Ukrainian Women Are Calling for a Sex Strike Against Russian Men

A group of Ukrainian women wants to go full Lysistrata on Russian men, as a means of protest against Russia’s aggression in their homeland.

According to The Atlantic, the campaign called “Don’t Give It to a Russian” has a Facebook page and, of course, t-shirts. The group says they are calling for women to “fight the enemy by whatever means.”

The initiative borrows its slogan from the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko’s 1838 poem, Kateryna: “Fall in love, O dark-browed maidens, but not with the Moskaly [the Russians],” according to the news site Global Voices.

The Atlantic points out that this isn’t the first time a group has encouraged this practice:

Of course, the women of “Don’t Give It to a Russian” are hardly the first to have this idea. Just last month, a group of women in Tokyo threatened not to sleep with any man who voted for a gubernatorial candidate who was seen to have outdated views on gender. In 2003, a group called the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace led a sex strike for an end to the Liberian civil war. And just a few years ago in Ukraine, the feminist group Femen called on the wives and girlfriends of the members of the prime minister’s cabinet to boycott sex in opposition to what they called the prime minister’s “caddish and humiliating attitude towards Ukrainian women.”

I’ve always held a personal belief that these “sex strikes” play into the worst gender stereotypes of women—that we’re all frigid sex-hating harpies who use sex as a weapon and have no problem giving up the act (because, presumably men love sex so much they’ll go mad without it and do anything to get it back and we hate it so much we have no problem giving it up.)

But telling women not to bang Russian men and encouraging them to go bang men of other nationalities is actually pretty goddamn funny, I have to admit.