The Lysistratan Agenda

In the comfort of his Noe Valley condo, Anthony slips out of his clothes and onto his couch. He turns off the lights and zaps on the adult entertainment cable channel. Lysistrata, ⁵⁹ a 1968 porno film, fills the darkness. Positioned for excitement, Anthony fixes on the man­hating heroine as she gently seduces her female friends. Ultimately Lysistrata is sexually betrayed, she stabs her female lovers and herself to death, and Anthony is spent.

The link between political power, war, and sex is as old as politics itself. Indeed, it is precisely this connection that the Greek poet Aristophanes played upon in the classic Lysistrata. ⁶⁰ When the women of Athens and Sparta went on a sex strike in order to end a twenty­one year war, their gender power did more than obtain the peace ­­ it changed the nature of the regime. The well­being of the state had to be left to women lest men destroy it; and the welfare of the state depended on women's governing men's eros. In this sense, body politics transformed the body politic. If, as this lesson teaches, the political can be sexual, then control over sex brought control over politics and vice­versa. The feminist Lysistrata seized this control for women. One problem for the Lysistratan agenda, of course, was that Aristophanes's classic work was anything but a morality play; it was a comedy. A gynecocracy based on female rule of body politics was seen as farcical because it was seen as futile, even unnatural.

In ancient Greece, men portrayed Lysistrata as comic. In modern pornotopia, men portray her as tragic, but only after she acts out her pornographic role. Where once she saved men, now she serves them. Where once she brought peace to men, now she is scripted to bring death to women. The pornographic Lysistrata is a discourse of death. But what are we to make of it? Is it basically pornographic violence against women? Or is it essentially an opinion about the desirability of violence? Or is it ultimately the violation of another that is inherent in sex?

The answers to these questions largely depend on who is responding. Listen, for example, to the stirring protests of Catharine MacKinnon: "[W]hat do men want? Pornography provides an answer.... It is their 'truth about sex.' ... [W]hat men want is: women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded ..., women killed. Or, to be fair to the soft core, women sexually accessible ... wanting to be taken and used...." ⁶¹ Accordingly, the radical feminists see in pornographic violence against women a complex link between political power and sex. For them, the welfare of the political state depends on women's governing "men's rea"­­the male sexual disposition. They seek to transform the body politic by directing certain aspects of male "discourse" about the sexual. Essential to women's political power, then, is control over both their bodies and over eroticized images of their bodies. Consequently, the radical feminists aim to seize regulatory control over pornography. And strangely enough, in this respect the modern view of the radical feminists harkens back to the traditional view of Thomas Hobbes­­that all citizens are entitled to the full protection of the state. The state cannot assure the security of all women and at the same time tolerate pornography, "a form of forced sex, a practice of sexual politics, an institution of gender inequality." ⁶²