Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell

by Katherine Angel

'Unmastered' is a new kind of book that allows us to think afresh about sex and desire. Incisive, moving, and lyrical, it opens up a larger space for the exploration of feelings that can be difficult to express.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Memoir, Sexuality, Poetry, Gender, Biography

347 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2012

About the author

Katherine Angel is the author of Unmastered, Most Difficult to Tell and Daddy Issues. She directs the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and has a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

AN EXCURSION

1. Years ago when Hannah and I moved house, we decided to throw out all our porn. There was a remarkable quantity of it, considering how often we talked about how unsatisfactory it was. We piled it all in a big bin-bag and took it, with a whole carload of other rubbish, to the local dump. Hannah's parents came with us to help unload the bags. Luckily you couldn't see anything through the black bin-bags.

2. At the dump, as we were unloading old furniture and other detritus, we realised that the men who worked there were routinely opening every bag that was given to them, and going through the contents in case there was anything that should be put into the recycling areas.

3. Hannah panicked. She left the porn bag till last, threw it at the guy in his fluorescent jacket, and sprinted back to our Nissan Micra yelling, ‘Start the car! Start the car!’ Her parents, in the back seat, looked alarmed. ‘We're not in a hurry,’ her mum said. ‘Oh no!’ Hannah kept saying. ‘Drive!’

4. I drove off. In the rear-view mirror, I could see the man from the council pulling a fistful of Rocco Siffredi DVDs out of the bag, open-mouthed.

5. I like how honest and even-handed Katherine Angel is about porn (and about everything else in this rather remarkable essay).

But misogynistic, coercive, tacky porn isn't necessarily unerotic – it just depends what you mean by erotic. These butch, taciturn men and shiny tottering women, in their bleakly naff trysts – they make me uncomfortable. They make me squirm with laughter, they make me cover my eyes, sometimes they offend me. There is something deathly, joyless in their performances. They leave me feeling vaguely deflated, slightly melancholic – a feeling akin, perhaps, to the desolation, the intense pang of aloneness, that male friends and lovers have sometimes described experiencing after orgasm alone or with someone they do not love.

And yet these trysts, these dead-eyed unions – they make me wet. They irritate me, if rather joylessly, into action. The lubricious body has run ahead, has jumped through the hoops, and got what it wanted.

It looks back over its shoulder and laughs.

6. I wonder if this disassociation, this feeling that the body will react how it likes regardless of what you think, is something men are more used to than women.


YOUR LAWS DO NOT APPLY TO ME

1. What turns you on is out of your hands. Sex is not politically correct. Your libido does not give a fuck about your social convictions.

2. The problem is that this means you may be sharing a bed – metaphorically, that is – with people who are stupid, or even dangerous. But what are women supposed to do, then? Shut up about it? Only admit to enjoying things that further the feminist project? Some people think so. I think Paul Bryant has suggested as much in a couple of reviews, if I'm not misinterpreting him.

3. There's a somewhat notorious sex blog on tumblr by a woman who calls herself ‘feminist-rapebait’. The title is not even the most problematic thing about her blog, which features the extremer end of BDSM gifs and images along with occasional captions explaining her responses to them. Recently she posted, and replied to, a message that someone called ‘fucknodoms’ had written about her:

Truthfully, I think everything that feminist-rapebait posts, has posted, and will ever post is harmful. She has a rape kink and encourages violence and misogyny. Many of her posts encourage women to believe that they are beneath men and should be degraded, raped, abused, and used, and that they should enjoy it. I have multiple examples after I came across her blog, here, here, here, and here.[links removed…sorry] She literally calls herself a rapedoll and spouts about how women are only good to be used for men’s pleasure…The posts are damaging…she posts a lot of gross stuff and has obviously internalized a lot of misogyny.

how low is your opinion of women that you believe my blog encourages women who choose to read this blog to do anything, besides finding an outlet for their sexuality that has been shamed and persecuted and condescended to by alarmists like you.
I especially like that enjoy it highlight. The outrage that I want people to consent to the sexual activities they involve themselves in!! God forbid women enjoy the choices they make with their body. How dare they engage in sex that you, fucknodoms, have not personally approved of. How dare women be multifaceted human beings with complexity, and contradictions. How dare women dare to be anything that makes fucknodoms uncomfortable.

