Joy Crawford | Lock shop in solidarity with all women

I am a survivor, advocate, activist, and first responder to women and girls who experience sexual violence daily – women who have their vaginas penetrated against their will, under physical, mental/emotional, financial, sociocultural threats; women who resist daily, in their own invisible ways, the scourge that seeks to take their souls.

No sex protest has a place in the journey of liberating women. Trinidadian gender activist Nazma Muller protested the increase in domestic violence (2020); actress and activist Alyssa Milano protested abortion laws (2019); Bolshevik women in the 1920s; Chinese women in the 1940s; and perhaps, most famously, by the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace in the early 2000s.

So, this is my contribution to the ‘lock shop’ dialogue.

Once again, men and women with good and not-so-good intentions don’t ‘get it’. This is not about withholding the physical ‘punani’. It is no different from the annual IDEVAW silent protest that you stand with victims and survivors. This is no different from the woman’s mental disengagement from sexual acts that seems ‘off the wall pleasurable to men’, simply because the woman is physically present. This is more than ‘stupid, dumb, pointless idea’.

This is about women choosing to make another visible denouncement of the crime against our sexual rights and well-being – crime that results in the rape, sexual violation, and death of our kin. Crime that is the centre of abortion, sexual harassment, tubal-ligation, safe-sex, no-sex, same-sex, paid-sex, marital-sex debates. This is about women choosing to use, yes, use, ‘power’ that is theirs to protect and liberate the soul that is trapped by sexual violence.

NO-SEX DAY

Why cannot men and women ‘shut shop’ – fast from sex, abstain – deliberately to stand with a woman or girl who cannot for herself? Is it impossible for a woman in a loving, harmonious relationship to say to her partner, I chose not to have sex for a day, a week, a month to support my sisters who cannot choose, and get the support of her ‘loving’ man? Hmmm? Or she, too, will find out that she really has no right or choice how, when or where she gives her gift.

We need to be cautioned: there is an illusion of what and who advocacy is for. Our resistance is against you; however, it is for us.

So, yes, I support every woman who can, need, choose to ‘lock shop’. I denounce every idea that her choice will justify men to increase violence against women. I laugh at the idea that this is extreme and stupid, because ‘unno won’t get none’.

I enjoy the thought that sex workers can strike. So, when men increase physical, mental, emotion and financial violence because of a ‘no-sex protest’, what are we really saying?

This is for us, by us. We lock shop in solidarity with those who have died, with those who cannot.

International Women’s Day (March 8, 2020) in Jamaica should be ‘NO-SEX DAY’ with all ‘Ps’ off.

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