Women in Togo have called a week-long sex strike to back their call for the resignation of the country’s president, the Associated Press reports. The ban is supported by an opposition coalition of political parties, civic groups and movements in the west African nation. The coalition wants President Faure Gnassingbe, whose family has held power for decades, to resign.
Unless you’re a classical theater scholar, the plot of Lysistrata is something you’re not likely to be familiar with. First performed in Athens in 411 B.C., Lysistrata is the comical story of one woman’s effort to end The Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sex from their men in the hopes that the increasingly horny men will be forced to negotiate peace in order to get laid. As usually happens in these sorts of things, events go sideways, and Lysistrata’s plans to force the men to reach a negotiated peace ends up inflaming the war between the sexes. Much hilarity ensues.
More than 2400 years later, women in Togo have taken a cue from Lysistrata in an effort to effect political change in their homeland. The one-week sex strike is designed to send a message to men that they should be taken seriously. Frankly, I’m surprised that it’s taken almost two and a half millenia for women to come back to recognizing the ultimate power they have over men. Liberian women did it in 2003 to campaign for peace. Why women in this country haven’t resorted to this tactic seems difficult to comprehend. Then again, let’s not be planting ideas in places we don’t want them to grow, ‘kay??
I suppose we should be grateful that our women aren’t well-versed in Classical Greek theater; we’d all be in a world of hurt….
