Seizing the Means of (Re)Production

More thoughts on Lysistrata

Photo from Oakland Women’s March by Tom Hilton on Wikimedia Commons

Welcome, new readers! I’m so glad to have you all in this fun, weird corner of the internet where I geek out about Greek literature, gender politics, and whatever the hell else is on my mind (like croissant plushes).

Last week,

lyz

published our episode of her podcast. We talked about ancient marriage, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and how extremely devastated we are when conservative men try to deny us sex to fix our feminism. It was so much fun:

"Lyzistrata" with Donna Zuckerberg

But do I have a lot more to say about Lysistrata? Yes. Yes I do.

I had planned to write an entire freaking book about feminist reception of Lysistrata and its sex strike as the follow-up to Not All Dead White Men. If that topic seems a little niche and narrow to you for an entire book… well, I’m pretty sure that’s what my editor said at first too. But I convinced her! And as it turns out, between the podcast and the pieces I wrote on Lysistrata for Eidolon and the Washington Post, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.

The book’s working title was Resistrata! – yes, really, as in #resist – and in my proposal I sketched out a plan to write about the topic from many different angles. There was going to be a chapter about real-life sex strikes and one about the “It’s Lysistrata time” Twitter meme. There was going to be a chapter reading The Lysistrata Project protests against the Iraq war alongside Chi-raq. There was going to be a chapter about the manosphere concept of the “sexual marketplace” paired with Kristen Ghodsee’s work on why women have better sex under socialism, digging deeper into sexual economics and how heterosexual marriage in our system can be a kind of sex work. There was also going to be a chapter I was calling “the real enemy is the men’s locker room” that somehow combined analysis of various YA Lysistrata adaptations with analysis of why it mattered that prominent transphobe Germaine Greer set her translation of Lysistrata in a men’s locker room, the site of so much gendered violence.

But after the dust cleared on that one month in my life when I had a baby, my first book came out, and my then-spouse came out to me as a woman, I decided to shelve the new book project. I spent the next nine-ish months trying to save my marriage, only to realize that it was a doomed prospect: maaaaaybe two people with enough motivation, time, and energy can successfully queer a hetero marriage with depressingly normative gender roles, but honestly, my ex and I were not in a place where we could give that the emotional and creative bandwidth it would need. All of her energy was going to her transition, and all of mine was going to our kids and my book tour.

The next nine months after that I spent getting divorced, which, as Lyz describes in depth on her podcast, is a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming process. In an earlier episode she said, correctly and devastatingly, that it’s easier for a 16-year-old girl to get married than for a 41-year-old woman to get divorced. Our system is fucked.

By the time I was really ready to work on the book, a year and a half had passed, and it was February 2020. And then the world shut down. I wrote about 20K words during lockdown while living with my ex, my new boyfriend, his wife, and our collective three kids – a story for another time – but eventually I became too sad. It was hard to laugh at a (very funny!) play about how all the women of Greece stop having sex to end a war when I was living in a world where people were refusing to wear a mask to save millions of lives.

So I put it aside. I (mostly) think that’s been the right decision. Sure, while I was writing this, I felt that old pull – like, damn, this project was actually pretty freaking cool! Should I maybe go back to it, or something?! Maybe I can call my HUP editor and un-cancel it? That’s natural, I think. As it turns out, a lot of writers have old projects like this one lying around. They make good fertilizer for future projects. I hope. That’s what I’m going to keep telling myself. (If anybody reading this has anything particularly fertile in their old project graveyard they want to share in the comments, please do!)

Unfortunately, that means that I have a mostly-untapped well of rage and pedantry about Lysistrata, and when

Sarah E. Bond

sends me a screenshot from Instagram of a girl wearing a t-shirt that says “Lysistrata the Republicans” – so it’s a verb now?? – I can’t resist going back to that well.

I think some of the commenters on Lyz’s podcast thought she and I were proposing/supporting a sex strike, which was extremely not the vibe. If you’ve read any of my work, you know I never do anything without over-analyzing its sociopolitical context first, and I’m much more interested in exploring questions like “why does the idea of a sex strike have such enduring feminist appeal?” than in trying to convince anybody to stop having sex with their partners. In fact, we should all probably go and read Emily Nagoski’s new book?

