Framing the Liberian women’s protest in terms of Aristophanes is, Morales argues, unhelpful – “a distorting mirror that reduces women to bodies and complex political action to titillation”. In fact, as the Nobel laureate pointed out in her memoir, quoted here by Morales: “The truth is that the greatest weapons of the Liberian women’s movement were moral clarity, persistence and patience.” The sex strike, though attention grabbing, formed a tiny part of the struggle. Activist Leymah Gbowee was labelled the “Liberian Lysistrata” after the western press picked up on the fact that the women’s movement in Liberia had staged such a strike in its efforts to end the civil war in 2002. Lysistrata, performed by a male cast to a (probably) largely male audience, is a comedic fantasy, not a feminist call to armsīut the play, performed by a male cast to a (probably) largely male audience is a comedic fantasy, not a feminist call to arms. This idea is often identified as deriving from Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of war-plagued Greece decide to withhold sex from their men until peace is established.

One passage, for example, deals with the sex strike as a tool of resistance. Morales does not write only about stories from mythology as such, but also about the myths the modern world has created from classical texts. The subtitle is “The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths”.

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