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Why you should give up on American men
I’m not just being Laconian.
Lysistrata is a play authored by Aristophanes about women ending the Peloponnesian War by withholding sex from their husbands and lovers. Aristophanes was no feminist and the ancient Greek world including Sparta — regardless of what you may infer from Ubisoft — was hardly a panacea for women. This is however, one of at least two plays where Aristophanes uses the role of women in Athenian society to question and ridicule the behaviour of men.
In the play, Athenian and Spartan women make an agreement not to have sex with their men until they end the war between their two city states. The conceit is that at their absolute base, men desire only sex and will become desperate and malleable if it is withheld. Now, if it were as simple as all that, then the Peloponnesian War may have gone very differently, but the idea was that women though they could have no voice in politics and in Athens hold no property, they did have this singular power.
But let us return to the modern era. As silly as Aristophanes was intentionally trying to be — at the *ahem* climax of the play he wrote a scene where the character of Myrrhine extracts a promise form her husband Kinesias to end the war, but because she has only his word proceeds to continually delay sex with him by finding she needs to go and…
