Spike Lee predicts sex strikes on college campuses

Spike Lee is humbly predicting that his new movie will inspire a new wave of campus protests next semester in which students will withhold consensual sex as a way to combat sexual assault.

“I think that a sex strike could really work on college campuses where there’s an abundance of sexual harassments and date rapes,” the director remarked last week during an interview on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his new movie, Chiraq.

“Second semester, it’s gonna happen,” Lee told Colbert, contending that college campuses are ripe for a tactic that has successfully been used to end wars in the past.

The forecast grew out of a discussion about the impending release of Lee’s new film, which is based on the classical Greek play Lysistrata, in which women organize a sex strike that persuades their husbands not to march off to war.

More recently, Lee claimed, a woman named Leymah Gbowee “won a Nobel Peace Prize because she used that same tactic in Liberia, and it stopped the second civil war.”

Lee and Colbert also discussed a similar movement in Chicago, where gun violence has produced more deaths in recent years than the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Lee asserting that the sex strike, begun by a lone woman, has now attracted 37 participants.

Given those precedents, Lee expressed optimism that a similar strategy could prove effective at curtailing the incidence of sexual assault on campus.

“With what is happening on college campuses—what’s happening at the University of Missouri, where the football players got together and said, ‘unless the president resigns, we’re not going to play’—I think that … a sex strike could really work on college campuses where there’s an abundance of sexual harassment or date rapes,” he said. “Once people come back from Christmas and some stuff jumps off, there’s [sic] gonna be sex strikes on universities and colleges across this country. I believe it.”

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