Janelle Monáe is on the May 2017 cover of Marie Claire, and in the accompanying interview she advocates for what might seem like an extreme strategy in the fight for gender equality. It's also not going to work. "People have to start respecting the vagina. Until every man is fighting for our rights, we should consider stopping having sex," she opines. "I love men. But evil men? I will not tolerate that."
The idea of withholding sex to achieve a social or political goal isn't new: in the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, women attempt to end a war by denying men sex, presumably the only thing the men enjoy other than fighting each other. Lysistrata has a happy ending, but, well, it's fiction. Monáe's support for equal rights is all well and good, but not everyone whose rights are in need of defense has a vagina to respect in the first place. And the end of institutional oppression unfortunately will not come by the grace of sex-starved straight men throwing up their hands and saying, "All right, you win! We'll stop making life hard for female-identified people, trans folks, non-binary individuals, and just generally anyone who isn't us." Discrimination isn't the sole purview of men who have sex with women (although they do tend to over-deliver in this area). I also happen to really like sex, and plan to continue having it while advocating for gender equality. Thank you for your suggestion, Ms. Monáe, but it's back to the drawing board.
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