Alyssa Milano, one of the actresses who got #MeToo up and running, found it outrageous that Georgia had passed a new "heartbeat" abortion ban law, and called for a sex strike by women.1 Aside from the people ignoring it, simply laughing at it as ridiculous, or being angry, reactions can be more or less grouped as follows.
- "This is a great idea." Encourage Milano and her fellow pro-choice women to follow suit.
- "This is problematic." Talk about how this is either heterosexist or commodifies sex. (This was a minority response, I probably saw disproportionately many of these because of my position.)
- "This is a bad idea." Talk about the bad assumptions. (We'll do this in a moment.)
Category (A) is particularly interesting, as it included not only a number of #MeToo feminists, but quite a few conservatives who were cheering and laughing, saying various things along the lines of "Yes, please DO practice abstinence unless you marry / plan to procreate." From their perspective, Alyssa Milano was asking pro-choice women to do exactly what religious conservatives want women to do: Refrain from having casual & recreational sex in the first place.
Milano simply did not understand her opposition. Her perspective was presumably informed by feminist Twitter's coverage of the law, which included a great deal of framing this as an act performed by men, acting as a collective to oppress women - an act of patriarchy. I'm not sure what presumptive collective benefit men were supposed to reap from forcing women to carry pregnancies to term.
In reality, there is little difference between men and women's attitudes on abortion. Many of the most passionate opponents of abortion are themselves women, who unambiguously would prefer that pro-choice women stopped having sex with men. With the rise in the use of political views to determine whether or not to date or have sex with someone, there are not many pro-life men who would have been impacted by a sex strike carried out by women with unambiguous feelings about "heartbeat" laws.
To make Milano's call even less well-advised, Georgia's "heartbeat" law is essentially identical to numerous other laws that have already been successfully challenged and overturned in court. The law will, in all probability, never take effect - until and unless Roe is overturned, in which case abortion will immediately become illegal (not just after 6 weeks, but at any time) in numerous states. The law is largely symbolic,2 and Milano's act did more to spread misinformation about what options women in the state of Georgia have available to them than it did to combat any actual change in abortion access.
It's very unlikely that the #SexStrike call will actually get anywhere, but it's a nice object lesson in how failing to understand your opposition can lead to deploying bad tactics. Milano seemed to think that a sex strike with pro-choice women refusing to have sex with men would retaliate against the people who were oppressing her people and cause them to relent; instead, it would simply ineffectually punish some segment of her political allies while rewarding her actual opponents, in order to try to rescind a law that has not taken effect and will not unless something momentous happens in the Supreme Court.
I would say that in most cases, successfully persuading opponents is extremely difficult without having an understanding of who your opponents actually are and why they're doing what you don't want them to do. If you don't understand what your opponents want, your attempts to retaliate against them might backfire badly. You may be giving them exactly what they want.
1. While virtually every call for a sex strike in the United States has been met with laughter, the tactic has arguably worked in a few cases, e.g., Kenya.
2. Except inasmuch as it provides another in a steady stream of cases designed to provide the Supreme Court with a case they could use to overturn Roe if they feel like it, but the Georgia law is not particularly special in that regard.
