Some crises call for the most drastic measures imaginable, said Jessica Strul in The Frisky. Last week, some Kenyan women’s groups staged a seven-day sex boycott to protest political violence that has left 1,500 people dead since controversial 2007 elections. Even the Kenyan prime minister’s wife “got in on the (non) action.” But not everyone’s happy—Kenyan James Kimondo is “so mad at his wife for withholding sex” that he’s suing her. (BBC) “Dude, really?”
Kimondo’s argument, that a sexless week traumatized him and gave him backaches, said Russell Smith in Canada’s The Globe and Mail, “is pretty much the same argument we used to try on our girlfriends in high school.” But the sex strike draws on even older history: the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata. That women-withhold-sex classic is often revived as a feminist or anti-war statement.
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