Variation on a theme from Aristophanes

by David Benjamin

“… Without sex what will happen to our great State?

Democracy will end if we can’t copulate.… ”

—Aristophanes, Lysistrata

MADISON, Wis.— It’s a dubious distinction to occupy a province in which, by the decree of white Judges Sam and Amy, John and Brett, along with America’s foremost Self-Hating Negro, abortion has been summarily banned, regardless of sexual assault, medical urgency or dead mothers.

But here we are. On, Wisconsin!

As America’s Dairyland—where oleomargarine once held the same weird verboten status as reproductive health services—adapts to the new abnormal, the time has come to dilate and curette all the righteous verbiage. What was once a political football has become a life-and-death struggle. 

And we must ask ourselves: What causes abortions?

The answer: Pregnant women (and the occasional ten-year-old girl).

But this is not quite the crux, is it? Because inquiring virgins will want to know: What causes pregnancy in women?

The answer: sex.

Here we are. 

As a guy, I’m acutely aware of the dilemma that has defined my existence since about the age of thirteen. Into my eighth decade on this fecund and menstrual planet, carnal symptoms haunt me still. Like all the other guys, I cannot escape or stifle a primal urge from which all human anguish flows.

Men just gotta get laid. 

That’s why we exist. We are rutting stags and intertwined earthworms. Getting laid governs our every action and warps our every perception. We know better but we can’t help ourselves. The consequence of this fatal male flaw is dire and life-altering.

When men get laid, women get pregnant. 

If women didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t get pregnant, whither abortion? More important, where would all those pious, passionate and occasionally homicidal pro-lifers go? Without the “unborn” to save, would Christian zealots shift their ardor to… wait! What did Jesus say about actual live, post-fetal, born mozniks? “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me…”

Do these people really want to take care of somebody else’s unwanted kids?

Rhetorical questions, of course. But as long as I’m waxing hypothetical, here’s a poser that merits another ounce of rhetoric. What if women—the ones with a conscious stake in their bodily integrity—deployed what might be termed the “nuclear option”? What if they made clear to the male arbiters of vaginal traffic—guys like Ken Paxton in Texas, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin—that they’re not gonna get laid? I mean, ever again. And what if this boycott applied also to their male offspring, and their old fraternity brothers, all the guys down at the biker bar and every male member of the Country Club, regardless of handicap. 

All men.

This is not exactly wild conjecture. It’s been pretty clearly proven, over the past five or six millennia, that women can either do without sex pretty much indefinitely or, in a pinch, they can do it (more hygienically) with one another. Men can be made superfluous far more easily than women. 

What if, in protest to Dobbs v. Jackson, women took up the banner of Nancy Reagan and just said “No”? Picture a nation in which millions of horny guys wander the streets every night, trolling bars and beauty salons, locking antlers and lying about vasectomies—as they seek that rare, single, promiscuous woman who disdains contraception and opposes abortion universally, even in cases of rape, incest, preeclampsia, ectopic implantation and fatal sepsis. 

Think of it. Legendary “ladies men”—like James Bond, Tom Jones, Tony DiNozzo—would be hard-up and SOL. Casanova himself would be reduced to lingerie catalogs and pre-Dobbs internet porn.

Of course, as you know, this is hardly a fresh notion. We have guidance dating all the way back to 411 BC, when Aristophanes’ comedy, Lysistrata, posed a solution to the Peloponnesian War. Women from two opposing Greek cities gave their men a choice: make war or make love. Lysistrata, the chief plotter, devised an oath for all the anti-war women of Greece: “I will not allow either lover or husband to approach me in a state of erection, and I will live at home in unsullied chastity, wearing my saffron gown and my sexiest make-up to inflame my husband’s ardor. But I will never willingly yield myself to him.”

Aristophanes had the hardly difficult but trenchant insight that guys want it, need it, gotta have it more than girls do. He suggested convincingly that—when all else fails and politics remains a male monopoly—girl-power boils down to being just too tired, having a headache and denying nookie ’til you get what you’re asking for. Alas, women have exercised this prerogative erratically and, except in ancient Greek drama, never applied it en masse, as a movement.

In their traditional roles as sex toys, homebodies, breeders and mommies, women have enjoyed scant access to a public sphere in which they might join with their sisters “in numbers too big to ignore.” Lysistrata’s lament rings down through history: “’Tis not easy you know, for a woman to leave the house. One is busy pottering about her husband. Another is getting the servant up. A third is putting her child asleep or washing the brat or feeding it.” 

But times, as Aristophanes would suggest today, are a-changin’. Unlike in ancient Athens or Sparta, where a woman’s “whole life’s but a pile of kisses and babies,” women in America in the 20th century attained options. No longer were women in the prime of their lives sequestered—Aristophanes again—“in the retirement of the household, clad in diaphanous garments of yellow silk and long flowing gowns, decked out with flowers and shod with dainty little slippers.” Since 1789, women’s rights have gone forth and multiplied, prominent among which is a woman’s power to control what goes in and comes out between her thighs.

Oops! Until the 24th of June. As state after state and male after male—bolstered by the pinched connivance of sanctimonious baby-factories like Amy Coney Barrett—seek to revoke that profoundly human and uniquely feminine right, the vow of Lysistrata deserves to ring from sea to shining sea.

Relegated to second-class citizenship by the Trump Court, every self-respecting woman today—along with all her sisters—is rightfully entitled to set her jaw, put on a pair of comfortable shoes and cross her legs ’til all the men in her life, and in America, cry “uncle” and defund the womb police. 

Or, to quote the wonderfully quotable Greek dramatist one more time: “All we have to do is idly sit indoors with smooth roses powdered on our cheeks, our bodies burning naked through the fold of shining Amorgos’ silk and meet the men, with our dear Venus-plats plucked trim and neat. Their stirring love will rise up furiously, they’ll beg our arms to open…”