Women Withhold Sex Until Road Is Fixed

Have you ever used sex as a tool to get your boyfriend or partner to bend to your will? Have you ever performed a sex act as a reward for a desired behavior or series of behaviors? How about withheld it in response to bad behavior in hopes that the bad behavior would not occur in the future? How about withheld it until the damn sink gets fixed?

Women of Barbacoas, a small town in remote southern Colombia, are using access to their netherregions as a bargaining chip in trying to sex starve the men of town and, by extension, the government into doing something about the sorry state of the road that leads from their hamlet of 40,000 people to the rest of civilization. Mudslides as a result of heavy seasonal rainfall has left the road in such a sorry state that the 35 mile journey from Barbacoas to the nearest town takes nearly 10 hours. The government has promised to fix the road, but so far has not followed through.

“These women, and all of the rest of us in this town, are fed up with the empty promises from the central government,” Lucelly Del Carmen Viveros, the human rights coordinator in the town of Barbacoas, said in a phone interview Friday. “This is the only road connecting Barbacoas to the rest of the state and the country, and it’s in despicable condition.”

The women began what they call the “Crossed Legs Strike” on Thursday, said Viveros, who said she’s not personally participating because she doesn’t have a boyfriend or husband.

(Not having a boyfriend or husband has not prevented many women I know from engaging in an uncrossing of the legs. But I digress.)

This isn’t the first sex strike undertaken by women of Colombia, according to the Wall Street Journal; in the late 90’s, the female partners of leftist guerillas were encouraged to keep their pants on in an attempt to encourage their boyfriends and husbands to negotiate with the government. Another strike occurred five years ago, when women attempted to keep a drug war from happening, which doesn’t make sense to me. If you wanted to prevent a drug war, why not stage a slutzkreig, inundating their partners with constant amorous attention, leaving the men so sexually exhausted that they constantly in the throes of ecstasy or the placidity of a post-orgasmic nap? At any rate, the anti-gang war sex strike only lasted ten days. Time will tell how long the “sex for pavement” push will last.