No Sex or No War ?

 Aristophanes "Lysistrata" is a play about a woman who unlike the others, wishes for peace and takes action. She thinks up a brilliant plan to stop the war and have all the men come back home to their wives. To do so she gathered up all the women and told them her idea to go on a strike to stop having sex until the men stop the war for good and make peace. Although at first, they did not think it was a good idea, eventually they all vowed to not be sexually active until their husbands give up and end the war. Eventually the men did decide to give up and wanted to resolve the war. But towards the end of this play, it got to be ironic.

Since old Greek plays such as this one viewed women to be lower than men in society, Aristophanes made this particular play about war and the main character in it was indeed a woman. Although this play was actually acted by all men who played as women, Arisophanes message in the play was that war was ridiculous and in order to have peace, one must step up and try to end the war. To do so, he made the hero a woman (Lysistrata) who also symbolized how ridiculous the war was since women themselves were thought to be unimportant to anything, especially wars. I find that kind of interesting and offensive at the same time because of the fact that women were thought out to be ridiculous and that was what helped make the play comedic.

I thought the play was unique because it shows the masculinity of a woman through her actions. While others stayed home, took care of the kids, house work, and pleased their husbands. Lysistrata wanted to take some kind of action by forcing herself and convincing others to stop having sex and be stronger in will than the men, she succeeded by showing herself and the other women as to being stronger and men were weaker. This sends out the message that women are not just sex objects or house wives, but they can be good for something as well as the men. Lysistrata made a commitment and stuck to it.

The play had an ironic ending because during the meeting that the Athenians had with Spartans, The men were all more concerned about the naked woman. They treated her as an object or as property rather than a human, even though Lysistrata proved to them that they are weaker than the women and her genius plan did work, they have changed their views about women, which until today still exist.

Although I did not find most of the scenes to be funny, I am amazed of how the stereotypes about women viewed in this play still reflect some of the stereotypes viewed today. Women are still viewed lower than men, and the man will always be viewed as the bread winner, no matter how successful the woman in the family is. This is because that is how society has always analyzed women to be. For example, in the play, the women were concerned about their appearance and until this day, women are still expected to look good and pay more attention to their appearance than men. Even in popular movies such as “Transformers”, the women who are supposed to look strong also have to look sexy for the camera. This was in the article called “Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women” I found the articles to be quite interesting because they match exactly the stereotypical views of a woman. I also find it interesting how sex strikes are still going on today like in countries like Kenya in the articles “Kenya: Men Start 30 Day Sex strike” or “Kenya: Women Go On Sex Strike.”  I don’t think these stereotypes will not change anytime soon. They lasted since many centuries ago, and will probably continue to go on for the many years to come because it has become as a law of society.