Access Denied: Sex strike to hit the US

A group of liberal-leaning women in the United States are calling for a strike this spring, and they hope to have their demands met through a form of protest that takes picketing to a whole new level.

Liberal Ladies Who Lunch, a women’s right group that says they strive to turn “America blue, one plate at a time,” is waging a sex strike starting next month that they hope will combat infringements on their personal liberties being waged by conservatives. With women’s rights issues being debated in the mainstream lately by the likes of lawmakers looking to deny the right to choose and commentators deeming pro-choice women as sluts, the strike scheduled for next month seems more than just well timed.According to the group’s latest call to action, this protest won’t rely on picket signs and chants to get a message across. Instead, Liberal Ladies Who Lunch are asking women to wage a sex strike to “united against the war on women.”“Why are we taking a stand to protect women's rights in 2012? Because not that long ago a group of brave women took a stand, and in some cases a beating, to give us the right to vote,” explains the group via Facebook, stressing the importance of the American suffrage movement in securing women the right to vote. “Younger men and women may not remember the ‘good old days’ when the only reproductive choice we had was to deny men access to sex. In truth, if we lose our hard won rights to medical care, birth control and pregnancy choice, it won't only affect women. Men will have to go back to the days when they waited for or paid for sex,” explains the group. To help make a chance, the group is asking like-minded women to align with them for a sex strike starting on April 28 and extending a week later until May 5.“This is issue impacts all of us. This strike is designed to make that point. Ask your man to speak up for your rights, because when we lose our reproductive choices, so do they,” explains the group.Although the campaign has garnered support from some who salute the strike as a great way to make a point, opponents are equally, if not more, outspoken. In a daunting missive that dares to decry Liberal Ladies Who Lunch’s protest as laughable, Town Hall columnist Guy Benson attacks the group for striking against a contraception ban that is not in effect yet, and calls the negative comments on the campaign’s Facebook page as “downright hilarious.” (For a sampling of what Benson is bringing up, two recent comments consist of “Maybe if these girls got laid they wouldn't be so uptight” and “Back in the kitchen, wimmenz!”)Liberal Ladies Who Lunch reference a handful of historic and recent international sex strikes on their Facebook page, noting that Colombia’s “strike of crossed legs” was followed by a 26.5 percent drop in the country’s murder rate, and another anti-war sex strike in Kenya brought a lengthy political impasse at the brim of war to an end after just one week.