The desperately blue-balled men in the remote jungle village of Barbacoas, Colombia, can breathe a collective sigh of relief—a 112-day “sex strike” that local women had imposed on them has been lifted after authorities began paving a rural road in acquiescence to the ladies’ demands.

Known as la huelga de las piernas cruzadas—“the strike of crossed legs”—this modern real-life reenactment of Lysistrata began on June 22 in protest of a dilapidated, washed-away, rubble-strewn road that linked Barbacoas with the provincial capital of Pasto. Conditions on the rural roadway—which authorities had been promising to repair for nearly two decades—had devolved to the point where the 35-mile sojourn took up to 14 hours, leading to horror stories of ambulances getting stuck in mud and locals perishing en route to the nearest hospital. Since Barbacoas was effectively cut off from civilization, prices for food and other commodities were punishingly higher than in the rest of Colombia.

So in late June, a passel of local activist women decided they were going to take matters into their own laps and resolutely clench their legs like a chorus line of militant lobsters snapping their crusher claws shut. Wearing bracelets that said “I LOVE BARBACOAS,” toting picket signs that read “POR UN NUEVO AMANECER NOS ABSTIENOS DEL PLACER” (“FOR A NEW DAWN, WE ABSTAIN FROM PLEASURE”), and marching into the town square to chant “¡No más sexo, queremos carretera!” (which Google Translate renders as “No more sex, we want road!”), the Babes of Barbacoas drew a line at their own vulvas and refused to give up the pum pum until that road got paved.

Haplessly horny townsmen groused that they wished the girls had chosen a hunger strike instead. “I do not understand the relationship of the road’s poor condition to sex,” griped Professor Manuel Olimpo Quiñónez. “For me, everything is an excuse [for my wife] not to have sex with me.”

In late July, authorities agreed to pave the road after the sex strike had entered its fifth week, but the re-virginized townswomen effectively said, “We’ve heard your empty promises before, muchachos—we’re not reopening the booty buffet until you actually start working on the road again.” It took another ten weeks of sexless torture before Army engineers finally began roadwork on Tuesday, October 11. Barbacoas Mayor Jose Arnulfo Preciado told reporters that his wife slept in a separate room for the strike’s duration and that he was willing to submit to a polygraph test to verify that he honored the protest. Although local males told reporters they were glad the strike had ended, many seemed anxious that the women might soon fall under the spell of some new pet political cause and collectively decide to tighten their vadge-vises again.

In September, a similar display of tightly orchestrated politico-vaginal discontent led to headlines such as “Sex strike brings peace to Filipino village” and “Sex Strike Brings Peace in Philippines.” During midsummer in an area of Mindanao island that had been ripped bloody with civil war since the 1970s, a ladies’ sewing cooperative started refusing to surrender the Pinoy punani until their men decided to grow the hell up and stop hacking each other to death. With nowhere to put their Philippenises, the men put down their swords and declared a cease-fire.