The Barbacoas protest is one of several recent sex strikes, a tactic that’s gained popularity around the world for a variety of causes.
The women of Barbacoas made headlines in 2011 by announcing they would refuse to have sex with their husbands and partners to protest the terrible condition of the road. When not closed by frequent flooding and mudslides, the 35-mile stretch could take up to 24 hours to travel.
Why, they asked, should they bring any more babies into the world when pregnant women were dying along the highway trying to get to the hospital?
“At first, the men were really angry,” Maribel Silva, a Barbacoas judge and a spokeswoman for the town’s ‘crossed legs’ movement, said. “But it worked.”
The protest convinced Barbacoas’ men to get involved, and apparently shamed government officials into taking action. Colombian army engineers recently began paving the beat-up parts of the highway, according to Col. Ricardo Roque, who is overseeing the project.
The Barbacoas protest is one of several recent sex strikes, a tactic that’s gained popularity around the world for a variety of causes.
Wives have refused sex to force politicians to form a coalition government in Belgium, to bring down a dictator in Togo and to end factional fighting in the Philippines. In Kenya, protesters even offered to compensate prostitutes for not working during a 2009 sex strike called to force an end to political infighting.
Women, who throughout history have found themselves at a disadvantage with men holding most of the power, have long known that men have a special vulnerability when it comes to sex.
In Colombia, the idea dates back to the late 1990s, when the army appeared to be losing the war to Marxist guerrillas. Things got so bad that Gen. Manuel Jose Bonett, who was then Colombia’s army chief and one of the country’s more philosophical officers looked to the ancient Greeks for guidance.
Bonett began extolling the antiwar message of Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ historical play in which the title character convinces her female colleagues to refuse to have sex with their husbands until they ended the Pelopennesian War between Athens and Sparta.
Bonett went on to suggest that female guerrillas stage their own sexual boycott.
Over the past decade, the rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have been weakened by a US-backed military offensive. But the FARC remains active, which helps explain why Colombia’s roads often seem more like mule trails than motorways……..
