I must start with a word of explanation. Lysistrata was a comic play by Aristophanes in classical Greece, in which the women, in order to stop a war they thought senseless, agreed to not sleep with their men until the war was stopped; I cannot resist the atrocious pun ‘peace or no piece.’
In our culture – and no, I have not wasted the time to sit through endless episodes of Sex and the City, so I have more or less depended on hearsay – young unmarried women spend a lot of time complaining that they cannot get their men to ‘commit.’ Well, why should young men commit, when they already have everything they want from marriage – access to sex, domestic care, etc. – without committing? The church [and at one time the general culture] frankly recommends a Lysistrata-like strategy to deal with this! Instead of withholding sex until the war stops, withhold sex until you get a ring. And if you don’t do this, girl, don’t come whining to me about how your man doesn’t ‘commit.’ I won’t waste time throwing words like ‘slut’ or ‘ho’ around; they don’t help anybody.
When my wife’s grandmother was young, she was on the way back from a dance with her date in a horse and buggy [the personal transport technology of the time] when he started to ‘get fresh,’ as she called it, she slapped him, got out of the buggy, and walked several miles home. And in older movies, a common scene is, if a woman feels sexually harassed by a man, to use today’s language, she slaps his face and bustles out. This sort of scene is very rare in today’s films. Would young women dare to do that today? And who, may I ask, is more liberated? The women of an earlier time, who felt that they could ‘slap ‘em and walk home,’ or today’s women, who don’t feel that they can, and must call on the university or the government for protection?
I think it is men, not women, who have mostly been liberated by the sexual revolution. Men today, when they get a young lady ‘in trouble,’ feel free to disappear and not be victimized by a shotgun wedding. After all, the woman has the option of abortion or of getting a better job than her predecessor and can afford the burden of a child without him. [Young men have one sort of valid excuse: the value of their wages in comparison to women’s has dropped in recent years.] Hugh Hefner certainly did not promote his ‘Playboy Philosophy’ in order to liberate or broaden the prospects of females! And, most polls on the abortion issue show that men and women hold similar views; it is not men that incline to be more pro-life than women, it is married people who are more pro-life than singles. Ya think?
