Thank Aristophanes for Poland’s sexuality strike

It’s 411 BC, and Athens has been at war with Sparta for decades. The women are sick of sending their husbands and sons off to die, and one woman has a plan: launch a sex strike to end the war.

Of course, this is pure fantasy (in the original sense). Lysistrata, the title character of Aristophanes’ infamous comedy, never existed, and sadly there is zero evidence of the women of Athens ever using (lack of) sex as a peace tactic. But, as so often happens with literature, Lysistrata has taken on a life of its own, evolving from a lewd comedy into a staple text of Western feminism, and inspiring change that would have left Aristophanes speechless.

In 2009, Kenyan women staged a week-long sex boycott to protest the political impasse of the power-sharing government, with the support of the wives of both the warring Prime Minister and President. In 2012, women in Togo went on sex strike in an attempt to bring down the one-family rule that had gripped the county for four decades. Modern-day Lysistratas from the Philippines to Canada, Turkey to Colombia have taken their lead from Aristophanes’ heroine to fight for political and social change, with varying degrees of success.

The recent protests from Polish women in opposition to a draconian abortion law were different. This was a general strike, with thousands of women in sixty Polish cities boycotting work to march in the streets for their rights over their bodies. These women already live under one of the strictest abortion laws in the world, where termination is only legal in cases of rape, risk of harm to the mother’s life, or in cases of foetal abnormalities. The new law would have seen even those exemptions swept aside, prioritising the rights of the foetus over the life of the mother, with prison sentences for doctors and pregnant women involved in abortions.

So Polish women went on strike, dressing black to mourn their reproductive rights and taking to the streets. They won. For the first time since it was elected in October 2015, the conservative Law and Justice party backtracked, and the new law was defeated 352-58 on Thursday. Victory, of a kind, though safe and legal abortion is still out of reach for the majority of women.

What does this have to do with Aristophanes’ tale of a proud and resourceful stateswoman? In one, women withhold access to their bodies for the sake of national stability. In the other, women disrupt stability for the sake of their bodies. In both, they triumph by catching their adversaries off-guard. In Lysistrata, the concept of women organising a sex strike and taking over the Acropolis (the parliament) is so ludicrous that the Athenian men can’t even contemplate it until it is too late. In Poland, such extreme and effective nationwide resistance clearly came as a total shock to the government, which had expected to push through the legislation easily. The Law and Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski had to cover for the hasty reversal by calling the whole situation a “giant misunderstanding”. There was a misunderstanding all right: women had been expected to stand by and take it. No one seemed to have considered that they might fight back.

There’s a long way to go for women’s rights, in Poland and all over the world, and for every victorious protest there are a dozen others that fail miserably. But what is clear is that when women surprise the opponents who so often ignore them and step out of the domestic sphere en masse, they hold real power – power that stems from the link between female autonomy and social harmony.

Aristophanes was a social conservative, a fantasist, and a brutal satirist. His comedies were funny because they were so bizarrely outlandish that humour was the possible only response. His work was never meant to be taken seriously.

I wonder what he would make of Poland.