Almost three weeks after the triumphant re-election of Donald Trump, the American left is still raging. In their quest to avoid self-reflection, Democrats and their lackeys in the legacy media have tried every argument in the book to explain the horror that lies before them.
The wheels really come off the chariot, though, when you realize that Lysistrata and her comrades actually enjoy the company of their men.
Radical feminists have now seized upon this moment, seeking to mold it into something through which they can exercise some power. Inspired by South Korea’s “4B Movement,” they have started calling for American women to avenge themselves on the evil MAGA men in their lives by refusing to date, marry, have sex, or bear children. (In Korean, the word “no” [as in “no sex”] begins with “bi” [“bisekseu”]. Thus, the “4Bs.” Those brave enough to endure a direct look at this phenomenon can click here.)
Calls for political “sex strikes” are not new; the radfems made similar threats in both 2019 and 2022 to protest having to accept some basic limitations on their “right” to murder inconvenient children. To understand why these efforts are doomed to failure, we need to look at their origin story, which just happens to be one of the classics of Western literature.
Aristophanes wrote his play Lysistrata in Athens during the waning years of the Peloponnesian War. When it was first performed in 411 B.C., the Athenians had suffered horrendous losses in their disastrous invasion of Sicily at the hands of the Spartans and their allies. Like all comedians (at least until very recently), Aristophanes sought to alleviate his fellow citizens’ pain by making them laugh at their precarious situation.
In the play, the title character plans to stop the war by convincing the women of Athens and other city-states to refuse to fulfill their duties (sexual and otherwise) to their husbands. Raunchy mayhem ensues as the old men of Athens engage in a hilarious war of double entendres with their wives, who seize control of the Acropolis in an early version of Seattle’s CHAZ protest.
Despite many obstacles (most notably horny dissension in Lysistrata’s feminist ranks), the plan actually works. Lysistrata negotiates a settlement (again the double entendres fly) and the two sides end up drunk as skunks singing a hymn to the goddess Peace (actually a distractingly naked female slave).
Comedies, whether ancient or modern, are usually grounded in their time and place. Lysistrata, however, transcends those limits because Aristophanes understood a basic human truth: the relationship between the sexes can be both serious business and incredibly funny.
Sadly, because they have no sense of humor, our current Lysistratas have mistaken the play for a political manifesto. Their first error is also the first sign of bad comedy: poor timing. The women of Athens made their move when the war with Sparta was still raging, while the radfems only pulled out their (anti-)trump card when the battle was already over. Perhaps if they had spent less time preferring bears to men and swooning over Doug Emhoff, they wouldn’t have missed their cue.
Then there’s the problem of recruiting enough women to the cause. For Lysistrata, convincing women to take the oath in the opening of the play was like pulling teeth and keeping women from sneaking off the Acropolis for a quickie was even more difficult. What hope can the radfems have for such gender unity in a country where 52 percent of white women voted for Trump and conservative women have promised a baby-making counter-protest?
The wheels really come off the chariot, though, when you realize that Lysistrata and her comrades actually enjoy the company of their men. There’s a reason why both the cast of the play and the audience breathe a huge sigh of relief when the peace is signed; the natural complementarity of male and female has been restored.
The same cannot be said for the radfems, whose hatred of men is well-documented. The most recent example of this contempt was the infamous “Your Vote, Your Choice” commercial which encouraged the wives of Trump supporters to vote for Harris instead, implying that the secrecy of the voting booth would protect them from spousal abuse. This insult to over half of American men virtually ensures that they won’t mind when the radfems no longer want to snuggle.
There is one area where Aristophanes’ work and the radfem ethos connect, though it is no laughing matter. About halfway through the play, Lysistrata negotiates with an unnamed Athenian magistrate. As the talks collapse, Lysistrata reveals her views on political and cultural power:
MAGISTRATE: Such awful oppression never, O never in the past yet I bore.
LYSISTRATA: You must be saved, sirrah—that’s all there is to it.
MAGISTRATE: If we don’t want to be saved?
LYSISTRATA: All the more.
All the pious claims these women make about the loss of their rights are just stage dressing; control and the pleasure that comes with it are the real goals behind this Americanized 4B fad, even if that control and pleasure do more harm than good to society.
Try as they might, radical feminists cannot escape their authoritarian impulses. As such, these women feel compelled to “save” Trump voters from the mistake they made on Election Day and withholding their charms is now the only way they can think of to do so. But as with so much else on the left, the pretend chastity they claim to aspire to replaces virtue with virtue signaling, a move that makes them the real joke.
READ MORE from Robert Busek:
Is the Educational Establishment Finally Starting to Crack?
The post Radical Feminists Misread ‘Lysistrata’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
