratic, body-hating, misogynistic fucktards who are passing the restrictions on abortion. As has been said many, many times on this blog and in other places, the anti-abortionists are anti-woman and anti-sex. The evidence is overwhelming: not only do they oppose abortion, but they also oppose sex education in the schools, Plan B contraception, the rights of gays to marry and adopt,  and they lie about the effectiveness of condoms in AIDS prevention. In essence, they don't want women to have access to medical care, but they also don't want men and women to have access to sexual pleasure that doesn't take place within a state-sanctioned, God-sanctified heterosexual marriage.

So, why should I give them what they want? I stop having sex in protest of their anti-sex policies? I don't fucking think so.

Secondly, I'm really uncomfortable with the implications of giving up sex in order to make a point. It seems to me that denying men access to women's bodies in an effort to have them get on board the right to privacy alliance reinstantiates, or confirms, some sort of notion that it's men who want sex and women who accede to those demands. It reconfirms the notion that women are not active sexual agents, that we are the receptors, not the instigators of sexual contact. And, quite frankly, that bothers me a lot.

Look, I'm not saying that women do not have the right to choose whether or not to have sex. I know women who don't enjoy sex for whatever reasons, and who have decided to opt out of sexual contact with men (and women, too). And, of course, I support their choice to not have sex.

But I do not want to contribute to a discourse that sees sex as a weapon that women use as a method of getting what they want from men--be it diamonds, marriage, or abortion rights. If I choose to have sex, it's on my terms. Not as some sort of negotiation. Not because I know he wants it and I've got what he wants. I have sex because I want to, because it feels good, because it affirms the pair-bond, because I can.

A quotation from Lysistrata.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | |