Asparagirl says all that needs to be said about the Lysistrata Project, the anti-war campaign that asks women to protest the war by swearing off sex. On Monday, over 1000 readings of Aristophanes' play about women who withhold sex in order to coerce their men into stopping their war were staged around the world. Campuses were of course a prime scene of impassioned dramatic activism, as these write-ups in The Michigan Daily, The Yale Daily News, USC's Daily Trojan, and The Stanford Daily attest.

The earnestness surrounding the readings is remarkable. ìReading the play in this context of conflict with Iraq is a way to raise consciousness,î said Stanford professor Richard Martin, Classics Department chair and event organizer. "Our purpose is to make it very clear that President Bush does not speak for all Americans," Sharron Bower, one of the project's founders, told the Yale Daily News. "Our message is simple: If you oppose this war, then speak up!" (And, she might have added, don't put out!)

The fervor surrounding the Lysistrata Project, particularly on campuses, should not surprise us: it is a living, breathing, vagina monologue, an activist's enactment of the ever-popular Eve Ensler's radical vision of how a vagina-loving populace can avert war and inaugurate a new, harmonious "V-world," a vagina-loving era of peace that is, in her unforgettable words, "creative, sexy, delicious and fabulous." Insofar as the Lysistrata Project takes seriously the idea that mental masturbation--which is what this impractical and self-satisfied project is--can solve the world's problems, it is also a parody of itself.

Thought experiment: Compare the Lysistrata Project--which is deadly serious about its desire to stop the war--to the Masturbate for Peace initiative. Embracing the slogan, "Using self-love to end conflict," Masturbate for Peace is a satire of the notion that self-indulgence of any sort, erotic or intellectual, can do anything other than pleasure itself.

Now ask yourself: If you did not already know which campaign was for real and which was a joke, could you tell the one from the other?

I just had a strange observation about many modern feminists take on this war. Essentially, the attitude seems to be that we shouldn't fight back--that we have not respected these people who now seek to harm us, and that we were/are asking for it. In essence, doesn't it seem like modern feminists want the U.S. to behave like a battered spouse?

The irony would be funny if it weren't so incredibly... wrong.

Or perhaps the analogy is that the U.S. is like the misogynist view of a rape victim -- someone who "asked for it."

Welcome to the Club

For many months tens of thousands of our men have been separated from their wives, sweethearts and families with nothing but the promise of many more months of separation. Nonetheless, according to all reports, moral remains high and they are eager to come to grips with the enemy.

Still, there remains a difference between our soldiers and the folks of the Lysistrata Project. Soldiers embrace a life of discipline: discipline, self-sacrifice, and a hard, difficult life for othersónamely us.

The modern university, on the other hand, no longer celebrates the difficult discipline of the scholar but easy courses, feel-good ideas, and the suppression of difficult debate. It is unlikely that people accustomed to this life of ease and self-indulgence will suddenly come up with the discipline and self-control to tame their hormones.

The march of folly continues. Does anybody really think that the Greek hoplites took their women on campaign? No doubt part of the comedy was that this separation of the sexes would take place in any event if the men decided on war.

These people argue that women oppose war because they are more "nurturing" than men. I guess they never considered the possibility that someone could favor war, in some cicrumstances, specifically *because* she (or he) was nurturing. Chesterton: "The true soldier fights not out of hate for what lies before him, but out of love for what lies behind him."

It seems to me more and more that "idiotarian" is not just a figure of speech; these people really are idiots. They are like a chess player who can never look more than one move in advance, or a sailor who doesn't understand that you have to tack away from the wind in order to sail into it.

No, Erin, I can't tell the difference myself.

Drew Carrey did a bit once that riffed on the "if women ran the world" meme at some White House function.

Because, you know, it's not like women would ever start major arguments without warning over little things.

At which point, all the guys in the room laughed heartily. But Drew wasn't done.

"Hello, this is England. Why are you invading us?"

- "Oh, I think you KNOW!"

And the whole audience just broke up.

This kind of routine is a deadly weapon in debate with the kinds of feminists running the Lysistrata Project, not only because the (accurate - women aren't less agressive, they just fight differently) message comes through under the radar but because one's opponents themselves are such perfect examples of the point.

But the "battered women syndrome" point made by Rick and John is at least as good.

I think it is important to note that after the actual Lysistrata project and Athens stopped warring, Sparta came back and destroyed Athens which is what finally ended the Peloppenesian(sp?) war.

HARHARHAR

this thing work?

This thing on?

this thing on? hurhurhur