Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women are staging a sex-strike

In Aristophanes’splay “Lysistrata”, a young Athenian woman persuades the women of warring Greek states to deny their lovers sex in protest at an ongoing war. Together they vow not to raise their “slippers to the roof” or crouch down before a man “like a lioness on all fours”. Soon bitter conflict erupts between the sexes and an angry chorus of men declares that there is no wild beast harder to tame than the woman.More than two millennia later women in Kiryas Joel, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave an hour outside New York City, are carrying out a similar strike. According to their leader, Adina Sash, 800 women refused to sleep with their husbands last Friday night, a time when intimacy is considered especially holy. More have since joined the cause. Unlike the Greeks they are not protesting against war but rather a religious system in which men can shackle women to unwanted marriages.