Jill of I Blame The Patriarchy says

a femininity work-stoppage would necessitate: misogyny, sex**, marriage, reproduction, nuclear familyism, child-rearing and other unpaid labor, attractiveness, head-tilting and other submissive affectations, fashion, glowing skin, letting disaffected musician boyfriends mooch off you, hot girl-on-mop action, etc.

...

• Sex could be reinstated as soon as the consent thing described above got carved in stone.

Read the quote in context here.

Good to know.

I don’t know enough about different revolutionary theories to presume, but since I know she was heavily influenced by Shulamuth Firestone I was wondering the other day if Jill was holding out for Firestone’s 60’s-era’s fascination with privileged-college-student version of Marxism. Which is only a little embarrassing compared to her now even more obsolete Freudian stuff, but also nowhere near as valuable as her articulate, fresh and (for me anyway) plausible and compelling vision of what a gender free society would look like.

I still think the (non-Firestone) idea of a straight-up sex strike would be dumb and I think I can finally explain why. And I think I’ve mentioned before that in the face of a strike the chances are higher than ever before that men would just switch to sex with themselves, each other, or inanimate appliances.

I’ve also mentioned that the idea of using sex for leverage is as deeply patriarchal as it gets, with the perverse effect that whereas individual men might notice and/or be unhappy Patriarchy itself would be on it’s knees whispering “please, please, yes, let this work!” Which makes Jill’s “...could be reinstated as soon a…” footnote not just dubious but ominous. Whether she meant it that way or not, without overturning the dominant paradigm a “successful” resumption of (hetero) sex would be perceived by too many strikers and strikees as an affirmation of sex as transactional.

This is just my opinion but if I were designing a patriarchy-smashing strike I’d probably advocate refusing to either offer or engage in transactional sex. Which no matter how “consensual” and no matter how gently or genteely conducted is and always will be hard to distinguish from rape. And therefore shouldn’t be resumed even after a revolution. (And no, duh, I’m not talking about going back to that pre-Dworkin Polanski-era “sexual revolution” crap where hetero sex was still absolutely transactional but the cost for men was supposed to be at or near zero and where women were “empowered” to say yes but not yet empowered to say no.)

A lot of the other stuff Jill mentions, like familyism and unpaid domestic labor (which, incidentally, is just more fallout from the whole notion of hetero marriage as a particularly elaborate sexual transaction), would also obviously follow from rejecting sex as transactional. Same with all the other submissive affectations she mentions which are, after all, based on the idea that men are doing the paying so they should be treated with the respect employees are supposed to give their employers and vendors are supposed to show their customers.

Incidentally, clarifying the notion that it the problem is transactional sex — something women might do willingly or even enthusiastically but “ideally” must do regardless — would put a huge dent in the whole feminists hate sex business. Far as I can tell most feminists, being human beings and all, rather enjoy sex. But being human beings and all they just don’t like the idea that you shouldn’t do it unless you’re trading something for it. I think it would also make feminism a little more accessible to women who say stuff like “I’m not a feminist but…” because they like sex but heard somewhere that feminists aren’t supposed to.