Women stop having sex so that men will stop fighting wars. And, unusually, sex strikes are proposed all the time - whether or not there is any follow through is an entirely different story. The article gives a few examples, citing places like Kenya and Colombia (where women stopped having sex to get the government to pave a road connecting them to the city) as a few locations where this has happened. Another great example is Belgium.
Now, relating this back to the Reader, we've been talking about the right to sex, age of consent laws and the generation gap between Michael and Hanna. What right does Hanna have to sex, does Michael have to sex, and do the men fighting for their nation have to sex? A movement purely designed to stop a war through withholding sex highlights the societal value of sex, not only to men, but also to women.
Age of consent laws can, arguably, be put in place to protect innocence and inhibit bad decision making. But, in cases with Michael and Hanna, one can argue that Michael was mature enough to make his own choice and pursue his right to have sex with whoever he wants. What place does the government have in regulating sex? Or, even more interestingly, how can sex - more specifically, a sex strike - affect a government or militia, and its actions? These women are exercising their right to have sex by not having it, hoping it'll change the world - or at least end a war.
This is the first time I've ever heard of women withholding sex from men as a political tactic. While it's great that women can have that sort of pull in ending wars and conflicts, it's really sad that they have to withhold sex to get their voices heard. It really goes to show that women are only valued as sex objects in many cultures.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of The Reader, I'd argue that both Michael and Hanna have the right to have sex. Michael was 15 at the time he met Hanna, which is young, but not young enough to be unaware of his body and his desires. I reject the idea that he was being taken advantage of because of his age; if he was truly being taken advantage of, he wouldn't have wanted to go back to Hanna's apartment day after day. He was fully capable of deciding what was right for himself.
Personally, I think government should have as little a role as possible in regulating sex. Age of Consent Laws work in theory for protecting the young and the innocent from being taken advantage of and abused, but they're also pointless in that one does not automatically become able to consent the day they turn a certain age. What I mean is, the age of consent may be 16 for a girl in some places, but that doesn't mean that the day of her 16th birthday a girl miraculously becomes able to decide what's right for her. Perhaps she developed quicker than others and felt that she was able to make the decision to have sex at 14.
I think applying the idea of withholding sex from men to win a war is really interesting and a good tactic (however skewed I think that is and how badly it reflects our society) but in the context of World War II I don't think it would have worked -- for Germany, at least. Many of the camps had brothels, in which female prisoners would have sex with the guards in order to survive for longer amounts of time. If the wives of the SS Guards were to withhold sex, it probably wouldn't have been a problem because there was a steady supply of prisoners to rape. Maybe it would have been more successful on the actual German Soldiers who fought the war -- a good incentive to stop fighting a war that they knew they were going to lose.