This past February in Belgium, socialist senator and part-time gynecologist Marleen Temmerman urged a nationwide sex strike to resolve political differences between Dutch-speaking Flemish northerners and French-speaking Walloons in the south. “Have no more sex until the new administration is posing on the steps of the palace,” she urged her countrywomen. Despite Ms. Temmerman’s face, Belgians continued having sex and only recently formed a new government coalition for reasons which have nothing to do with her failed sex strike.

Temmerman said she had drawn inspiration from a successful week-long 2009 Kenyan sex strike that reportedly led to conciliation among violently warring factions in the nation’s fragile coalition government. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s wife even allegedly participated in not participating in sex with her husband for the strike’s duration. Innovatively, the women’s group that organized the boycott even offered to pay prostitutes for their lost wages if they joined the strike. Although it only lasted a week, the strike led Nairobi resident James Kimondo to sue organizers for causing him “anxiety and sleepless nights” that led to “mental anguish, stress, backaches, [and] lack of concentration.”

In Gabon two years ago, a man named Samuel Ntoutoume Ndzeng spun the mattress around and called for the country’s men to “sleep with our clothes on” and deny sex to Kenya’s damsels if voters failed to elect a female president. A male was elected, and Gabon’s men presumably continued sleeping buck-ass naked. Late in 2008, women in Naples threatened to “take action” and make their men “sleep on the sofa” if they persisted in lighting illegal fireworks for New Year’s Eve celebrations. The strike was a bust, as firework usage last New Year’s Eve in Italy yielded one fatality and 70 injuries. And a 2003 Liberian sex strike was credited with helping end that nation’s civil war, eventually leading to a Nobel Peace Prize for strike organizer Leymah Gbowee.

The idea that any of these sex strikes were successful is incomprehensible when one considers that in every case, nearly all of the victimized men had a pair of fully functional hands. Whereas one can only end a hunger strike if there’s food around, a sex strike’s more crippling effects can be easily averted with one quick jack session.

Is masturbation a capital crime in Colombia? Do we need to airdrop instructional leaflets about self-pleasuring to Kenya’s men? Surely these areas provide tropical fruits and warm animal corpses that approximate the texture and tensile strength of the human female organ!
What’s next? The women of Manitoba deny their husbands handjobs until they pay off the winter’s entire heating bill in advance PLUS take them out to a nice restaurant of their choice? No nookie for Cleveland’s men until everyone gets HBO? When will it stop?

The idea of a sex strike where women cruelly wield their genitals as strategic political weapons against helplessly lust-addled male gorillas is demeaning to men. For far too long, society’s males have been depicted as boner-driven troglodytes utterly enslaved to their sex drives. Men need to reclaim their sexuality and sense of self-destiny by starting to defiantly masturbate—as a political gesture. The surest way to prove we aren’t a hopeless lot of randy apes is to start brashly playing with ourselves as if we were ordinary chimps at the zoo.