Content Warning: This article contains references to sexual assault.
At Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, where I work as a student tour guide, the current exhibit “Picture Worlds” emphasizes how the Western world takes much of its cultural influence from ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Unlike women of the ancient world, the modern American liberal woman is empowered: She can vote for a biracial female presidential candidate and have casual sex. But like women of the ancient world, when political upset becomes enraging, she can turn to a sex strike. The Greeks first introduced this tool in the play “Lysistrata,” showcasing women who, despite being ravenous for intercourse, withheld their carnal desires to convince their husbands to end the Trojan War.
“Everything is Erotic,” my sex column inspired by Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic is, in many ways, inherently political. Lorde notes that when desire is oppressed, the erotic is feared and confined to the bedroom because, if fully recognized, there is no more powerful leverage than one’s connection with their sense of the erotic. Recently, TikTok clips, op-eds and discourse have surfaced about the 4B movement, a feminist protest movement beginning in South Korea that encourages women to abstain from sex, dating, childbirth and marriage with men.
Women and female-identifying people in the United States are engaging in the sex strike because, like ancient Greek women, they are enraged. Liberal American women are enraged at male partners and family members who voted for a candidate in direct opposition to female empowerment and bodily autonomy. These women are enraged that Vice President Kamala Harris may have lost partly because she is a woman and President-elect Donald Trump won despite numerous women accusing him of sexual harassment and abuse. The 4B movement’s sex strike seeks to punish men for their ideological failings, and while many critics contend that this notion will further prevent productive discourse with Republican men and alienate Democratic men, both proponents and opponents of the 4B movement have missed the radical underpinning. The proposed sex strike is counterproductive and a fallacy of female empowerment simply because it operates through the male gaze.
Sex has long been a political tool, but if straight women do not decolonize their sexuality from the heterosexual male gaze, a sex strike has little merit. One’s sense of the erotic should not exist in relation to another person. In the 4B movement, women imagine themselves as valuable to men for their sexuality, but that detracts from the goal of cultivating sexuality as an independent entity. Moreover, if the men the sex strike aims to punish voted against reproductive agency — for a man accused of sexual harassment and abuse — this demographic does not value women’s consent or their withdrawal of it.
The sex strike gets sex wrong: Sex can be exactly what a lot of people might want following the election. The act of sex should not be pathologized because of misplaced rage as a means to mobilize. Moreover, the strike fails to include communities that are not straight or female-identifying. My problem with these sentiments about mobilization, which major newspaper editorials echoed following Election Day, is that American liberalism projects a fallacy of radical activism. In reality, American liberalism subscribes to the very capitalist concept that individuals wield power. This is true to an extent, of course: Voting, for example, is representative of fulfilling one’s duty to American democracy. Everyone should vote — it is a fundamental democratic process. However, the rhetoric of individual responsibility can go too far, promoting feelings of political burnout and election exhaustion, and the response to continue mobilizing only perpetuates an exhausting cycle of self-inflicted investment. Those encouraging a sex strike seek to bridge political anger with their erotic lives, but giving up sex is inherently subscribing to the ideal that the most sacred parts of our inner lives — rest, intimacy, pleasure — is tied to making a statement on state affairs and political systems.
Sex is a commodity that men accrue to gain value in the social hierarchy. A sex strike represents a cessation of labor and a method of removing oneself from patriarchal expectations. Critiquing a strike through the lens of productive labor is therefore inherently confounding because this promotes the strike as a means to contribute to democracy in some way. To be in touch with one’s erotic is to think outside of prescribed frameworks, and to rest is to question if we should be instilling the majority of our work in a system that disappoints, even if the candidate of choice wins.
Decolonizing the erotic and detaching it from mobilization is inherently anticapitalist and, as Lorde says,“the principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need.” A compelling take on the sex strike from The Guardian emphasizes that outside of sex, maybe women need to strike completely — against careers, driving kids to school and all forms of emotional labor. While I see the validity in this, only weeks have passed since the country received the results of the 2024 presidential election. Pushing back against the rhetoric to mobilize compels an unlearning of personal investment in democracy. In doing so, we are able to question our roles of labor, challenging what we desire of our political institutions, intimate relations and beyond.
The sex strike outside of the male gaze can operate as intentional celibacy. This term differs from abstinence within the male gaze because of the emphasis on voluntarily withholding from sex instead of being expected to do so. Memoirist Melissa Febos writes that, after about a year of celibacy, the “sensual relationship to all the other aspects of [her] life deepened.” Choosing celibacy for oneself instead of in relation to men has the power to evoke reflections about everything from political investment to subscription to hetero-patriarchal ideals. However, abstaining from sex as a form of male punishment is inherently performative, as many straight women feel the need to perform during sex. Ask yourself: Who are you striking against sex for, and why? If a proposed sex strike centers mobilization as a means of empowerment, I offer the consideration that rest, in the form of celibacy or deleting your media applications, is both revolutionary and erotic.
Contact Saanvi Nayar at saanvi.nayar@emory.edu.
If you or someone you know experienced sexual assault, you can access Emory’s Title IX resources at 404-727-0541 or https://equityandcompliance.emory.edu/title-ix/index.html and the Office of Respect at https://respect.emory.edu/ or their hotline 24/7 at (404) 727-1514. You can reach the RAINN National Sexual Assault hotline 24/7 at (800) 656-4673 or https://hotline.rainn.org/online. You can reach the Atlanta Grady Rape Crisis Center crisis hotline 24/7 at (404) 616-4861 or gradyrapecrisiscenter@gmh.edu and the Decatur Day League Sexual Assault Care and Prevention crisis hotline 24/7 at (404) 377-1428.
