I Love My Husband. I’m Still Withholding Sex Until the Patriarchy Falls.

How a sex and reproductive strike might be the key to smashing the patriarchy for good.

No Sex. No Babies. No Compromise.

I’m done.

I’m done pretending everything is fine while my rights are rolled back like we’re living in some handmaid’s tale prequel. I’m done smiling politely when politicians who couldn’t find a clitoris with a map decide they’re qualified to legislate my body. I’m done negotiating with a system that was never built for me in the first place.

Let me break it down for the men clutching their pearls right now: this isn’t about you. Unless, of course, you’re one of the ones voting to control my reproductive organs while struggling to find the G-spot. In which case, yes. It’s definitely about you. Cry harder.

And so, starting now, I’m on strike. A full reproductive strike. No sex. No babies. No more participation in a society that sees my uterus as state property.

And I’m asking—no, urging—every woman who feels the same to do the same.

I know it sounds extreme to some of you. But what’s more extreme: choosing not to have sex, or being forced to give birth against your will? Choosing not to get pregnant, or watching your reproductive rights disappear one by one like they were never yours to begin with? If you're uncomfortable with my method, ask yourself why you're not more uncomfortable with the oppression that led me here.

The time for protests and rallies has ended. Now is the time for radical measures.

We’ve tried being polite. We’ve tried voting. Marching. Writing letters. Giving interviews. Making TikToks. Screaming into the void of late-stage capitalism. But the truth is, they don’t listen to our voices—they listen to power. And there is nothing more powerful than women collectively choosing to shut down the one thing the system cannot function without: our reproductive labor.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about punishing our partners. This isn’t about withholding love or intimacy out of spite. This is about power. About reclaiming the only power they haven’t fully stripped from us yet. Our bodies. Our choices. Our ability to say no. Not just to sex, but to complicity.

And for the record, my husband gets it. Completely. He watched what happened with the Dobbs decision. He watched me cry when our state passed its six-week abortion ban. He watched the protests, the backlash, the gaslighting. He asked me what he could do. I told him: stand with me, not inside me. He got a vasectomy. Voluntarily. No kids, no risk, no hesitation. Then he asked me—asked me—if he could go a step further and wear a chastity cage until I said otherwise. Not because I demanded it. Because he wanted to show solidarity with the boundaries I was setting. That’s what real partnership looks like.

We’re locked in so to speak.

Because every time we bring another child into this world, we’re doing it with the knowledge that our daughters might have fewer rights than we did. That our sons might grow up in a culture that teaches them entitlement to women’s bodies, not respect for their autonomy. That we will be expected to sacrifice our careers, our health, our identities, and in some states, our lives—for the sake of pregnancies we might not even choose.

We’re birthing children into a world where a rapist can sue for custody, but a woman can’t sue the state for forcing her to carry a dead fetus. And you want me to “calm down”? I’ll calm down when we stop pretending this isn’t biological warfare disguised as policy.

If that doesn’t terrify you, then maybe you haven’t been paying attention.

They want us barefoot and pregnant, docile and distracted. And the most radical thing we can do right now is say: not anymore.

Let them jerk off to the idea of a future they’ll never see, because we’re not here to populate a dystopia for their benefit. We’re not your incubators, your maids, your therapists, or your punching bags. We’re done doing unpaid emotional labor for a world that doesn’t even give us basic human rights.

What would happen if women everywhere stopped having sex? What would happen if we refused to give this system any more daughters to exploit or sons to indoctrinate? What would happen if we, together, shut it all down until our rights were not just returned, but expanded?

This isn’t just about Roe. This is about everything. About autonomy. About consent. About economic freedom, medical privacy, safety, dignity, and the fundamental right to exist without being controlled.

And until that’s possible for all women—trans women, Black women, poor women, immigrant women, every woman—I’m not participating in this broken game. Let the patriarchy collapse from blue balls and empty cribs. Let them see what a society without women’s labor, pleasure, or progeny really looks like.

You want my body? Give me back my rights.

Until then?
No sex.
No babies.
No compromise.

And if you’re a man reading this and feeling “attacked,” good. Sit in that discomfort. That’s the faint echo of what women have been living with for centuries—just a taste. And if you do want to help? Then sit the hell down, shut up, and support women without needing applause for it.

— Signed, a very tired, very angry woman who’s had enough.