You can't blame the Belgians for considering radical measures. Their elections were held 243 days ago, politicians still can't agree on forming a government, and as a result, unlikely proposals are being made to end the impasse. It's been suggested men should stop shaving in protest, and this week Socialist senator Marleen Temmerman proposed that age-old remedy: a sex strike. "I call on the spouses of all negotiators to withhold sex until a deal is reached," she says.
Temmerman was inspired partly by Lysistrata, the Greek play in which Arisophanes's heroine calls for women to abstain from sex to end the Peloponnesian war. In the play, the gesture is successful. But the question of whether sex strikes are generally effective calls up mixed, murky results.
In Pereira, Colombia, in 2006, the girlfriends of gang members held a widely publicised "strike of crossed legs" vowing to give up sex until their partners gave up violence. Last year, the city's murder rate saw the steepest decline in Colombia, down by 26.5%. Then in Naples, Italy, in 2008, women formed a similar strike against the notoriously dangerous New Year fireworks displays; in 2011, yet another man died and 70 people were injured at the event. Was one strike a long-term success, one not? It's impossible to say. These aren't, thankfully, the only measures to have been taken against these issues.
One sex strike lauded as a straightforward triumph was held in Kenya in 2009, when women's organisations protested against political infighting. "After just one week there was a stable government," Temmerman says. So are sex strikes the way forward? It seems unlikely. While it's understandable that women might assert political power this way – and a form of sexual control too – in communities where they're marginalised, sex strikes are also clearly problematic, reasserting old ideas of men as sexually predatory and essentially entitled to sex, while women must protect their honour at all costs, and can only effect change through their bodies. Back to the debating chamber, I'm afraid.
