Early in the fifth century BCE, during the Peloponnesian War, an Athenian general called Alcibiades decided to mount an invasion of Sicily. What became known as the Syracuse Expedition created the template for military disasters thereafter, from the routing of the Romans by the Parthians in the Battle of Carrhae, 53 BCE, to the humiliation of the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam two millennia later. While Syracuse was a giant nail in the coffin of Athenian independence from Sparta, the arts remained well-funded, and the playwright Aristophanes decided to turn the whole thing into a proto-feminist comedy, Lysistrata. To cut a schlong story short, the play’s eponymous heroine convinces the women of the warring city-states to withhold sex from their lovers until they end their bellicose ways. The effectiveness of the strategy was not lost on the women of Liberia during the civil war of 1999 to 2003. Led by Crystal Roh Gawding, Comfort Freeman and Asatu Bah Kenneth, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, a cross-religious group made up of different social classes, pursued a similar strategy of sit-in and sex strike – with a curse thrown in, for good measure. They were in no small part responsible for achieving an end to fourteen years of fighting, and made possible the presidency of Africa’s first elected female head of state, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, from 2006 to 2018. There was a cautionary subplot in Lysistrata, however, with many of the women as frustrated as the men by the lack of bedroom action, and the tactic inflamed the battle between the sexes. Faced with a similar ploy today, enlightened heterosexual men are likely to be as incensed as women at being reduced to sexual objects. And even at the time, it’s doubtful the strategy cut much sway with homosexual soldiers, who played a significant role in ancient Greek armies. After all, at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE, it was the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite force made up of 150 male homosexual couples, who finally ended Spartan domination.