In real life, the Peloponnesian War fatally weakened Athens and caused intense general suffering in the populace, meaning actually everyone, not just the elite.

War in those days was a game played by highborn men looking to increase or sustain their wealth and/or power. The Peloponnesian War became much more than that. It's not that commoners actually fought in it; they mostly didn't. Soldiers continued to be wealthy men who could afford to pay for expensive military gear..

But the State was becoming more powerful, and military tactics, including crop destruction, became more damaging. Fields of grain were burned, olive groves were destroyed, and ships carrying food were sunk.

Neither men nor women who represented the bulk of the Athenian population would have had any power to stop any of that. They weren't exactly slaves, but they had very little influence.

The people who did were elite men who had the right to vote, and they consistently voted to go to war because they thought they might benefit from it.

The fictional women in the play who withheld sex would have been the wives of these elite men, seeking to crack their hubris and make them pay attention to the results of their actions.

It should be noted that these women had no freedom. "Elite" women in Athens in that time period were virtually the property of either their fathers or their husbands. They were rarely permitted to leave their homes, and when they did they were covered and veiled head to toe. They had no property rights, no legal rights in the courts, and of course they had no vote.

Women of other social classes were more free, but elite women were slaves in all but name.

That context helps explain why anyone might have thought a women's sex strike could be worth writing about. The very idea of elite women speaking up to influence state policy was radical – even when women were suffering from war.

So what can any of that tell us about the struggle for women's rights today? I don't have any profound ideas, but it's worth noting that the conservatives who insist they have a right to control women's bodies are in a very small minority, even though they have grasped disproportionate political power. There's a parallel in there somewhere.

It's also worth noting that many powerful women on the right are making the same tyrannical claims that controlling a woman's uterus SHOULD be a state prerogative.

Just look at that vicious religious fanatic on the Supreme Court, whose name I don't even want to write. She's loathsome, a member of a controlling cult that treats LGBTQ people like shit and teachers that women are to be subject to men.

She's one of the people insisting that women's bodies must not be their own. Many conservative women are as vile and evil as she is.

They're not going to withhold sex from their husbands. They're encouraging their husbands to treat women like shit.

During the Peloponnesian War, there was a clear split between how elite women thought and how elite men thought.

There seems to be less of that today, far less. Women who wanted to withhold sex would probably be withholding sex from men who are as (or almost as) opposed to the state controlling women's bodies as they are.

Meanwhile, religious fanatics will just keep rolling with their horseshit about how gawd wants them to keep women's bodies under State control.