Lysistrata

Lysistrata pits men against women and violence against peace in a battle that felt as poignant to Aristophanes in Ancient Greece as it did to Will Huddleston in 2008. The play brings attention to the inequity in Athens using a satirical tone that makes the message accessible to a larger audience while simultaneously highlighting the power and pitfalls of presenting important issues through satire. Satire can be a powerful force to reveal the absurdity of commonly held beliefs and take the powerful people it critiques down a peg. Although I agree that “for its time” this play was a radical call for peace and equality in Ancient Greece, it begs the question: why did some plot lines not get removed in the more modern adaption? 

         When the women overtake the city, they are shown as flighty and flawed but still more capable of ending a war than the men are. However, this is not the call for “equality for all” that one might at first assume, as the women’s main argument for why they deserve rights boils down to marginalizing another group: “Do you think you are dealing with slaves?” (Aristophanes 36). Class and money are truly what rule society and these women who are fighting for equality are “all the women [who] have been raised in luxurious splendor” (Aristophanes 39). Although I can’t really know Aristophanes motives in writing this play: I do find it believable that he could see rich women (or more realistically women with rich husbands) as valuable while still looking down on women who don’t have as much financial power. I can even excuse Huddleston for potentially using this as a critique of feminism during the modern era: that still centers women who are rich and white.

Lysistrata at once asks us to laugh at the powerful while falling back on punching down towards the less powerful. I think this is shown no clearer than in the character of Kleisthenes. If I’m remembering correctly, male homosexuality wasn’t seen as unnatural or subversive in Ancient Greece—but in 2008 it was. This character who seems to be a sort of sex worker is portrayed as down for anything—reinforcing the idea of homosexuality being equivalent to having a “sexually promiscuous lifestyle” (I saw this in the play in the scene where he says he’s okay with being singed by a torch). During this time (and still today) being gay is seen as a “lifestyle” that could never end in happiness or marriage. His sexuality is seen as funny and a joke. Although everyone in this play is taken to absurdist levels, I don’t think framing powerful men as incompetent and falling back on a harmful stereotype of gay men are the same thing. 

Lysistrata is a product of its time—both in its original conception in Ancient Greece and the less “politically correct” (for lack of a better word) years of 2008 when humor only got funnier with the more people you offended. It leaves its readers with the question: Who exactly is Lysistrata laughing at? Is its overall goal of world peace worth the jabs it takes at the less powerful? 

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