The Sex Strike Isn't Going to Happen

Because straight women actually enjoy having sex, too, among other reasons.

Right after the 2024 election, I wrote a piece so anxiety-provoking (for me, anyway) that I wrote three full throat-clearing paragraphs of disclaimers before I got to my thesis, which was that: A.) the results of the election were causing sexual strife between men and women and B.) I did not think that straight women in America would initiate the sex strike they were promising, let alone perform such a protest to “completion,” whatever that may have been. (At the time, lots of young women on social media were claiming that they planned to participate in “4B,” a South Korean radical feminist sex strike movement which wasn’t even that popular in South Korea.)

At the time, people told me I was too quick to dismiss women’s rage at Trump’s election (look, I was mad too, but not mad enough to go monkmode) and therefore too quick to dismiss the idea that straight women would stop having sex with men in droves, for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly forever. I maintain that I was correct, I apologized way too much, and the 4B sex strike obviously never caught on in any mainstream way, nor will it ever catch on in the modern-day US. This is true for many reasons, the main one being that women, even liberal feminist women like myself, also enjoy sex. Also, a “sex strike” with a solution of “just start dating women instead” is not palatable to most women, given that most women are, in fact, straight.

But let’s back up a bit, because sex strikes have worked before. In 2006, girlfriends of gang members in Pereira, Colombia stopped having sex in an effort to force a reduction in violence, working with support from the municipal government. This made a lot of sense because they speculated that men got involved with gang violence specifically to attract women, and by rebranding this behavior as unattractive, fewer men were inclined to partake. The strike successfully reduced the murder rate in the city by 26%. A 2003 sex strike in Liberia also helped put an end to civil war, although the sex strike was part of a larger movement that involved other protests and sit-ins.

But I’m just not buying that a sex strike will ever happen in the US, at least not anytime soon.

Before you “nobody is saying that” me, the 2024 election wasn’t the only time people called for a sex strike in the US, although it would be valid to question the legitimacy of these other calls to action. In 2017, Janelle Monáe suggested in an interview with Marie Claire that women go on a sex strike. In 2019, Alyssa Milano advocated for a sex strike to protest anti-abortion laws (a bit of a horseshoe abstinence-only thing, I guess). And this week on Substack, a piece by a bisexual woman who “decentered men” by simply dating women instead (it’s giving “still having sex”) called for a sex strike, assuming that straight women would stop having sex at all. (I’m not linking this piece, mostly because this woman doesn’t have a big following despite how often I’ve seen this article circulated, and it would be a #problematic power imbalance for me to inadvertently cause her to be brigaded.)

But the problem with these proposed American sex strikes is multifaceted. First of all, straight women also enjoy sex, probably too much to deprive themselves of it for an indeterminate amount of time with no clear endgame.

Second, successful sex strikes (and to be clear, there haven’t been that many) have existed on a relatively smaller scale, where the male partners of the women involved were the same men causing a concrete problem that needed to be fixed. Most of the women in favor of a sex strike are not married to the men who, even by their standards, “deserve” to be punished.