Katherine Angel

A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women--and their bodies--want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? In this elegant, searching book--spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism--Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood? In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that "tomorrow sex will be good again."

Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

antonia maria wagner she/they

Sex, if we are lucky, is not just exciting and satisfying; it also touches on our deepest fears, our deepest pains.

There may, however, be some wishful thinking at work in insisting that we have a sexuality that can be discovered separately from interaction with others. The difficulty with the notion of what one ‘really really’ wants – finding that out, and bringing it, as if it were an object, to sex – is not just that one has to start somewhere with sex: there is a first time for everything sexually, and it is necessarily unknown and full of uncertainty. It is also that every sexual encounter is unique, and has a powerful indeterminacy to it; we never know what is going to happen in any given sexual experience, or how we will feel about it – regardless of what we have done and liked before. And this is the power of the erotic.

Part of the joys of sex might precisely be in discovering new, different ways to be touched: in being vulnerable to the unknown.

As Audre Lorde writes in ‘Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving’, it is ‘axiomatic’ for black men and women ‘that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others – for their use and to our detriment’.

When you feel vulnerable, it’s tempting to brace yourself against vulnerability – the fantasy of hardening yourself so that nothing can hurt you. The collateral, however, is that nothing can reach you, either. How to protect oneself without denying vulnerability, with all its fruitfulness? ‘How’, asks Lorde, ‘to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply?’

When it comes to sex, there is pleasure to be had in vulnerability. It can be what makes sex joyful – the giddy rewards of stepping haltingly into the water, the gasp on contact, the relief in the finding of ecstasy. We need to be vulnerable – to take risks, to be open to the unknown – if we are to experience joy and transformation. That’s the bind: pleasure involves risk, and that can never be foreclosed or avoided. It is not by hardening ourselves against vulnerability that we – any of us – will find sexual fulfillment. It is in acknowledging, and opening ourselves to, our universal vulnerability

Letting things in, being porous – being susceptible to the other’s needs and desires – is what makes one tender to the feelings of others, and what puts one at their mercy.

Letting go in sex – letting oneself go to places of intensity, to the hairsbreadth space between knowing and not knowing what you want, between controlling the action and letting the action take over – being spat out of the flume into this coursing water taking you God-knows-where – involves placing an immense burden of trust on the other, trusting them to renounce their liberty to abuse. I trust you, we want to be able to say, not to hurt me. I trust you not to abuse your power.

Sex is an interaction, resolutely social and interpersonal – far closer to other social phenomena than it is unlike them. Sex, like anything social, is a process, a development, an unfolding. Sex is a conversation, and like any conversation, can be promising, and can yield on that promise – or it can disappoint. We may encounter depths, surprises, and new avenues, or we may encounter something ugly, mean or cruel, and want to extricate ourselves.

it’s precisely the uncertain, unclear space between yes and no that we need to learn to navigate. And it’s in this space that an exploratory process can unfold, one that can bring us intense pleasure; a process, as writer Dodie Bellamy puts it, between ‘two people in mutual need and at equal risk’.

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