Katherine Angel > Quotes

“Any model of consent can prove itself worthless if a man is not open to his sexual partner's no, or her changing desires, and if he responds to either of these with a rage borne of humiliation.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“The fantasy of total autonomy, and of total self-knowledge, is not only a fantasy; it’s a nightmare.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“But speech and truth-telling are not inherently emancipatory, and neither speech nor silence is inherently liberating or oppressive...Consent, and its conceit of absolute clarity, places the burden of good sexual interaction on women's behavoir – Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Working out what we want is a life's work, and it has to be done over and over and over. The joy may lie in it never being done.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Total independence is a fiction. And in sex, we are all vulnerable. Whoever we are, we turn over vulnerable tissues, organs, sensations, and complex selves to another. We can always get hurt. This is not an argument about being cavalier about the other's inherent vulnerability - for urging anyone to 'toughen up', to take the rough with the smooth, to be resigned to bad sex. It is an argument for resisting the urge to vilify vulnerability. Sex is a risky adventure, and vulnerability can be a form of care.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Why not aim for sex itself as being deeply mutually pleasurable? Why not aim for a culture that embraces and enables women’s sexual pleasure, in all its complexity, and admits the complexity of male desire too? Could we not aim for a wondrous, universal, democratic pleasure detached from gender; a hedonism available to all - for what Sophie Lewis has called a ‘guards-down, polymorphous experimentation’, for everyone?”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Feelings, sensations, and desires can lie dormant until brought into being by those around us. We need to be able to allow this, too; we need not to fight so hard against our own porousness, our own malleability.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“I'm not interested in the labels of dominance, submission, top, bottom, fucking versus being fucked. I don't believe that particular sexual acts denote vulnerability or strength; that would be to buy the line that fucking is active and being fucked is passive; as if the arrangement of our bodies tells us something categorical about our psychological stances, our vulnerabilities, our feelings; as if the binaries of active and passive are not used to divide the ranks into powerful masculine attributes and powerless feminine ones. I am talking here instead about a psychological and social acceptance of vulnerability, of all our capacity for injury, of the shared softness of us all.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Girl X is grappling with questions that many women may ask themselves, that I have certainly asked myself, the first time they sleep with a man or the moment they reveal their desire: Will I be in danger? In revealing myself, have I foregone privacy and dignity? Will I be pursued, haunted by my own actions? Will I be able to resist the unwanted desires of others? Has saying yes precluded my ability to say no?”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

“Desire isn't always there to be known. Vulnerability is the state that makes its discovery possible.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“But we must not think of a person's desire as some easily identifiable object, some easily accessible part of a person which they can summon up with ease. Sex is made up of countless acts of questioning, expression, and exploration... The fixation on yes and no doesn't help us navigate these waters; 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'.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“The father is appalled by the news of the engagement: horrified, angry, jealous, unable to conceal his wounded sense of having been displaced. He acts comically badly towards the fiancé; when his daughter and the new man kiss, he rolls his eyes, while the mother whimpers in admiration. The father identifies as a jilted lover, while the mother identifies with a romantic girlhood. The audience is presumably meant to do the same, in line with their gender. Later in the film, Martin bitterly acknowledges that 'my day has passed', likening himself to 'an old shoe, discontinued.'

But is the father's horror at his daughter's sexuality exactly that? Or is it a displaced horror at his own sexuality, his own desire? The commonness o sexual abuse of teens, and the ubiquity of the teen trope in pornography, would suggest that most men at least know what it's like to desire a teenage girl. Is the father's horror at his daughter's sexuality perhaps a disavowed horror at his own susceptibility to it?”
― Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues

“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.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“To desire, to yearn, is to be made vulnerable - hankering after nourishment, contact, recognition in the embrace of the other.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Letting go in sex...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.”
― Katherine Angel

“I am talking here instead about a psychological and social acceptance of vulnerability, of all our capacity for injury, of the shared softness of us all.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Instead of resigning ourselves to the inevitability of bad sex, and even romanticizing it as merely youthful misadventure, we should subject it to sustained scrutiny. Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in access to sexual literacy, sex education and sexual health services. It trades on unequal power dynamics between parties, and on racialized notions of innocence and guilt. Bad sex is a political issue, one of inequality of access to pleasure and self-determination, and it is as a political issue that we should be examining it, rather than retreating into an individualizing, shoulder-shrugging criticism of young women who are using the tools available to them to address the pains of their sexual lives.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“The father is appalled by the news of the engagement: horrified, angry, jealous, unable to conceal his wounded sense of having been displaced. He acts comically badly towards the fiancé; when his daughter and the new man kiss, he rolls his eyes, while the mother whimpers in admiration. The father identifies as a jilted lover, while the mother identifies with a romantic girlhood. The audience is presumably meant to do the same, in line with their gender. Later in the film, Martin bitterly acknowledges that 'my day has passed', likening himself to 'an old shoe, discontinued.'

But is the father's horror at his daughter's sexuality exactly that? Or is it a displaced horror at his own sexuality, his own desire? The commonness of sexual abuse of teens, and the ubiquity of the teen trope in pornography, would suggest that most men at least know what it's like to desire a teenage girl. Is the father's horror at his daughter's sexuality perhaps a disavowed horror at his own susceptibility to it?”
― Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues

“By refusing to reduce incest to merely a physical act imposed on a little girl by an adult male, Harrison reveals the necessity of the stable yet flexible, reality-dosed mirroring that Winnicott talks about; the gaze that enables a child to individuate, and experience a sense of self. She reveals the curtailing of the self that arises from the lack of good-enough parenting - parenting that Winnicott saw as both utterly ordinary and immeasurably skilled. Without it, enchanted in all the dark ways enchantment can take place, Harrison is compelled to be seen at any exorbitant, self-thwarting price.”
― Katherine Angel, Daddy Issues

“The attachment to consent as the overarching framework for thinking about good and bad sex amounts to holding onto the fantasy of liberalism, in which, as Emily A. Owens puts it, ‘equality simply exists’.”
― Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

“Women, writes sex educator Christina Tesoro, are urged to develop the capacity to say no, as well as the capacity to say a hearty yes, but they are not taught to say: 'maybe. To say, I'm not sure'... Or to say 'touch me a little longer first. Touch me at all. Be gentle. Go slow.'..”
― Katherine Angel