Long ago (in 415 BC), in a galaxy far, far away (Greece), a guy named Aristophanes wrote a play called Lysistrata, in which a bunch of Greek women decided to go on a sex strike until their husbands quit fighting wars. In the story, it worked.
But I’m not suggesting that anybody do that. It wouldn’t work anyway. I mean, the warmongering, right-wing men of America probably aren’t sleeping with their wives often enough that they would notice. They’re too busy repressing those pesky sinful urges (which might explain their chronic rage), or letting off steam using alternative methods like massage.
On HuffPo today, I found out about a protest option for us thoroughly modern girls. It’s an initiative started by BlogHer.org called BlogHers Act (26,900 participants as of today). It started with a call to women bloggers to submit the global issue that they would like the community of women bloggers to support. BlogHer will use our input to create a voter manifesto for the next presidential election and they’ll publish the manifesto at the 2007 BlogHer conference.
You submit your Big Issue either by posting a blog entry that contains it (and has the title BlogHers Act) or by posting a comment on the BlogHers website. I think. It’s not real clear, exactly, so good luck. The site is a little hard to parse.
So far the participants’ suggestions are all over the map, as you can imagine. If you ask me, there’s only one issue, and it’s human rights. All the “big issues” fall into that category if you think about it. Every kind of abuse, oppression and exploitation, every kind of want. Even global warming.
The deadline for submission is tomorrow, so I don’t know how many of my girl blogger pals will be able to get in on this part of the initiative. Nonetheless, I thought it was worth spreading the word about BlogHer.org to the multitude of girl bloggers who talk and worry about something besides how many Jello shots they did last weekend.
Here’s to girl power.