Janelle Monáe wants women to consider a ‘sex strike’, but I really can’t handle a dick-drought right now

Also, I shouldn’t have to

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Next month’s cover of Marie Claire is a photo of Janelle Monáe stamped with the text “The Future is Female,” and all I can think is, does she really believe that?

In her interview with the magazine, she told them she’d support women having a sex strike, which really just feels like another form of victim shaming — not to mention a really awful idea. I have plans this weekend, and those plans include snaking into the DMs of as many Tinder exes as possible.

These are her words exactly: “Until every man is fighting for our rights, we should consider stopping having sex.

“If you’re going to own this world and this is how you’re going to rule this world, I am not going to contribute anymore until you change it” — but there’s a huge issue with that.

If we want to have sex with ten guys this week, we should be able to without A) Women shaming us, and B) Needing the validation of those same men to get what we want in the board room.

Sex strikes have a long and confused history. We’ve seen it in Colombia — women renouncing any sexual activity until their demands of fully paved roads were met. And in many activist circles, these strikes are referred to as the “Lysistratic non-action” approach: A weapon “More successful when the women involved have little economic autonomy, and when their demands are specific and realistic.”

Sex strikes not only feed into gender stereotypes but they reinforce the idea that women are less economically and physically powerful, and thus have to resort to using our bodies to get what we want or deserve — not to mention they’re wildly heteronormative. For trans women or women who sleep with women, traditionally victimized far more than straight women, this “weapon of choice” has nothing to do with choice at all — it’s another form of victimization veiled as some form of progressive activism. It is a regression steeped in an emotionally manipulative history of women existing for procreation and the satisfaction of men.

Mixing politics and body-politics is a slippery-slope, more often than not resulting in women being viewed as sexual trophies, less-autonomous than they were before.

Sex should not be a reward we offer to men for doing what they should have been doing in the first place. Sex is something that should be committed to and enjoyed equally by both parties, and should have no place in the rules and regulations put in place by officials outside of the bedroom.