Anti-abortion laws are patriarchal weapons, deployed to control the bodies of people with uteruses and instill fear of our own sexuality.

We can resist these laws in many ways, including with how we practice pleasure. Let’s strike against the penis-in-vagina (PV) intercourse paradigm, as our ancestors before us! Most importantly, let’s come together to learn to access more pleasure in the face of oppression.

While we take to the streets, support grassroots reproductive justice organizations and abortion funds, and fight in the courts and legislatures, we also refuse to allow these laws to succeed in miring us in fear and tamping our erotic energy and all its power.

We refuse to have our bodies and pleasures policed by the state. Pleasure is a resource that charges our batteries and connects us with the deep erotic intelligence of all life. Pleasure is the fuel for our revolution.

There are infinite possibilities for erotic and sexual pleasure that do not require taking the risks of criminalization or coerced parenthood. These potentially expansive, queer, communal, masturbatory and subversive expressions of our erotic life also pose a threat to patriarchy.

Under the heteronormative model of PV sex as some kind of ultimate sexual destination, people with uteruses are often expected to endure or tolerate sex that does not center their pleasure. With a sex strike against PV sex, we build solidarity, hand in hand, hand in cunt, cunt in mouth and every other way. Whether on our own, with a partner(s) of any gender(s), between friends, with a practitioner, or in community, this is a time to build our erotic capacity and resource ourselves with pleasure.

The impact of new anti-abortion laws is horrific, as we already know both from past eras of illegal abortion and the places where even under Roe abortion remained inaccessible, due to restrictive state laws as well as intersecting forms of oppression that collude to limit access.

This impact is never felt equally. It’s those unable to travel out of state, who lack access to child care or healthcare, who don’t have employment or reliable transportation – disproportionately people with low incomes, Black and Indigenous folks, people of color, undocumented folks, queer and trans communities, disabled people and youth – who are most impacted.

Deciding whether and when to have a child is a matter of basic bodily autonomy – not to mention the implications for a person’s health, educational access and economic wellbeing. These laws are racist, classist and ableist. They must be stopped.

And so in response to these unjust laws we say:

Strike against the PV intercourse paradigm.

More erotic education, not less.

More bodily autonomy, not less.

More pleasure, not less.

This is a Sex Strike – but it is also a Strike for Pleasure!

SEX STRIKE:

In a nation where access to basic healthcare and bodily autonomy for folks with uteruses are more under attack than ever, let’s be real: PV sex is not safe right now for so many. In solidarity and self-protection we strike against the reproductive act the state seeks to police and control.

Indeed, we strike against any sex that does not serve our pleasure, our full embodied consent, or our safety.

Crucially, this part of the strike is an invitation because we recognize that bodily autonomy is exactly what’s under threat right now. Sex Strike invites us to abstain from PV sex (if relevant to the kind of sex we have) only if that brings pleasure and/or a sense of agency in responding to the laws (and doesn’t inhibit our wellbeing or survival.)

(Explore the potential ancestral joy of this kind of solidarity on our Origins page, shedding light on the crucial role of sex strikes in creating gender egalitarian hunter gatherer societies and facilitating the evolution of art and symbolic culture, as well as sex strikes in our more recent history.)

STRIKE FOR PLEASURE:

“We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”    – Audre Lorde

Regardless of whether you choose to engage in the PV strike described above, Sex Strike // Strike for Pleasure will by no means deprive people with uteruses (or their allies) of their right to their bodies and their pleasure. The most important part of this campaign is to resource ourselves with pleasure and the erotic as fuel for the fights ahead.

When we come together to expand our erotic fluency, we strike for pleasure!

We see their oppressive laws and we raise them: more sex education, more pleasure, more erotic possibility. When we de-center PV sex we learn to expand our erotic embodiment, to be better attuned to our desires and pleasures, and find broader expressions for them. We learn from sex positive communities, queer communities, kink communities, and communities of erotic laborers in a rich sex work lineage.

As Audre Lorde teaches us, Deep embodied pleasure – the true erotic – is power:

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives… “

Let us strike, militantly, for this deep erotic capacity that is our birthright.

Let the pleasure-knowledge we find set the bar for our demands and fuel our fight.

Once we know our full erotic potential, we shall never look back.