Sex strike as protest
Women power: Lysistrata and her modern daughters
Sex is the elixir of life, basis for procreation, but also a means of brutal subjugation. Women on all continents have therefore used sex strikes as a weapon of peaceful resistance. And still do today, as the 4B movements in South Korea and the USA currently show. A journey through time and places.
Many young men have already died in the war when the eponymous heroine in Aristophanes' comedy “Lysistrata” calls for a sex strike. The women of ancient Athens and enemy Sparta are supposed to refuse their husbands until they end the war. And indeed, they succeed. Peace and sex make a comeback. At least in literature.
But a look at more recent history shows: In real life, too, women have achieved an astonishing number of their goals through this kind of non-violent protest. What does such resistance look like in the age of social media? Is it at all promising as long as the women's movement is divided within itself?
At least that's how it is in Western countries. In Germany, for example, where I asked around among women's activists during my last stay in Berlin.
“If you are a man, I won’t be talking to you. I am going to be promoting the 4B movement.”
On the online platform X, a woman announces that she no longer wants to talk to men but wants to promote the so-called 4B movement. This means she says “no” to men four times: “No to sex, no child bearing, no dating, no marriage!”
Origins in South Korea
The 4B movement originated in South Korea. Each of the four “No”s in Korean begins with the letter B. The catalyst was the murder of a young woman in Seoul in 2016. Her killer claimed that he stabbed her to death because women had ignored him all his life. South Korea has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. According to surveys, 65 percent of women do not want children, they complain about domestic violence, a lack of daycare places, unequal pay and strict beauty and clothing standards.
4B movement in the USA
Since the election of Donald Trump as US president, female Democrat supporters have also sought refuge in the four “No”s. One woman announces on X, while sobbing unrestrainedly, that she will not use dating apps for fear of being linked to a Trump voter. Some women shave their heads to make themselves as unattractive as possible to men. “There is no way I am letting any man near me for the next few years.”
For their sex strike, the activists are earning a lot of mockery online from Trump supporters. “You mean they are not gonna to give birth to any more crazy liberals for the next four years..?”, comments a woman smugly.
Lysistrata
The sex strike as a form of passive resistance and peaceful protest has a famous literary role model: in the comedy of the same name by Aristophanes, Lysistrata calls on the other women in ancient Greece to go on a sex strike. Her aim is to prevent a devastating war. The plan works. Peace and sex make a comeback, at least in literature.
The story of Lysistrata has been made into several international films. Among others, in 2015 by director Spike Lee, who relocated the plot of his film CHI-RAQ to the gang milieu of Chicago.
"Pro-choice” advocates in the USA call for a sex strike in 2019 against stricter abortion laws in the southern US state of Georgia. Three years later, activists even want to refuse to have sex until abortion is legalized nationwide. The actions become a topic in all the media. Despite all the approval on the net, there are also objections: “Kelly tweeting out: Isn’t that called abstinence. Isn’t that exactly what conservatives wanted?”, says the TV presenter, echoing a user's comment.
Protest in the 1970s
“One part of patriarchy has always been to suppress women's knowledge, skills and freedom. That's why it's a crazy vulnerability for women that they can get pregnant unintentionally.”
Says Eva Quistorp, co-founder of the German Green Party. In the 1970s, she was active in the early women's, peace and ecology movement in West Germany - and called for a birth strike. “Because all societies are dependent on children and offspring”, she explains her reasons. “A birth strike, I thought, has revolutionary potential. Women need power and influence! And if they are not granted that, we won't have children if necessary."
At Easter 1980, Eva Quistorp and 5000 other women in Lüchow-Dannenberg in Lower Saxony call a birthing strike. It was to last until the end of 1981 and prevent the planned nuclear waste repository in Gorleben. Although there was no nationwide strike, Quistorp considered the action a success. “It encouraged women to consider as to which erotic, sexual relationships they should choose in the first place. That you don't necessarily enter into love relationships with men who like big cars and don't care if the environment is destroyed.”
Present-day birth strike movement
A modern version of the birth strike is the “Birth Strike Movement”. Initiated in 2019 by the then 33-year-old British singer Blythe Pepino, the movement is fueled by the fear of a “climate Armageddon”. Many female and male supporters of this movement do not see their childbearing strike as temporary, but rather as a permanent sterilization. On the one hand, they don't want to put any child through the feared future, and on the other, they simply consider children to be harmful to the climate because of their CO2 emissions.
