Sex Strike - Withholding Of Pleasure To Protest Violence Against Women says Gender Activists.

Gender activists in Jamaica believe that the call for a more-than-one-month withdrawal of sexual freedoms in romantic relationships will raise awareness about violence against women and persuade male muscle in the fight for respect.

Reacting to a surge of spousal violence in Jamaica, the fire of fury was lit by Trinidad and Tobago writer and gender advocate Nazma Muller, who took to her social-media page urging women to formulate a sex strike to famish men into compliance and put the cause of women’s rights on the front burner. She has recommended that the sex strike be imposed until March 8, 2020, International Women’s Day.

Muller urged Caribbean women to protest against the philosophy that women were property, arguing that men will “never miss the water till the well runs dry”.

She further stated that they will begin to value us and our capacity to produce life if we don't let off any. Holding back sexual pleasure and reflect on what this thing is doing to us and to the future. I am saying to my sisters across the Caribbean, let us really consider and appreciate what they have.

“We really have to take back our p**p** and put a value on it,” said Muller.

Professor Opal Palmer Adisa, the university director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, at The University of the West Indies, Mona, said she would strongly advocate for Jamaican women to also ‘lock shop’ in protest of gender-based violence here.

Acknowledging that women have used sexual power for personal benefit and sway in their relationships for ages, Palmer Adisa said it was time for women to completely challenge patriarchal values of entitlement.

“Jamaica definitely needs a strike, and I think that women have more power than they exercise. If women were so organized and all women took this on as their issue and we say nothing, nobody getting anything, including those who are behaving themselves, then that would have some impact,” Palmer Adisa said.

The advocacy comes amid national outrage over a slew of killings of women, including the New Year’s Eve slaying of a Manchester woman by her supervisor partner, the murder-suicide by a Jamaica Defence Force corporal in Portmore, and a savage knife homicide in the quiet St Elizabeth district of Brinkley, presumably by an estranged lover.

Just yesterday, a St Catherine man who chopped a woman to death and wound another pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder in the St Catherine Circuit Court.

The accused, 65-year-old Ernest Whyte, was ordered remanded for sentencing on March 4 by Justice Andrea Pettigrew-Collins.

A social inquiry report was also requested by the court.

On a previous appearance, Whyte was remanded for a forensic psychiatric evaluation.

Palmer Adisa fears, however, that because many women will not feel sufficiently empowered to engage in a strike of this nature, requiring mass participation, the desired result might not be achieved.

Gender activist Nadeen Spence shares a similar sentiment of caution.

Spence said that even though women have used a sex strike in seeking to end the civil war, she did not believe the strategy would be successful in Jamaica because some women were quick to cast blame on other women.

The advocacy to which she referred was the sex strike organized in the West African state of Liberia in 2003 by Leymah Gbowee, ending 14 years of civil war. Gbowee was later named a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

But Palmer Adisa believes that one way of achieving a paradigm shift in Jamaican culture and relationships is to recruit men as loud voices in the fight against patriarchal violence.

“The men have to be our allies and they have to speak to other men, their brothers, men on the street they see are disrespecting women, so that becomes their responsibility".