Every now and then some group of women will talk about going on a "sex strike", that is, refusing to have sex with men until their demands are met. The idea has been around since at least ancient Greece. The ancient Greek play "Lysistrata" is all about such a strike. I've heard it come up a few times in my life here in the US. Most recently, some number of liberal women declared a sex strike after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, to protest restrictions on abortion.
A big problem with such a sex strike is, Who are you hurting? Usually -- not always, but usually -- women date and marry men with political and social beliefs similar to their own. So if a group of pro-abortion women declare a sex strike, the men they are denying will mostly be pro-feminist, pro-abortion men. These women were unlikely to have sex with conservative men anyway. To put it bluntly, when Donald Trump wants sex, I presume he goes to his beautiful and glamorous wife. Not to some women with blue hair and facial tatoos that he has never met. The strike doesn't affect him at all.
I saw a post from a woman who was overweight, tatoos on her face, and a ring in her nose, in which she asked, "What do I have to do so that conservative men won't be attracted to me?" And my immediate thought was, Don't worry, you've already got that covered.
These sex strikes always seem to fizzle because they can't get enough women to sign on. For a sex strike to work, they'd have to get the wives or girlfriends of leading opposition political leaders to join the strike. If, say, Mr Trump's wife refused to have sex with him unless he adopted some liberal policy, maybe that would work. Maybe he would cave in. But the wives of (in this case) conservative political leaders are not going to join the sex strike, because they mostly support their husbands' policies.
Liberals commonly make the mistake of thinking that all women (or all black people, etc, but that's not relevant here) are liberal. This just isn't true. This is not a debate between men and women. This is a debate between some men and some women on one side and some men and some women on the other side.
For decades, conservatives have been saying that if you don't want to have a baby, don't have sex. Liberals have replied that this is unnecessarily restrictive. They should be able to have sex whenever and with whomever they want, and if they get pregnant, they can just have an abortion. So now liberal women are saying that in order to prevent getting pregnant and having a baby, they are going to refuse to have sex. Conservatives reply, Yes, good idea.
Others have said, If you had the self-control to refrain from having sex, then you wouldn't need abortion.
How come you never hear of men going on a sex strike, refusing to have sex with women? I'm sure you can easily list the reasons. It's almost as if men and women are different.
In general, more often than not, children grow up to have similar political and social beliefs to their parents. So if this sex strike really takes hold and they really keep it up for years, that means that fewer liberal children will be born, while conservatives continue to have babies. The next generation will skew conservative. The plan seems self-defeating.
© 2025 by Jay Johansen
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