Lysistrata

Grow_peace_in_Bedlam · 2025-02-27T21:13:01+00:00

I have not read it (but I should), but I understand that the women in the play are portrayed as very much enjoying sex themselves and therefore struggle very hard not to break the strike. Can anyone who's read it confirm or deny this?

IcyTrapezium · 2025-02-28T15:36:45+00:00

Women aren’t stingy gatekeepers of sex in this play at all. One of the other running jokes in the play is that women are incredibly horny and can’t keep the strike up. That’s a running theme in the play with women being described as needing sex like Plants need water.

It’s interesting that aspect of it is often ignored by people who don’t read it.

RapaxIII · 2025-02-27T18:17:59+00:00

Men are having less sex than ever before and the desire to go to war only comes from people in the govt trying to scare us into it, not average men on the ground. Lysistrata gets invoked a lot nowadays, especially in the context of Roe v. Wade case, but lack of access to sex doesn't make you want to go and kill people like women claim.

Ironically, the men most likely to go to war (or fall prey to propaganda) have a wife and kids, they'll defend the system they think is providing them security in their life

MyUpSeemsDown · 2025-02-28T10:33:11+00:00

LOL I guess it's parallel reinforcement to what we know at least in whatever little perspectives I can think of. For example, women being picky or the "stingy gatekeeper" is kind of iterated through evobiology where because pregnancy is costly for women they kinda have to be stingy gatekeepers. Even for other species, males have to do all the wooing shit before they're selected by females. And it isn't uncommon where even now days, variation of such notion is told as a joke by comedians and in the media, so it's pretty funny to see such notion echos back that far.

Realistically, I think there's many justifiable reasons why someone doesn't want to have sex in an instance, not everyone just wants to fuck all the time. But isolating the action of just "withholding sex with motive" I think definitely has more room for it to be interpreted as a negative. I can never see myself having a meltdown because I'm not getting laid, but also hypothetically it'd definitely prompt me to break off from that relationship because it indicates their willingness to try to manipulate just to have it their way. With sex at that, like you really think that highly of yourself and your sexual prowess when my left hand can do the same thing that you can? 🤣🤣🤣

Electric_Death_1349 · 2025-02-27T17:46:37+00:00

No - it just proves that, for women, relationships have always been transactional

Outside_Memory5703 · 2025-02-27T19:46:31+00:00

Irl husbands punish wives who don’t fuck them. That’s why it’s a comedy

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DGenerationMC · 2025-02-27T19:13:17+00:00

I'd just want to see their faces if/when it's proven to not be wholly true.

"I know what it's like to lose. To feel so desperately that you're right, yet to fail nonetheless. It’s frightening. Turns the legs to jelly. I ask you, to what end?"

Master-Watercress567 · 2025-02-27T20:26:20+00:00

I think we have a tendency to forget that our forbears were humans who felt the exact same things we did, with a few cultural differences.

AidsVictim · 2025-02-28T07:24:56+00:00

Does this historical record change the way people think about modern dating?

The modern world is too radically different for it to have much relevance.

abaxeron · 2025-02-28T10:00:46+00:00

Aristophanes is the original redpiller; I haven't read Lysistrata specifically, but have seen quite close-to-original play of Assemblywomen / Women in Parliament. Made me laugh: as soon as women assume full control of the polis, two well-off fellas in age gap marriages share their fears that their vigorous wives will now deny them breakfast if they don't give enough sex. At the end, women basically institute communism (making a city-feeding ultra-huge mega-pizza, or in Jefferson's version, "limpets and saltfish and sharksteak and dogfish and mullets and oddfish with savory pickle sauce and thrushes with blackbirds and various pigeons and roosters and pan-roasted wagtails and larks and nice chunks of hare marinated in mulled wine and all of it drizzled with honey and silphium and vinegar, oil and spices galore", except in Greek it was all in one word), which was considered a hilarious punchline.

Does this historical record change the way people think about modern dating?

Not sure if you mean the sex strike, or the fact that it never happened; what this play does show, is that women (not_all) largely don't understand systemic reasons behind wars. Which I think is also the biggest joke of this play, that their (wrong) assumption (that if only men put this pent-up energy somewhere else...) ends up working.

ThisBoringLife · 2025-02-28T16:13:22+00:00

I believe Spike Lee made a modern film on this: Chi-raq.

I think the main issue is that both men and women, particularly the attractive ones, can gatekeep sex. However, I think the "war" here couldn't be resolved by abstaining from sex.

As for actual wars now, I highly doubt women on both sides would agree to hold off from sex to coerce their men to stop fighting.

The_Forgotten001 · 2025-03-02T10:09:57+00:00

It goes in line with the greek play Assemblywomen which in my opinion is currently playing out.

TidyMess24 · 2025-02-27T21:45:56+00:00

You do realize that when we are talking about ancient Greek theater that comedy doesn't mean the same thing as when we use to describe movies, right? Comedy doesn't mean haha-funny, it's just the opposite of tragedy.

Makuta_Servaela · 2025-02-27T18:31:40+00:00

Does this historical record change the way people think about modern dating?

I'm not sure how it would. As long as we've had marry-for-life monogamy, we've had this issue, this perspective that men want to obtain women for sex and women gatekeep sex with their icky "lack of consent" and "security in their own bodies", etc. Virtually no other social mammal that lives as long as we do have for-life monogamy. For-life monogamy is usually for the mammals that live less than 20 years.

Because we've been acting so unnaturally for so long, and our bodies know we are acting unnaturally, we feel weird. That weirdness makes its way into our media.

berichorbeburied · 2025-02-27T17:51:54+00:00

Ima be completely honest
I fully believe and think that sexual attraction
Is way more important than sex
So
Men back in those times probably didn’t know about true sexual attraction
And only knew about relative sexual attraction
Because there’s no way for someone that’s a man to not understand that sex in itself is not an actual fulfilling or pleasurable thing
It’s the act of being sexually attracted to and wanting and desiring a woman while fucking her that’s fulfilling
I’ve known women who’ve masterbated to nothing. No thoughts. No looking at anything
Also women like to feel sex instead of the sexual attraction and lust and looks and etc parts
I’ve said all this to say
That the narrative of men only wanting sex
Is a female perspective at best
And the perspective of a man whose never had sex or never seen a truly sexually attractive woman At worst

Title	Lysistrata
Author	Fancy-Statistician82
Upvotes	10
Comments	77
Date	February 27, 2025 5:12 PM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/1izkvj5/lysistrata/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/lysistrata.1545118 https://theredarchive.com/post/1545118

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