I do want to push back, gently, on the commenter who wrote, “every time I see some liberal woman online talking about a sex strike I’m like… do you all not enjoy sex? Why would I give up something I like doing when the world is already hellbent on punishing me?” Although I absolutely understand the sentiment behind this objection… a strike wouldn’t be very meaningful if you only had to give up things you didn’t like, right? Sometimes activism does cost you something. Even in labor strikes where the workers might not like their work, they hope to be able to return to it under better conditions.

Again, I’m not proposing a sex strike. AT ALL. In fact, I think the sex strike element of Lysistrata gets too much attention and eclipses some of the other more interesting activism in the play.

Everybody always thinks about the play as being about a sex strike, because LOL boners. And I get it! Like I said on the podcast: boner jokes for all. If that’s your flavor of humor, Lysistrata’s got plenty for you to enjoy. But an under-mentioned part of the equation is that the women of Greece also, effectively, go on a domestic labor strike. That’s the part that I find more intriguing.

In one of the most famous scenes in the play, a man, Cinesias, approaches the women camped out on the Acropolis and tries to convince his wife Myrrhine to come home (or, at the very least, screw him then and there). Lysistrata encourages Myrrhine to tease her husband into a near-frenzy before leaving him high and dry. Many boner jokes ensue, of course, but embedded in there is also this exchange (877-882):

CINESIAS
Don't go, please don't go, Myrrhine.
At least you'll hear our child. Call your mother, lad.

CHILD
Mummy ... mummy ... mummy!

CINESIAS
There now, don't you feel pity for the child?
He's not been fed or washed now for six days.

MYRRHINE
I certainly pity him with so heartless a father.

Cinesias is channeling every single father in a post on the “Am I the Asshole” subreddit here. Strategic incompetence to the max. Later in the scene he also mentions that the house is a disaster and Myrrhine’s weaving has been picked apart by roosters. I hate this dude in all of his iterations and he’s the fucking worst.

Regardless of my own personal rage, this exchange makes a crucial point. Yes, the women are blocking access to the treasury the men need for war, and also (hilariously) to their lady bits. But in the process they’ve also stopped tending to their homes and their children. They are denying the city their domestic labor – and their reproductive labor, too. At one surprisingly real and poignant moment in a play full of men complaining about blue balls, the women say there’s no point having children anymore just to watch those children die in war. It’s the closest Lysistrata comes to Trojan Women.

Among the infinitely many reasons why I’m not out on Twitter calling for a sex strike is that, historically, sex strikes don’t really work. It depends on what it means for a strike to “work,” I guess. Certainly they can create bonds of solidarity and encourage women to make activism more a part of their lives, but they mostly don’t work to achieve goals. Sometimes, maybe, they work to call attention and raise awareness to specific issues that require concrete actions to address. One example is the “crossed legs” strike in Colombia in 2011, where the people of Barbacoas successfully convinced the government to repair the single extremely badly maintained road into the town. Some of the rhetoric was remarkably similar to that used in Lysistrata – women mentioned that it felt like there was no reason to have children only to put their lives at risk because they couldn’t access medical care.

But for the most part, sex strikes like Alyssa Milano’s seem to fizzle out and become a punchline. Other times, the role of the sex strike to the success of a movement is problematically overstated, as it was with Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee’s activism in Liberia. In fact, in the article I linked to there, classicist Helen Morales argues that “sex strike” is more or less a category of action invented by the media and not a meaningful heuristic. On the other hand, domestic labor strikes seem to be much more effective, and “day without women” strikes have been held around the world to highlight the sheer volume of uncompensated domestic labor women do and its contribution to the economy.

This element of Lysistrata didn’t come up on the podcast specifically, but on the other hand, it’s one of the main themes the podcast returns to again and again. Lyz and I both immediately agreed that, as feminists, it feels impossible to embrace the sex strike aspect of Lysistrata. But hearing how the house fell apart as soon as Myrrhine left? Spoiler alert: if you read the first few pages of Lyz’s book (which you should preorder!!), you’ll see just how much that element rings true today.

