Is it Time to Lysistrata the Dating Apps?

Or the Men? Or Both?

First, crash course on Lysistrata:

Lysistrata is an ancient Greek badass and feminist superhero. In 431 BC, she and all her Greek sisters and girlfriends decided they had absolutely had it with the Peloponnesian War, so Lysistrata hatched a plan. She gathered up all the women of the warring city-states of Athens and Sparta, and they united forces to end the war.

You might wonder how women could achieve such a thing while living under a patriarchy that considered them hysterical and silly, but smart women have always known how to exploit men’s underestimation of us. We do it all the time, even today. Aida Chavez took up the theme just a few years ago with this viral tweet:

Once Lysistrata had all the women together, she instructed them to withhold sex from every man in the land. The warring meatheads now had two choices: negotiate peace and end this dramatic nonsense, or no sex. The woman declared their united stance, and then they locked themselves up in the Acropolis together and had an excellent time. They chose the Acropolis because that’s where all the money and other resources were held, so in addition to losing access to sex, the men lost access to everything. They lost their collective shit immediately, of course, and after the raging gave way to chest thumping that gave way to whining, Lysistrata’s war of attrition rapidly proved successful, and the entire Greek civilization balanced itself into a prolonged period of peace and mutual interdependence. It didn’t take long at all.

I’m suggesting we try something similar in addressing the debacle that is contemporary dating, but first, two disclaimers:

1. Lysistrata is a character in an ancient Greek comedy that was regularly performed in classical Athens prior to the birth of Christ; she wasn’t a real person. She’s real to me, though, and she’s an inspiration.

2. I’m not suggesting women withhold sex (unless you want to, in which case you absolutely should). For the record, I want all women to have any sex they desire and no sex they do not desire, so don’t make this analogy too literal.
   

The war of attrition thing, though: it could work. Here’s how we Lysistrata the current dating wars:

First, we must understand the barriers to peaceful and productive partnership: the first is the disproportionate percentage of toxic and dysfunctional single men available; the second is the dating apps themselves; and the third is the fact that for too long, we (women) have been feeding those systems ourselves. Not intentionally, and I’m not blaming women for any of this; I’ve been complicit myself. But we cannot fix this problem without recognizing the ways in which we ourselves have been exacerbating it. We’ve been excusing toxicity and aggression, tolerating bad behavior such as breadcrumbing and negging, and we’ve been handing our hard-earned money over to dating app corporations that are intentionally gamifying their products, commodifying their users, and making up fairy tales about algorithms that even they know don’t work. Here are some options for our next moves:

1. Opt out of the dating apps entirely. Many women are swiping left on the apps for good, and many are happier than ever.

2. After that decision is made, we have the time, energy, and peace of mind to either actively try to meet someone IRL, or the time, energy, and peace of mind to build a single-lady life that’s fulfilling and fascinating and happy and healthy.

3. The other option is to remain on the apps, but figure out how to game them so that they work for instead of against us. The project I’m facilitating (I’m an academic teaching people to use applied rhetoric tactics on the dating apps) is one way to do that. It’s called “Burned Haystack Dating Method”: the controlling metaphor is that it’s too much of a time and energy suck to find a needle in a haystack; instead, you just burn the haystack to the ground and the needles will appear on their own. And my platform is just one example — lots of women on their own and led by other social media influencers are using various resistance tactics on the dating apps, and it’s working. In a nutshell, simply don’t engage with the nonsense. At all. Not from the men, not from the apps. If an app works for you, and if you encounter a man on that app who conducts himself as a likable human being rather than some minor god in his own personal Greek mythology, then proceed. But if it’s anything less than that, just opt out. Go on about your life. Here’s what’s going to happen:

Things are going to change. They’ll have to. Men want to date. They definitely want sex. If those things stop being available in the absence of decent human conduct, then that conduct will improve. And apps need users. If their users leave—and they are currently leaving in droves—then the apps will also need to improve.

Lysistrata’s story is theoretical, yes, but everything is theoretical until it happens, and what I’m seeing in my own work suggests it’s already starting to happen. Recently, one of the Burned Haystack group members was on the crosstown bus in NYC and she overheard a man in his 20s talking to another of the same. He said, “If this Burned Haystack thing is how women are screening us now, then getting laid just got harder.”

It is getting harder, and it’s going to keep getting harder as more and more women decide it’s either decent human treatment or no treatment. There’s enough talk about this on social media, in news media, and even in college classes (I just finished teaching a new course titled “Rhetoric of Dating and Intimacy”), and these various discourses are coalescing into a multi-pronged resistance: in addition to women uniting in grassroots ways as they have in Burned Haystack, mainstream publications are now paying attention. Just this year the dating app wars—those between men and women and those between the apps and everyone—have been covered in The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC, and many, many others.

I’m sitting in Athens as I write this, in the shadow of the Acropolis. I normally live in Wisconsin, but am visiting Greece with my Greek mother and the rest of our family, so it’s possible that my Lysistrata daydreams are inspired by the fierce Grecian sun or jetlag or both, but if invoking this fictional character’s campaign seems absurd, it’s no more absurd than the fact that nearly 2500 years later women are still battling too many of the same lopsided gender dynamics.

I think that Lysistratian resistance is worth a concerted try; if nothing else, it’ll get everyone’s attention, and gathering attention is always the first step toward change.