Eva Quistorp, on the other hand, once had a genuinely feminist cause. For her, the childbirth strike was a kind of link to women in ancient Greece, under the motto ”Who knows what other good women's actions there have been."
Until the turn of the millenium
In fact, there have been sex and childbirth strikes, or at least calls for them, on almost every continent over the ages. In pre-modern times, indigenous women in Nicaragua called for a “strike of the uterus”: they did not want to give birth to slave laborers for the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors' mines. For the same reason, black female slaves in the USA try to prevent or interrupt a pregnancy using herbal mixtures.
Although radical feminists were already discussing the idea in the 19th century, sex strikes only became a phenomenon in the 20th century. The co-producers of the Dig: A History Podcast, Marissa C. Rhodes and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, attribute this to the fact that until then, women were still considered the property of their husband or father. According to the podcasters, women in communist Russia and China already refused to have sex in the first half of the 20th century.
“In patriarchal societies there were few times and places where women could safely withhold sex from their partners without risking rape, spousal abandonment, shunning or legal sanction. Only societies with matriarchal structures or weak conceptions of property were exempt from this reasoning.”
Sex strikes in the 21st century
After the turn of the millennium, sex strikes followed in the Philippines, Japan, Colombia, Spain and Belgium, in South Sudan, Togo and - the most famous - in Liberia. In 2003, massive women's protests and the announcement of a sex strike lead to the end of the civil war in the country, which had already been going on for 14 years. Opposition leader Ellen Johnson Sirleaf becomes the first female head of state not only in Liberia, but on the entire African continent. Sirleaf and the initiator of the protests, Leymah Gbowee, receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. In 2010, women in Kenya also want to push through a political reform by boycotting sex. An angry man threatens to go along with this for a week and then go to a prostitute.
Women have even fought for everyday things with sex strikes. In Turkey, residents of two villages managed to get the water system repaired. Previously, the women had to carry drinking water in canisters for miles or bring it to the village on donkeys. And in Naples, women managed to get their husbands to celebrate the next two New Year's Eves without rockets and firecrackers with the message "Make love, not explosions!".
Germany
In Germany, shortly before the First World War, the labor movement discusses a birth strike for the first time. However, the leaders Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg were against any form of birth control, as they wanted to achieve mass production. Then in 1917, in the middle of the First World War, the Social Democratic Labor Union wanted to prevent the birth of future soldiers with a birth strike. But the Prussian House of Representatives in Berlin rejected this.
There is currently no open call for a childbirth strike or a 4B movement in Germany - but there is one of the lowest birth rates in Europe. Before the 2025 federal elections, dissatisfied women launched two online initiatives. One initiative calls for an election boycott of a particular politician and is called “Frauen gegen Merz” (Women against Merz). Although Merz has since been elected Chancellor, the activists' reservations persist. The reasons are listed on their website and include Merz's positions on women's policy, as well as his statements on climate change, migration and the “fight against the right”. The activists have also posted short videos. One goes as follows:
Mother: So, how was it?
Daughter: Oh mom, he's great and so smart. He explained to us that you don't actually do women any favors with quotas. Because then there are bad appointments, and if you're good enough, you'll prevail anyway.And that it's completely normal for men to demand a different level of respect because they simply have a different level of self-confidence..”
As the daughter speaks, the mother’s face looks more and more troubled, incredulous, annoyed.. Finally, she discovers that the daughter is talking about Friedrich Merz.
On the website, you can read that “Women against Merz” is part of a loose association of “over 180 progressive actors from the fields of art, culture, politics and activism”. The organizers declined to give an interview. Not so the initiator of the second online campaign, Rona Duwe. The outspoken critic of the the so-called Self-Determination Act which allows every adult in Germany to officially change their gender once a year has titled her campaign with a question: Was ist eine Frau? (What Is a Woman?)
Duwe was inspired by a similar initiative by Scottish and British feminists who had also asked MPs in the UK about this issue, she says. “I thought, that's an interesting story to do that in Germany too, now that the Self-Determination Act was passed in November 2024, to simply find out what direction politicians and parties are taking.” According to Duwe and her fellow campaigners, they wrote to more than 2,000 MPs, women and men, from all parties. You can read 135 responses on the initiative's website. Most of them fall into one pattern or another: “A woman is an adult person of the female sex” or “A woman is a person who identifies as female”.
Boycott of trans-identified athletes in the USA
In the USA, the issue of “trans” contributed significantly to Donald Trump's election victory. Since then, the president has banned trans men from women's sports, among other things. Not all US states want to follow suit. However, since swimmer Riley Gaines quit competitive sport in 2022 in protest against the preferential treatment of her transgender competitor, women in particular have increasingly refused to compete against biological men in university sport.
