Blog Post #3

A logical and intelligent person who reads this play can appreciate the plan that Lysistrata comes up. She decides that the women should go on a sex strike to end the war in Greece and reunite the country. The thought of this plan can be appreciated because it is a nonviolent way to end a war which has obviously brought upon violence in Greece. If it were to work, Lysistrata could be compared to the likes of the American civil rights activist, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Indian nationalist leader, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more commonly known as Mahatma Gandhi. Similarly to these two great activist, Lysistrata figures out a nonviolent solution to the current war in Greece and for that a reader can respect and appreciate that.

Unfortunately, when further analyzed, her plan has some flaws in it. In the play, the women complain that they haven’t seen their husbands due to the war. This means they are no longer at home. Therefore a sex strike wouldn’t have any effect on these men. Even if the men were home, just as Myrrhine had wanted to do before the Milesians revolted and made it impossible to buy a masturbation tool from the open market, the men could find other solutions like masturbation or prostitutes. Looking at the plan isolated from the issue of the war, a sex strike would still be a very successful way to deal with a problem dealing with men, as long as they are actually at home.