4. I have not the slightest idea how this argument should be settled. In fact I get a bit annoyed with people who think this is a simple question.

5. Katherine Angel worries about this a lot. She is very aware that women are often socialised to want what other people want them to want. ‘I should be accommodating. I should be good. I should not leave the party when I want to.’ Nevertheless; wherever it comes from, we do want what we want. Whatever that is.

What I remember is that an image inserts itself, suddenly, of him hitting me. Of him, yes, hitting me. It remains unclear; what do I mean? Being slapped? I don't think so. Punched? Surely not. Somewhere between the two, perhaps. The content has blurred edges, but the feeling is precise.

I want him to do something like hitting. Something – something – that would stop me in my tracks.

I want to say crazy stuff, I whisper. He says, Tell me.

But I don't; I hold back.

6. She and her boyfriend are worried about the same thing – finding themselves sharing some opinion, some spark of arousal, with the sort of people who do this in seriousness. People for whom it reflects deeply-held beliefs about men and women and their relative worth. ‘He too knows the fears, the risks; the symbol that becomes real, the real that becomes symbol. The metaphors we love by.’

7. I keep thinking of a moment in Alan Moore's Lost Girls, where a woman in the middle of an orgy finds herself disturbed by the content of the Victorian incest erotica she's been looking at. ‘It's an…unngh…exciting story, but the children, doing things with…ungh…with their own Mother! I mean, I have…unngh…a son myself, and I'd never dream…unngh…never dream of—’

‘But of course you would not, dear Madam,’ interrupts her partner. ‘Your child is real.’


TO THE WHOREHOUSE

1. The moving spirits behind this book are Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. They are quoted often to great effect. Foucault, inevitably, is there as well, in mercifully small doses.

2. What Angel is looking for, I think, is some feminist theory of sexual desire that does not leave people feeling guilty.

Well…join the queue.

We are all in the same lulling, lurching boat, fashioning our beliefs to resolve our feelings.

3. There is something essentialist about desire. I am someone who likes fruity cocktails, cries at adverts, does yoga. I have always disliked set gender roles and I usually feel comfortably fluid about them. But when I'm with Hannah, I feel completely polarised into masculinity. She kisses me and my hands go to her wrists, her hair, her neck. Almost this gender polarisation has started to be what desire means, to me.

4. Not everyone is like this. I have friends who feel exactly the opposite: they like the fact that their partner makes them feel (in the words of one friend) ‘genderqueer’. So I guess everyone's different. ‘It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple,’ Angel says.

5. This book is a shortish essay that has been spread out over a 350-page paperback using the expedient of a large font and a lot of white space. It can be read in a couple of hours. This didn't bother me, but it has bothered some people. The writing sometimes teeters on the edge of pretentiousness, but Angel's Englishness reassured me (unreasonably) that she was just about staying grounded.

6. I loved it. I love that people are writing seriously and intelligently about this, and that the debate is not being abandoned to the margins of Fifty Shades of Grey. It's a little sui-generis gem that deserves a lot more readers than it will get.

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

He was clad in a white bath robe and sitting in the mid-morning autumn sun at the wrought iron table where we had first made love, studying me as I bounded onto the terrace. I grinned at him and he smiled slightly, his long fingers brushing the glass top surface in tempo with Wagner’s Das Rheingold, his eyes teal flecked with dark amber, the pupils pits of non-light, and he continued to observe me as I stretched out my arms, wrists, legs. I bent from my hips to hang head down, palms flat on the red-brick paving, eyes closed as I luxuriated in the endorphins inoculating my brain and the warmth of the sun drying the perspiration on my skin. I sensed him move behind me and ignored him, until my head was yanked up by my ponytail and he slammed me across the surface of the table, my ribs and hips smashing against the glass.

“Teo! Ma che fa—” I flung out my arms to brace myself and arch up and away from the table top, and he kicked my legs apart, lifting my ankle off the bricks and pushing his knees into the backs of mine. He grasped my wrists, clamping my arms down, and shoved his pelvis against my buttocks, my shorts a flimsy half-barrier until he brought my hands together and grappled both, freeing his own hand and reefing the fabric away, his penis cudgelling my vagina, his teeth pincering my earlobe. I turned my face towards him, lifting my chin to protest and his breath, fruit sweet and espresso acrid, filled my nostrils. “Stop it, Teo! You’re hu—” His mouth drowned my words and his tongue lashed mine, one hand sliding under the cotton of my T-shirt and dragging my sports bra over and off my breasts. He pinched each nipple and I slid helpless under the onslaught of his mouth and fingers and penis into desire failing to be revolted by his callous assumption and disregard for my consent, by my submission to the familiarity of his touch, and by my frantic compulsion to sublimate myself in him and assimilate him into me.

