The Sex Strike, a form of resistance.

The first time I heard of a Sex strike, I was eleven years old, sitting in front of the tv, watching the news with my parents. The news echoed the peaceful protest organized by the librarian women in the form of a sex strike in 2002. The protest was indented to push the regime of Charles Taylor in power at this time to integrate women in the negotiation process for peace, which ends up being a success. This protest was initiated by Leymah Gbowee, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2011.


Leymah Gbowee: “The men in our society were really not taking a stance. … We decided to do a sex strike to kind of propelling these silent men into action.”
https://www.registerguard.com/news/20190212/nobel-peace-prize-winner-leymah-gbowee-to-speak-at-uo-friday

So what is precisely the concept of a Sex strike? According to Wikipedia, sex strike or sex boycott is a method of non-violent resistance, in which one or more people voluntarily deprive themselves of all sexual practices with their partner (s) for achieving certain goals. This type of resistance has been used throughout history by Women as a temporary but a militant tool to bend the patriarchal power in which they evolve. It has been used in:
- Togo in 2012 to compel men to invest more in the opposition protest movement against the regime of the president Faure Gnassingbe,
- Kenya in 2008  to push the dialogue between the country's President, Mwai Kibaki and the Prime Minister Raila Odinga,
- Belgium in 2011 where a Belgium senator called for a sex strike to compel the country to form a new government

In a more recent period, the American actress, Alyssa Milano, called for a sex strike to protest strict abortion laws earlier this year.

Historians even found some proof of the use of such strategy in the ancient time, 411 years before j-c, by a Greek female comedian Lysistrata. Women through time have used sex strike to defend and claim rights or decisions generally in the seek of the wellbeing of the overall society. This strategy falls under what Hamdan-Saliba, Fenster (2012, July) categorized as pro-active tactics since it is indented to change an urgent situation with a method that is sure pacific, irredeemably aggressive in the eyes of men. Pro-active resistance includes the reclamation of meaningful space. In this case,  women take ownership of their bodies as a place and refine the rules that will be in effect in this space. It is interesting to see how a woman can use an instrument that is usually employed by the patriarchy to subvert them as a tool to fight this very patriarchy. Conversely, when looking at these stories, I paradoxically wonder if men can use sex strike as a protest strategy.




Hamdan-Saliba, H., & Fenster, T. (2012, July). Tactics and strategies of power: The construction of spaces of belonging for Palestinian women in Jaffa–Tel Aviv. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 203-213). Pergamon.

https://qz.com/958346/history-shows-that-sex-strikes-are-a-surprisingly-effective-strategy-for-political-change/

https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2012/08/28/greve-du-sexe-au-togo-un-procede-deja-teste-avec-plus-ou-moins-de-reussite_1751986_3212.html

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%A8ve_du_sexe

https://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/27/liberian_nobel_peace_prize_laureate_leymah