Rampant Women On Sex Strike: Aubrey Beardsley’s 8 Erotic Illustrations For Lysistrata, 1896

As for old flames and lovers  they’re none left.
And since Milesians went against us,
I’ve not seen a decent eight-inch dildo.
Yes, it’s just leather, but it helps us out.
So would you be willing, if I found a way,
to work with me to make this fighting end?

– Lysistrata prepares to organise a sex strike to end the war between Athens and Sparta, Aristophanes, 411BC, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in 1896

 

Aubrey Beardsley was hired to make eight illustrations for the Greek erotic comic play Lysistrata for a privately printed edition issued by Leonard Smithers in 1896. Smithers was the British publisher proud to “publish what all the others are afraid to touch”. Inspired by Japanese shunga (erotic) prints of the likes of Kawanabe Kyôsai’s penis fights, Beardsley’s ink on paper drawings are high-quality smut, easily stored between the sheets of less racy books.

Written by Greek playwright Aristophanes (c. 446 – c. 386 BC), Lysistrata, a play about sex and war in which love defeats death – or, in Greek, Eros defeating Thanatos, was first performed in Athens around 411 BC. Aristophanes wrote it during the Peloponnesian War, a long war between Athens and Sparta. Tired by all the fighting, Lysistrata organises a national sex strike until it stops. She joins forces with the Spartan Lampito who orchestrates a similar sex strike in her homeland. The play begins:

LYSISTRATA
There are a lot of things about us women
That sadden me, considering how men
See us as rascals.

CALONICE
As indeed we are!

 

The sex strike turns into an orgiastic triumph of lust over despair. In one scene, Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women, the naked audience fondle each as they listen to Lysistrata’s speech. In a subverting of male dominance in life and pornography, Myrrhina teases her husband with her body until he’s demented by lust and will do anything for a shag.

You can imagine the pale, tall and thin Beardsley making his drawings in his room at the Spread Eagle hotel in Epsom, Surrey. In inky pools of black ink on white paper, he draws a woman naked except for stockings covering what the artist calls her “coynte”. In The Toilet of Lampito, a winged Eros applies a powder puff to a woman’s naked bottom. In The Examination of the Herald, a wizened Spartan man surveys a young Athenian’s gargantuan erection.

 

Beardsley died in Menton in the south of France on 16 March 1898. He was 25 years old. As his friend Robert Ross commented: “There need be no sorrow for an ‘inheritor of unfulfilled renown.’ Old age is no more a necessary complement to the realisation of genius than premature death. Within six years… he produced masterpieces he might have repeated but never surpassed.”