In the May issue of Marie Claire, Janelle Monáe floats the idea of a sex strike. “People have to start respecting the vagina. Until every man is fighting for our rights, we should consider stopping having sex,” she told the magazine.
It’s a nice idea. Well, sort of. Let’s think this through for a moment—is this actually an actionable and potentially impactful plan? First off, women have more power than just the ability to provide sex to men, don’t they? Honest question! R.I.P. when women had power, at least for now, though. There’s also the not-insignificant point that some men do not have sex with women and some women do not have sex with men. How are those people supposed to go on strike? And then there are the single people who at any given moment might not even have someone to deny sex to. Can this movement afford to alienate the single people and gay people, not to mention single gay people? Already, this sounds like a big headache.
The Women’s March, the most successful protest in recent memory, was no easy feat to organize. A lot of it was essentially moderating a very large and very unruly Facebook group. There were also permits to obtain, in-fighting factions to quell, knitting patterns to distribute. Is Janelle Monàe willing to take on the role of organizing an event of a similar scale to mark the sex strike? Imagine taking all that social media unrest and introducing horniness into the mix. And there are a lot of questions to consider. For maximum impact, should all women walk out of their bedrooms and take to the streets in their lingerie at an appointed time? If we do this during the day to take advantage of the light, what if people confuse us for one of those pillow-fight flash mobs? Will it be too on the nose if we all knit chastity belts to wear? Or, oooh, pairs of blue pom poms for everyone? And you know those clickers for counting crowds—does such a device exist for counting a large group of people not-having sex? Do they have to not-have-sex in specific positions? Who even handles permits for publicly not doing something? See, you think it’ll be the not-having-sex that would get you, but really it will be all the clerical work and philosophical debates that will grind you down.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very on board with the idea of punishing men who don’t respect women’s rights. But what sounds in theory like a Lysistrata-inspired call-to-arms would be, in practice, an administrative disaster.
