Peta, Lysistrata and the comedy of a sex strike

The German branch of the ‘green’ organisation Peta (‘People for the ethical treatment of animals’) is demanding that, until men stop eating meat – apparently they cause 41 per cent more pollution than female carnivores – women must deny them sex. The same sanction had its origin, of course, in Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata (411 bc), staged during the war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), just after Athens had suffered a disastrous defeat in a failed attempt on Sicily.

Naturally, an organisation like Peta might well think the play was in earnest. Was not Lysistrata proposing a noble, female-instigated sex-strike, by the women of both sides, to stop a war? Had she not organised the women to seize control of their state’s treasuries, ending any chance of military operations? All this surely represented a serious, female liberationist, anti-war agenda.

Not quite. In the absence of the men fighting at the front, the sex strike was difficult enough to execute anyway, and besides, it had as little appeal to the women of the comedy who were (as usual) depicted as sex-crazed; and no band of women, however ‘manly’, could hope to overpower men guarding the treasuries. Nor did the women actually wish to be ‘liberated’; what they wanted was the return of normal family life and the pleasures of peace, conjugal love and domestic bliss. Movingly, Lysistrata described how women were doubly cursed, having their children sent into battle while being deprived of their husbands, leaving them to a lonely old age, ‘clutching at any sign of hope’. Nor did the comedy express any sentiments about the futility of war. The women, for very good reasons, just wanted an end to this war.

So the whole thing is a fantasy, the males groaning under the weight of gigantic erections, the women bossing the frustrated men about and eventually forcing them to make peace. Further, it is extremely funny – just the tonic that Athenians needed at this desperate time.

Peta may feel in communion with animals, but it is decidedly green in its understanding of human behaviour.