In March 2025, Sadie Schreiner has to compete alone in a 400-metre race in New York after the competitors boycott the race as a whole. At the beginning of April, fencer Stephanie Turner kneels down in front of her transgender opponent - and is immediately disqualified from the rest of the competition for her refusal to compete.
Although Rona Duwe doesn't think Donald Trump is a friend of women, she welcomes his decision on women's sport. In the USA, it's also about scholarships, so it's really about careers. Why should women give up these rights? If they go on strike now, so to speak, then this can lead to them not winning an important victory, for example, and being demoted. This is something that has been demanded for a long time: “If it bothers you so much, women, why don't you go on strike?” But, so Duwe, many of these critics just don't realize what consequences this has for women.
International Women’s Day 2025
International Women's Day in Berlin: around 300 mostly young women are gathered on Mariannenplatz in Kreuzberg, many of them dressed in purple. As in the 1980s, the color purple once again stands for women's power. Pink nets have been thrown over the bronze fountain figures and posters read “Stop femicide!” and “Protect Trans Kids”. What do women here think of the 4B movement?
Woman 1: “That you shouldn't have sex with Trump supporters until they come to their senses.. We could do the same with CDU and AfD supporters. I think that's a fantastic idea!”
Woman 2: “I haven't heard of such a movement in Germany yet. But I recently saw a survey that the political attitudes of women and men are becoming increasingly divergent, and that men are drifting to the right and women to the left.. That could lead to a kind of sex boycott.”
Liberal contra radical feminists
Then the women get on the bikes they have brought with them to cycle in a parade through Kreuzberg. A woman with a baby on a cargo bike has hung a sign around her neck: “My body, my choice”. The abolition of Paragraph 218 and the fight against “femicide” - these demands unite the current women's movement. After that, opinions are divided: “liberal feminists” like those at Mariannenplatz are behind the Self-Determination Act and the legalization of “sex work”. “Radical feminists” such as Rona Duwe reject gender language and favor the so-called Nordic model as applied in Sweden, in which clients are punished.
On this Women's Day, the two camps are separated by a whole eight kilometers. That's how far it is from Mariannenplatz to Wittenbergplatz in the middle-class part of Berlin. A group of around 30 women, many of them with gray hair, are standing in front of the former luxury department store “Kaufhaus des Westens” (Department store of the West), or KaDeWe for short. What does the organizer Judith von LSquad Berlin think of the “Women against Merz” campaign? Judith lets out a sarcastic laugh and then says firmly: “Women against everything! I'm so fed up with politics because there isn't a single party that really stands up for women.”
A young woman with long dark hair steps up to the microphone. “It's a great day”, Helen greets her fellow activists. “We come together here, we do and we fight.. but we already do so much - paid and unpaid work!” Her female audience is applauding and cheering while Helen continues, now with a raised voice. “What I would wish for, and not just on this day but for a whole week, a whole month, a whole year: that we stop all the work - and we bring the world to a halt. Nothing functions without us!” Now the women around her applaud and cheer her even more, some whistle in support. And Hellen ends: “I know it's a utopia. But that’s exactly what would bring a revolution: We don't care anymore. We simply stop!”
Women’s strike in Iceland
This is actually what happened in Iceland - for a whole 24 hours. And despite the fact that the country is number one in the world rankings for equal rights. In October 2023, almost 100,000 women, around a quarter of the population, refused to do paid work and housework and demanded an end to the pay gap in front of the parliament in the capital Reykajvik. The model is a women's strike in 1975.
The organizer of the women’s event in Berlin, Judith, sees no ray of light for such concentrated female power in Germany. She is a bit disillusioned overall, she admits. “It's really difficult to keep the women's movement together, there are all these movements that no longer have anything to do with us as so-called radical feminists. How are we supposed to manage a birth strike? Which women will take part?”
“24 hours without rape”
Are such calls to strike possibly aimed at the wrong people from the outset? In 1983, a women's activist in the USA turned the tables. Andrea Dworkin is one of the most radical representatives of the women's movement of the time. She directed her historic call to strike not at her fellow women, but at men. A young activist reads Dworkin's speech on YouTube:
“I want a 24-hour truce during which there is no rape. On that day we will start to practice real equality. And then we will for the first time of our lives, both men and women, begin to experience freedom.”
This text was first published in German as a radio feature, see also my website.