Mrs Samira Ahmed, an ex-university professor in Sudan, has launched a sex-strike in an attempt to end the 19 years of (un)civil war that have torn the country apart. The newspapers went into their usual routines about Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 bc) – and, as usual, got it wrong.
In Lysistrata, we are regularly told, the women of Greece are persuaded to refuse to sleep with their husbands in an attempt to end the Athens-Sparta war that had begun in 431 bc; as a result, the sex-starved men, sporting huge erections all day, give in and the war ends. This is true as far as it goes, but in fact the sex-strike is only the half of it. The women of Athens also seize the Acropolis, where the financial reserves were kept, and ‘manfully’ protect it against counter-attack from the elderly chorus (the only men left in Athens); and the women of Sparta repeat the trick there.
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