I’m sure when Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata, he thought he did something special. He thought he made some kind of point. Lysistrata is a play about how the women of Greece were sick and tired of all of the fighting, warring and violence between the dudes during the Peloponnesian War, so the women came together to find a way to end it: a sex strike. No dude gets the cookies until they give up fighting and warring. When a society’s rise or downfall is placed on the sexuality of women – or the withholding of sex, because apparently only men “want” sex – well, it’s problematic. Which is why Aristophanes can eat it. It was a comedy, but people are still playing around with the fundamental concept within Lysistrata, that women are the sexual gatekeepers, that women refusing men’s access to their bodies could stop a war. Spike Lee recently played around with that idea in his 2015 film Chi-Raq. And now Tiffany Haddish is saying that a sex strike could heal racism.

Tiffany Haddish has a solution to help rid the world of racism — and it involves abstaining from sex. During a roundtable video discussion for The Hollywood Reporter, Haddish was asked by the moderator how, as the self-proclaimed “administrator of joy,” she could be funny during this difficult moment in American history.

The 40-year-old comedian responded, “I’d just talk my truth. Like, people have asked me, ‘Tiffany, how can we solve this? What do you think we could do?’ To be honest… I don’t know. But I know when I have problems and I want them solved, I just stop having sex and everything’s solved. So, if everybody just stopped having sex, especially if you are in an interracial relationship and your man is white, stop having sex with your white man. Things will change.”

Haddish also had advice for white women. “If you are a white woman and you’ve got a white man, stop having sex with that white man. When a white man ain’t gettin’ no sex, things change, that I know.”

When roundtable participant Jameela Jamil stated she thought the problem was that people weren’t having enough sex, Haddish replied, “Sex is power.”

“If a black man ain’t gettin’ no sex,” she said, “he’s going to team up with the white man, ‘Look, brother, we’ve got to figure this out. OK? The women ain’t having sex with us and I don’t want to have sex with a man. So we’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to make it right.’”

[From Page Six]

I’m sure that, much like Aristophanes, Tiffany thought she was being funny! But please, can we just take sex and women’s bodies out of this conversation? And honestly, nothing will be solved if white women suddenly stop sleeping with their white husbands and boyfriends. Nothing! “Celibacy to end racism” isn’t a thing.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Backgrid.