“If you stand there stretching like that . . . what do you expect? You know you want it, Claudia, that’s why you move like that, to tease me. You want me to fuck you.” He punctuated each word with a grind against my buttocks. “You’re already wet. You want my prick in you.” He could not have penetrated me more easily if he had lathered himself in ylang ylang and rose-perfumed oil; whatever affront my emotions and sense of self suffered, my body delighted as a vassal.

He released my hands and gripped my shoulders to raise me towards him, before slipping his hands under my arms and around onto my ribs to crush my breasts savagely against my chest and gouge my skin with his fingernails. “This is what you need, mia furia amorosa. A good fuck, you want it right inside you, I’m going to split you in half.” He supported my weight and continued to drive himself into me, thrusting so hard my feet lost contact with the ground, and my senses exploded in complete and utter exculpation of his words; I drowned receptive to and helpless against the tsunami of lust swamping my awareness to the exclusion of anything but the sensation of his desperate invasion and my coerced and conflicted capitulation. That he had not the slightest interest in my pleasure as I defined it impacted upon me not at all, that our coupling was at his instigation irrespective of my agreement made no impression, and seconds later, as he groaned and shouted my name at his orgasm, his ejaculation splashing my cervix was a ridiculous and primitive vindication of my effect on him, my dominion over him and his dedition to me. The possible aftermath was not even the embryo of an idea.

He put his hands on my hips and pushed himself away from me and I leant on my elbows, his semen a warm trickle snail-trailing down my leg while I watched him slouch silently into the winter garden to slump onto the couch, his legs sprawled straight in front of him, one hand aimlessly scratching his crotch, his elbow propped on the side table and his chin heeling his palm. He returned my perusal with one eyebrow raised, his mouth twisting. My groin gnawed at me with the heaviness of unfulfilled tension, arousal still demanding a release despite its abrupt abandon. I rocked back onto my heels and strode through the glass doors to the breakfast table. The espresso was cold and thus ruined, the fruit a sugary, tangy fizzle in my mouth; quarters of peach, plum, and apricot, and late season slivers of melon sprinkled with freshly hacked mint. I drank some water and regarded him coolly, one hand on my hip, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries rioting in the background.

“What the hell was that about, Teo? And I’m not your 'lust-filled fury'.”

He smirked, snorting, and shrugged his shoulders. “Next time don’t wave your pussy in my face if you don’t want me to fuck you.”

I set the glass on the table and walked across to him, kicking off my running shoes and kneeling on the couch with my thighs around his, my ankles hugging his knees, and thumbed his chin upwards, locking his eyes with my own. “Next time fuck me properly.” I pulled aside the seam of my shorts and took his hand to guide his finger onto my clitoris, slippery and swollen and ripe for climax.

“Why don’t you learn how to come properly from me fucking you? Isn’t this enough prick for you?” He twitched aside his robe and his penis bounced long and thick up from his abdomen. His finger slid desultorily across my clitoris and already spasms were crowding my flesh, insisting on the rhythm that crescendoed towards orgasm. I angled his penis into my vagina, encasing his glans with my labia resting around the folds of his foreskin. He lifted his hips and I jerked away. “Wait for me, please?” I laid one finger over his to conduct the orchestra of pressure and pace.

“Take off your top.” I half-lifted my T-shirt and halted, robbed of any ability to focus as my awareness collapsed inwards to the black hole of the self in absentia. Teo skated the head of his shaft over my clitoris in the same, unbroken rhythm and pulled my T-shirt over my head, unclipping my bra, before grazing his teeth over each areola. Tormented as he intended, my fingers searched my mons to regain and prolong the last instant before oblivion, and he bit and sucked my breasts until I quivered and cried out and he rocked my hips down hard to swallow his penis with the contractions of my orgasm. I fell forward onto his neck, mindless, lost in the concentration of my senses and the extinguishing of myself as he held me immobile and impaled me with a blind, unassailable, ferocity.