The domestic labor of women in heterosexual marriages is disproportionate, crushing, and often invisible to our partners. I didn’t speak a lot about my own divorce on the podcast, because we ended up mostly focusing on history and gender politics and all of that. But suffice it to say, I didn’t always feel that my labor on that front was seen in my marriage. The fact that my spouse wasn’t actually a man didn’t change that.

Still, I love this play. I was actually surprised, when I was visiting a college campus to talk about my work, to find out just how much the students hated Spike Lee’s Chi-raq and the struggled to even find humor in the idea of a sex strike. They couldn’t even stop and smell the boner jokes! Gen Z may very well save us.

One of the students then asked me, if I were doing an adaptation of Lysistrata that embodied my own politics, what that might look like. (Students do not mess around in Q&A’s! They go right for the throat.) And it’s a great question! In my book, I was planning on analyzing the various traps and pitfalls feminists can fall into while trying to reclaim Lysistrata today… but what would it look like if we tried to do it ourselves? To write a new Lysistrata that took into consideration the embedded misogyny of the source text and the embedded misogyny of our own society, and, ideally, used the play as a way to comment on both?

That’s not to say that I have a great answer to that question locked and loaded. After a little bit of throat-clearing while I cast around for something (ANYTHING) to say, I eventually settled on a heteropessimist/political lesbian Lysistrata, in which Gen Z women stop having sex with men because men are just kind of garbage. As Jane Ward says in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, you can, actually, choose to be gay if you want to.

I guess my version would start with something not entirely unlike the Alyssa Milano sex strike proposal on Twitter – although I think a true Resistrata would have to really problematize and challenge its heroine and force her to confront her positionality instead of unquestioningly accepting her as the exceptional face of the movement, as happens in Aristophanes’ play. Especially if she’s a white woman.

So let’s say it starts with a white woman proposing a sex strike on social media and getting righteously schooled. But a seed takes root, and she manages to actually hear criticism instead of whining about being canceled, and women come together to admit that it’s gotten harder to safely enjoy sex in a post-Roe world with terrible maternal healthcare and no childcare safety net. Much the safest plan is, as Lysistrata herself says at the beginning of Aristophanes’ play, to avoid dicks altogether (ἀφεκτέα τοίνυν ἐστὶν ἡμῖν τοῦ πέους). (Incidentally, I do enjoy that she specifies that the thing to be avoided is the body part itself. She’s not being cisnormative at all here! All penises are to be avoided, regardless of the gender of the individual they’re attached to!)

In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the success of the strike hinges on the surprising alliance between the women of the warring Athens and Sparta. In a modern-day Resistrata, I think that alliance would instead have to go across political lines. Maybe one of the leaders of the strike is the wife of a conservative Supreme Court justice, or something. And at the end of the play, instead of dividing up a woman’s body to represent the map of Greece, the government would enshrine a set of constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right to prophylactics, abortion, maternity leave, and high-quality daycare, so women could finally relax and enjoy sex again.

And then we’d close the book or leave the theater and be back in this living nightmare, I guess. But that’s how the fantasy works.

Every so often, someone (older than Gen Z) will confess to me that even though they know it’s problematic, they just really, really love the play. THAT’S FINE. I’m not the feminist classical reception police! Feminism itself is a complicated, self-contradictory, divisive, beautiful thing. So is classics. Both have special resonance across national, generational, and other boundaries, and both also have been used as tools of silencing and oppression. Combine the two and you get something even more complicated and wonderful and worth wrestling with. And there might just be some boner jokes along the way.

In case you’re wondering, my favorite classics-related boner joke is from the book Non Campus Mentis, which I think my dad gave me in high school? It took hilariously dumb excerpts from college-level essays. Including this one:

Was this real? Who knows, although I think anyone who’s graded a few college papers would find it pretty credible. I was grading a test for a mythology class at Princeton University where students were prompted to name Heracles’ first labor, last labor, and any other two, and one student wrote, I shit you not, “Earth, air, fire, water.”

Regardless, I believe 100% that this quote is real:

You’ll never convince me otherwise.