Ah, Aristophanes! How well you understood the martial excesses of your times, and how delightfully did you sketch the true power that need only assert itself in the face of patriarchal ambitions to grasp its ultimate power in this world.
For twenty-five long years during the last of the fifth century b.c.e. the Athenian democracy fought the Spartan oligarchy over the shape and nature of the ancient world. The endless war sucked away the wealth and strength – and sons – of the city-states and territories and spread civil strife throughout the Aegean region. Originally staged in Athens in 411 b.c.e. – seven years before the end of the war – Aristophanes’ brilliant and funny Lysistrata was so popular it still serves as a humorous reminder nearly 2500 years later that the ultimate power of life and continuance, the power men most fear above all things, belongs to women.
Most of us are familiar with the plot line of Lysistrata, how she rallied the women of Athens to seize the Acropolis and convinced the women of Sparta to join in a Sex Strike to bring an end to the conflict. The sex strike theme has been borrowed here and there, and the play recast in modern, more feminist terms many times during the 20th century, and staged every year since 2003 (beginning with an Iraq peace protest) in the 21st. Yet here we are all these centuries later, suffering a new patriarchal shove-down of women’s rights and power by a fearful warrior class and the government that commands them into endless wars for the profit of soul-less oligarchs.
The Stupak amendment is the final insult for me. I have NO reason to believe the misshapen, grotesquely immoral oligarchs in D.C. when they claim they didn’t ‘mean’ to strip us of a long-enshrined constitutional right to privacy for our own bodies and important health decisions when they voted this abomination into the HCR bill. Thus I have NO reason to believe their lying lips when they claim it will never make it to the final law. I would have to be a much bigger fool than I already am to play along with that sort of pure garbage at this point in time – Congress does nothing by accident.