Here’s to the women of Kenya! Tired of the acrimonious divisiveness within Kenya’s coalition government, and afraid that their country is on the edge of a resurgence of the violence of 2008, a coalition of women’s groups known as the “G-10” has called for a week-long sex strike. The purpose is to urge the government (made up of men) to get its act together. The G-10 wants women all over the country to refuse to have sex for a week in order to get men to stop their endless bickering and get something done. What a gutsy, humorous, hopeful, impossible, and profoundly beautiful political move.

Since when do women anywhere in the world have the power to tell men to get out of the bedroom? Individual women have always had tricks to effect particular results with men, to be sure, but collective female power has always been relatively weak — even during such historical battles as suffrage. To my knowledge, it’s never expressed itself in the form of the collective withholding of sex.

Nature dealt women a pretty bad hand when it comes to sex. It’s easy for uncivilized men to consider it their right to ravage and abuse women merely because, well, because they’re able to. To many men, it’s a woman’s obligation to give sex.

Well, these wonderful women in Kenya have a very different idea. For all their playfulness, they’re realists. They’ve decided to pay the prostitutes their husbands visit to join them in the sex strike. Even the prime minister’s wife, Ida Odinga, has lent her support to the cause.

Some liberal Kenyan men are responding that the strike isn’t a bad idea per se, but a week is too long (oh such suffering!) Others reminded women that they could get sex whenever and wherever they felt like it, thank you very much (duh — cruel and lousy louts exist everywhere).

The Kenyan women are not fools. Obviously, no man needs to abide by female-made rules calling for a sexless week. But most married men who are the least bit civilized desire wives who love them and want to have sex with them. The Kenyan women behind this movement are counting on these men to be seriously perturbed — enough to go back into parliament and tackle the myriad political problems that they’re currently ignoring.

The women behind the sex strike are also having a great laugh. Shades of the wonderful Lysistrata — a play by Aristophanes that I happened to have seen performed when I was in college. In the version I saw, the women were elegant and lovely in their long flowing white tunics, while the men were burdened with two-foot-long, hot-dog shaped pink balloons strapped to their crotches. The women came across as in control, the men as whimpering fools. I have no idea how the people of Athens received the play, but surely its mere existence indicates that 5th-century B.C. Athenian woman held more power within their marriages than Afghani women do today.

It would be a stretch to argue that either the fictional ladies who followed Lysistrata’s call for Athenian women to withhold sex in order to get their men to end the Peloponnesian War, or the real women of Kenya who are currently calling for a sex strike, are feminists in the ordinary sense of the word. Neither group’s purpose is to take over the exercise of power from men. Instead, both groups want men to stop behaving like children.

To withhold sex is a very female form of power. Sure, almost any man can force sex on a woman. But no man can make a woman love him, or want to have sex with him. (Alas, therein lies the singular beauty of human sex, as opposed to animal sex.) Most men pride themselves on being able to make women love them, and in civilized society, only perverts prefer sex through force.

The Kenyan women are onto something real: Male mortification erupts instantaneously whenever women publicly reject them, and a national sex-strike is on the face of it a hugely public rejection.