Classic example... Arcola Theatre's 2005 production of Lysistrata. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Ever thought of a sex strike? Perhaps not. But the women of Colombia's Pereira clearly have, presumably in the hope of provoking a general downing of tools. In the week's most bizarre news story, it was revealed that the wives and girlfriends of Pereira's mobsters have said that they will not have sex with their partners until they give up violence. In a city with a high murder-rate, this a serious issue; and one only hopes these feisty Pereira feminists can make their macho males see sense and do something about the guns in their pockets.
Apparently the striking women have created their own rap song. Perhaps they should also revive Aristophanes' Lysistrata: the archetypal play about sex strikes. Exasperated by the long drawn-out war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian women occupy the Acropolis and refuse to sleep with their menfolk until peace has been declared. It's both a bawdy comedy and a passionate anti-war play. It also left its mark on our own poet-dramatist, Tony Harrison, who has adapted it twice: the second time as The Common Chorus, showing how the women of Greenham Common were subjected to sexual abuse by the male guards of the Cruise missile.
But just suppose the women of Pereira did revive Lysistrata, what would it teach them?
The message, I fear, is somewhat equivocal. In dramatic terms, the women succeed. Forced to knead their own dough and cope with sexual starvation, the men eventually succumb. Even more subversively, for its time, the play shows that women have far more sense than men when it comes to running state affairs. But, although Aristophanes' play was a powerful metaphor for Athenian anti-war feeling, it did nothing to change the course of history. Women were still excluded from power and the war with Sparta dragged mercilessly on.
In fact, the example of Lysistrata is even more complex than it first appears. We forget now that the play would have been performed originally by a group of travesty-actors. So you'd have had a bunch of men dressed as women playing presumably to a large group of Athenian males. Would the whole thing have been treated as a stag-night joke? Or did Athenian blokes go home to their wives and honestly report what they had seen? Obviously we shall never know.
I still wish the women of Pereira well. Clearly there is one big problem which people are too polite to talk about: that a sex strike, like any other industrial action, can only work if it is total. And I guess that in Pereira, as elsewhere, if men can't get sex at home, they will find alternative sources of supply. But it is still an idealistic gesture by a group of dedicated women. "What about Pereira?" asks a character in TS Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes. What indeed? It is clearly a place of gutsy women who have created what they call "a strike of crossed legs" in order to get men to lay down their arms.
