#lysistrata

Military recruitment parody posters by Masturbate For Peace, 2002.

Though it didn’t enter World War I until 1917, the United States produced more posters in support of mobilization and civilian service than any other country. The government established a Department of Pictorial Publicity with 300 artists who were ordered to “draw until it hurts.”

The backlash fifty years later against the Vietnam War included the co-opting by activists of propaganda posters. They substituted anti-military themes, often featuring the slogan, “Make Love, Not War.”

Joan Baez and her sisters Mimi and Pauline posed for a poster challenging the popular notion that refusing to serve was cowardly or unmanly. Their message, that liberated women would have sex with draft dodgers, perhaps recalls the heroine Lysistrata, who organized a chastity movement among Greek wives to force peace negotiations.

Perhaps because my life hasn’t followed a conventional gender script, I am fond of images that challenge stereotypes–and Katherine Hepburn was so formidable she doesn’t seem out of place at all.

Hepburn’s breakout performance came in a 1932 revival of The Warrior’s Husband (a riff on Lysistrata) when she played Antiope, sister of the queen and commander of the all-female armed forces in the Amazonian state of Pontus. For her stage entrance, Hepburn jumped down a flight of stairs while carrying the carcass of large stag on her shoulders.

An RKO scout in the audience one night, Leland Hayward, was so impressed with Hepburn’s physicality that he arranged a screen test. She made her Hollywood debut in George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement and by 1933 had earned her first Academy Award for Morning Glory, where she portrayed a young actress who sacrifices romance for the sake of her career.

Perhaps Hepburn had her early successes in mind when she said, “I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.”

Norman Lindsay
Pen drawing from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, 1926

Exciting presentation at the Urban Survivors Union sex worker working group conference call this Tuesday at 9 PM EST–Cora Colt, the co-founder of Lysistrata will be speaking about starting and maintaining a sex worker collective fund! https://www.gotomeet.me/LouiseVincent or join us on your phone in the US–+1 (786) 535-3211 Access Code: 615-430-549

Sex worker collective funds are a thriving practice in African sex worker movements, as documented in Chi Adanna Mgbako’s To Live Freely In This World, and in Indian sex worker orgs, but in the US they are few and far between. Lysistrata is one of the oldest and most consistent sex worker mutual aid funds around, established in the wake of the first major Backpage shakeups/ad category closures a couple of years ago. W/the economic devastation sex workers are suffering post-FOSTA/SESTA, esp. marginalized sex workers such as drug-using sex workers, the creation & management of collective funds are invaluable skills for sex worker communities. So, sex workers/ex-sex workers, esp. drug-using sex workers, as well as respectful allies w/connections to drug users’ unions and harm reduction, are welcome to join us at 9PM EST Tuesday for the presentation.

Cora Colt is co-founder & treasurer of the Lysistrata Mutual Care Collective and Fund, an online-based sex worker activist cooperative and emergency fund to support marginalized workers in crisis. Cora has been a sex worker since 2007, primarily working as a stripper. She began organizing through producing underground percentage profit share stripper events in NYC. Those events led Cora and others to hosting broader sex worker community meetings/events, highlighting the need for more direct services and productive partnerships between folks of all experiences in the sex industry. Then Lysistrata was founded in the aftermath of the Backpage raids and the 2016 presidential elections.

We will also be talking grants, the connection between sex workers and the Urban Survivors Union #reframetheblame women/feminist-led campaign against drug-induced homicide laws, bad date list sites, and more! We want to develop this call into a national resource for drug-using sex workers and sex workers connected with/interested in harm reduction to use drug user union movement resources.