The Stench of Gendered Power Structures in Lysistrata Anonymous College

On the surface, the play Lysistrata could appear to be a light-hearted comedy about a group of women who decide to refuse sex to the Greek men in order to end the Peloponnesian war. However, inside of this humor there exists a dangerous, hidden transcript: by refusing sex to the men and demanding the end of the war, the women are challenging the pre-existing patriarchal power structures in ways that were unheard of in Ancient Greece. In order to maintain their hegemony, the men try to assert their dominance by any means they can, including, in a very animalistic manner, demonstrating that they smell much worse than women and by taking off their clothes to show off their masculinity. Throughout the play, the men and women of Greece fight for power, and Aristophanes conveys this power struggle by using the sense of smell, by demonstrating that the differences between genders are entirely fictional, and by use of the image of the “woman on top.”

The men want to show off the way that they smell bad in order to assert their dominance over women in the Choral Debate on pages 66-68. However, the women reveal that they smell just as bad so that they can maintain the power they have already seized by refusing to have sex. The men’s...