LYSISTRATA LATINA STYLE

From Reuters via the Houston Chronicle:

Sex strike hits Colombia gang members

They are calling it the "crossed legs" strike.

Fretting over crime and violence, girlfriends and wives of gang members in the Colombian city of Pereira have called a ban on sex to persuade their menfolk to give up the gun.

Click here for the rest.

Now that's feminism! It's also a case of life immitating art. Check out this bit from Wikipedia:

Lysistrata

Lysistrata . . . Aristophanes' anti-war comedy, written in 411 BC, has female characters, led by the eponymous Lysistrata, barricading the public funds building and withholding sex from their husbands to secure peace and end the Peloponnesian War. In doing so, Lysistrata engages the support of women from Sparta, Boeotia, and Corinth. All of them are at first aghast at the suggestion of withholding sex, but they finally agree and swear an oath to support each other. The woman from Sparta, Lampito, returns home to spread the word there.

And

The play also addresses the contribution that women could make to society and to policy making, but cannot because their views are ignored: All such questions are considered the purview of men only. See the exchange between Lysistrata and the Magistrate who comes to try to browbeat the women into giving up their plans.

Click here for more.

Amazing.

On the other hand, I wonder if this actually is a case of life immitating art: the population of Pereira is about a half million, not a tiny hole in the wall, but not a cosmopolitan metropolis, either. Surely, there must be educated women there who have read the classics, but without any information to the contrary, I like to think that they figured this out by themselves. After all, witholding of sex has got to be a major motivator, behaviorally speaking, especially in a macho Latin culture. Really, it's kind of an obvious tactic, once women are organized and looking for a way to flex their muscle.

You gotta hand it to those ancient Greeks: they understood human nature as well as anyone alive today, which is, of course, why we continue to study them. Now, how can we get American women organized enough to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? My god, that would be so fucking cool. No sex until the fighting stops.

Heh. Make love, not war. I fucking love it!



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