“Dio mio, Claudia.” He sank his teeth into the cord of muscle at the base of my neck. “Voglio,” he paused and groaned, biting me again, smashing my pelvis onto him as the hammer onto the anvil of his words, “scoparti . . . fuck you, and . . . fuck—” His lips sought mine, his tongue diving into my mouth in the moment of his release, and he crushed me against him while my pelvis flooded with fire that devoured and demanded.

When his body no longer spasmed and he had relaxed back into the lounge we stopped kissing and rested, expended and wounded warriors, until my stomach growled and prompted movement. I slithered from his lap and brought the platter of fruit to the side table. He speared a piece of melon and sucked on it, the juice beading at the corners of his lips. I caught a drop with my finger and he pulled me to sit beside him, one arm draped over my shoulders, his other hand pronging the fruit with a fork.

“You’re too hung up on a clitoral orgasm, Claudia.” He offered me a plump segment of peach, poking the piece between my lips. “You’re holding us back from connecting on the spiritual level. It was different with Lisbeth – she could climax with a finger-fuck. Stop focussing on coming with your clit and instead concentrate on coming with your cunt.”

I swallowed, choking myself on words foaming with vituperation, mobbing my mouth to vomit forth jealousy at the sound of her name and outrage at his careless and colossal dismissal of my sexuality. Instead I breathed slowly and shrugged an insouciant answer, my tone derisive, my smile disdainful. “The one doesn’t exclude the other, Teo, assuming vaginal orgasms aren’t just a male fantasy absolving the effort to pay attention to what a girl likes. Anyway, I’m going for a shower.”
***
We ordered primi piatti of cannelloni di ricotta for me, gnocchi al pomodoro for Teo, and tortellini in brodo for Teo's father, Massimo, Anja, his mother, eschewing a starter, and secondi piatti of rabbit prepared hunter’s style for her, Massimo opting for carpaccio, and Teo and I sharing a plate of fritti misti di verdure. While Massimo perused the wine menu, Anja leaned across to Teo and tapped his wrist smartly, her lips squashed together as if her first sip of mineral water had consisted purely of bitter lemons.

“Are you still following this idiocy? Crazy vegetarian diet! No wonder you look like a drug addict! So thin.” She pinched his cheek and Teo jerked back, sighing heavily. The waiters waltzed expertly around us, laying white squares of linen on laps and bread rolls on side plates.

“Figurati, Mama.” He broke open his roll and dipped it in the oil. “It has a pedigree. Some very famous people have been vegetar—”

“Ah, yes.” She selected a carrot stick and dunked it in the bagna cauda. “Buddha – and Gandhi. And this Osho char—”

“And Da Vinci. And Kafka. And Virgil.”

“No women. Too sensible, naturally. And how would that work, carrying a baby to term?” She tossed her hair back from her shoulders and drummed the fingers of one hand on the damask white tablecloth. “Hmm, Claudia? Che ne pensi?”

Carrying a baby to term was the last thing about which I was thinking, irrespective of diet. I took a segment of finocchio before replying, my tone neutral. “Martina Navratilova is vegetarian. As a sports—”

“And gay! You see where that leads?” Anja stabbed a brilliant red peperoni with her fork and the eyes of the waiter nearest her, pouring out the local Sangiovesi wine Massimo had chosen, widened.

“Mama, ma che dici!” Teo pinched his upwards-pointing fingertips against his thumb, shaking his hand at her. “Non c’entra niente. Non si puo—”

“Anzi! Navratilova could hardly have had a baby, could she? There’s only ever been one concepimento verginale!”

We chimed glasses and chanted “Salute!”, and after sharing appreciative comments about the wine, I suggested, “Mary Shelley was vegetarian and a parent.”

“Cristo Santo! And wrote books about monsters!” Anja spiralled her fingertip against her temple and arched an eyebrow at me, as if to confirm I had vindicated her argument.

“Vegetarian monsters, Mama.” Teo smirked. “Frankenstein’s creation didn’t eat meat, either.”

Anja sniffed. “So you’ve converted her or she’s brain-washing you?” She leaned forward in her chair and rested her chin against her knuckles, her eyes flickering back and forth between us, as the first courses were served, pepper proffered, and more water poured.

