My dear darlings: I don’t have the words to express my devastation about this week’s election result. I’m so, so sorry that we live in a world where authoritarianism is so readily embraced, time and time again, and where marginalized people are regularly thrown under the bus. It fucking sucks, and I’m furious and heartbroken and scared, and it’s absolutely okay if you are too.
People have all kinds of reactions to strong emotions like these. When the situation in question involves access to reproductive healthcare (or a lack thereof), sometimes people react by proposing a “sex strike.” Usually these strikes involve women declining to have sex with men for the duration of the strike. Sometimes, as in the 4B movement in South Korea (which unfortunately is TERFy), these strikes extend to other activities too, such as dating men, marrying men, or having children.
Some American women have proposed launching similar sex strikes in the U.S., to protest the loss of Roe v. Wade and the re-election of a rapist. Since pregnancy is even more medically risky in a Roe-less world than it already was, it makes total sense to me that many people would become voluntarily celibate at a time like this. Better to have no sex at all, they might be thinking, than to have sex that could end up literally killing them (if, for example, the pregnancy goes awry and doctors are legally forbidden to intervene because of reproductive healthcare bans).
“Sex strike” discourse is often very cis-hetero, because these strikes are largely borne out of unequal gender dynamics in the cis-het dating world, and specifically out of the healthcare disparities between cis men and cis women. However, as a queer person and an erstwhile sex educator, I can’t help but notice that these strikes are usually based on two common assumptions in hetero dating culture, both of which are simply false:
