And Aeone, you’re right but look at the situation here.  History is crediting women with stopping a war without any hint of violence.  Even if their weapon of choice was different, isn’t it a step in the right direction that this is even codified?  Besides, once you take the element of femininity out of it and turn it into a pair of completely equal and genderless entities, you run into one problem with the story:

“No, YOU get out of MY house.”

Or, you could go to a typical playground, where “women rule the roost.” Plenty of selfishness, greed, aggression, and occasionally violence… on the part of the “grown ups.”

The thing about *human* nature, is that it’s not defined by gender.

Here’s the literal translation of what the people said. 
Kandatu: We said to each other, we should tell our husbands do not go there and get yourself involved if you are not a part of it. If you want to go sure, go ahead, go there. It’s your own choice but you will not be able to go home. I will not accept you. 
Kandatu’s Husband: She said, if you do wrong then so be it, we’re going to separate. 
Kamanza: If you do not agree with me, you will get none of my salary. 

This was not a “sex strike.” This was a group of women banding together to knock some sense into their husbands not using their powers of seduction but their powers of logic and reasoning. They did not withhold sex, they exercised their authority and told their husbands that their home, their life, their family, their money, will not tolerate their continued fighting. They gave them an ultimatum. 

It’s almost like they couldn’t accept that these women just put their foot down and bared their teeth, but they had to tell the rest of the world that seduction was the most powerful intent that drove the point home to these men. The women used their own authority and the men respected it. If that’s so hard to understand from a general worldwide perspective, then it’s damn sad.

If women did that and men respected their opinion enough to listen, then yes I firmly believe wars would end.

If the victor “hated” the enemy, there would have been no survivors.

This is where I suspect it would be useful to distinguish two different uses of the word hate. Like love, it can refer to an emotion and/or action(s) – actions which can be complimentary and/or cooperative (in the case of love), or derogatory and/or coercive (in the case of hate). So, in the broader sense, engaging in war out of envy could be considered an example of hate. But there are other reasons, like self-defense and defense of loved ones, for which people may go to war. That’s where the utopian ideal breaks down. It only works if everyone chooses love, and freewill* tends to put a kinker in that plan. This extends to all examples of coercion; crime would be nonexistent if no one committed crimes.

*used here in the sense of others making choices beyond one’s own influence, as opposed to in the fuzzier metaphysical sense ;)

Now, I’m not accusing hippie sloganeering efforts of being hugely savvy or educated, but… daaaaamn they would have to be oblivious.

Actually, I think interpreting ML,NW as “Making love will make it harder to make war” is far from oblivious.Think of it this way:  When you make love, you enter a relationship where the “Other”, the person who is not you, is seen as desirable, precious, beloved.  Making love freely (in the hippie sense) opens you up to the habit of seeing the Other in this way.  War, on the other hand, is predicated on a world view that sees the Other as detestable, worthless, hated (the exact opposite of how you see other people when you make love).  So the logic here is, once you get in the habit of making love, it becomes very difficult if not impossible to see “the Other” in the objectifying way you need to to make war on them.This is Utopian thinking, sure, but it’s still a pretty beautiful thought.  That’s why I’m kind of disappointed that the opposite seems to be true in this example:  Not making love resulted in not making war.  To be clear, I’m certainly not disappointed that this Lysistratic strategy worked in this case!  I just wish the hippie Utopian ideal had tested out better.

It’d be a whole other ballgame. But I’m afraid it’d require some unlikely intellectual revolutions…

Regarding the matriarchal versus patriarchal debate, it seems to me we have a chicken an egg question. Which came first, testosterone or aggression? My inexpert hypothesis is that a civilization rooted in millennia of matriarchy would be different, but I’m highly skeptical that it would be particularly more peaceful. I doubt aggression among our species is uniquely caused by male biology, i.e. that even an all-female human civilization (provided such were biologically feasible) would be devoid of coercion/resistance. I wonder what our post-human descendants will make of all this…

Correlation does not prove causation.

A cute little inversion– the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s war!

So here is a question. Let’s say person A (let’s call him John Germany) decides to invade the home of person B (let’s call her Jane Poland), execute Jane’s grandmother and conscript Jane’s children into his army, and Jane fights back. They are both clearly at war. Does that then mean that they are both acting out of hate?

It’s not a question of an entirely all-male leadership defining patriarchy, but of the values and assumptions that define a civilisation’s power stucture. Thus the occasional female ruler’s failure to distinguish themselves from male rulers proves nothing, since they’re operating under the same conditions and have very little scope to enact a matriarchal style of management over the top of a patriarchal system.

You should be able to recognise a matriarchal society quite readily; I imagine people wouldn’t be locked up for punishment but actual rehabilitation, for example. A matriarchal society would have a radically different approach to very many aspects of the regulation of that society, enabling far less adversarial interactions than those a patriarchal mindset feels necessary. In short, such a society would value cooperation over competition and have as many nurturing aspects as we’re used to seeing punitive ones.

It’d be a whole other ballgame. But I’m afraid it’d require some unlikely intellectual revolutions…

John and Yoko. 1971

So this is the direct opposite:  Not getting laid is causing these guys to reduce their aggression. (So they can get laid.)

And, to that I again say HOORAY! Love is SO SO good, and there is not even close to enough of it. FUCK war, forever.

I always thought it odd that love is so often regarded as the opposite of war. Love is wonderful, but surely it is not required to stop war. People hate one another frequently without going to war over it. Nor does going to war necessarily imply hate. If slaves revolt for freedom, it is not because they fail to love.

Wouldn’t it be great if these women were allowed any power BESIDES having a vagina that they could have wielded? Because this kinda further entrenches the idea that sex is a thing that women give and men take, not a thing that peole do together ’cause they wanna.

Indeed. I’d argue the world divides into two outlooks on sex, that it is a transaction and that it is an interaction. Even among individuals who regard it as an interaction, though, it could still be used for leverage. Call it Mutually Assured Celibacy.

I would prefer to see more people in power who work for the taxpaying voters they represent, and not their corporate minders, and I could care less what gender they are.

As the good doctress says, THIS x 1 million.