“We’ve made a pact, Mama.” Teo forked gnocchi into his mouth and chewed studiously for a few moments, three pairs of eyes trained on him. “Whichever one of us breaks it first foregoes the right to name the baby. Dammi il parmigiano, Claudia, per piacere?”

I choked on my wine, no longer Claudia Maini but a character in a Woody Allen film.

“Baby?” Anja snapped the carrot stick she was holding. “Bist Du verrückt? Ist sie schwanger?”

“—Teo? Intendevi ‘in caso che’, no?” Massimo raised an eyebrow, a vague frown forming across his forehead, his voice indicating knowing disbelief.

“Mama! Calmati!” Teo touched his napkin to his lips and reached across to Anja, patting her shoulder while winking at his father. “Of course Claudia isn’t pregnant. But we haven’t ruled out adoption.”

Fortunately my forkful of cannelloni fell onto my plate and not in my lap and saved me from near asphyxiation a second time.

“E beh! You have enough projects on your plate without starting another, Teo. Particularly since you have no means to support a family.” The threat in her voice was not in the least veiled.

Massimo spooned soup, smiling at me as though the topic of conversation was no more controversial than the weather, and I asked, in the vacant silence, “How are your tortell—”

“Tja! Kommt immer wieder zurück, dieses Thema: Geld. Was machst Du, wenn ich endlich nicht mehr von Dir abhängig bin?” Teo locked eyes with Anja, his voice equally hostile. The few words I had understood concerned the topic money. “Mi dispiace, Mama. Penso che non mi capivi. If Claudia was pregnant, naturally we’d put the baby up for adoption, since we don’t have jobs and haven’t finished our degrees. Yet.”

Massimo raised his hand to gesture at a passing waiter, who immediately refilled water and wine glasses. We had both finished our first courses, Teo sliding gnocchi in desultory trails around his plate.

“Nein, Theodor. Du würdest deinem Großvater nicht eine solche Schmach zufügen.” Anja lightened her voice, her dulcet tones returning, while her fingers ripped a bread roll. “Carino mio, naturally I make a fuss at how easily my son can be influenced. Sono la tua mama! Come non posso mi preoccupare? Forgive me.” She dropped the bits of ravaged roll on her side plate and clasped his hand, bringing it to her cheek and kissing his palm. Teo smiled and resumed eating; I felt revolted.
***
The colour stained the strip slowly; the spectrum from blue, paused at purple, and despite my incredulity, my refusal to acknowledge the evidence of my eyes and the voice chattering in my brain with a blithe insistence that this was all unreal, that I was dreaming, that I would shake myself from what was surely the reality belonging to someone else, and not me, continued to uninterrupted until red. I was pregnant. Teo had invoked destiny and I had no will, no choice, drowned as I was in well of our mutual peonage, to act in any way other than what was already pre-determined.

I closed the door to the ensuite bathroom and sat down beside him on the bed, handing him the strip wordlessly. He looked at it, looked at me, looked away, before standing up.

"There's a mistake. You'd better go to the doctor. We . . . you can't be . . . this wasn't meant to happen."
***
Afterwards, we never talked about it. But then the nightmares commenced, and I couldn't see past prams and parents and babies giggling in the arms of people I hated, like I began to hate him, and myself, until finally I was leaving him pictures of homunculi and descriptions of pregnancies, how a foetus develops hourly, daily, weekly, the changes from month to month. We somehow survived although what we had created had not, it was a canker between us that metastased into cancer - he loathed me for my own cowardice and once threw me to the floor, yelling, "You didn't have to do it, Claudia!"

It ended, the dreams, the sense of crushing loss, as Sabrina had predicted it would, only after we dissolved all that had been between us, and he returned to Johannesburg. One day, long after, when I realised I had been spellbound by what had never been, that we had constructed simulacra of each other and poured what was missing in ourselves into those, I breathed air untainted by memories of him, fresh as sunshine after a summer storm, floating free as the butterflies my sister had always loved.

[Nick Imrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay was... exasperating.

Part memoir, part poetry, it gestures towards art like it gestures towards argument, always promising and never quite doing. It's a tease.

There were so many moments where I highlighted some phrase or paragraph and thought eagerly, 'Yes, this is so true, what a good insight' but then there was no follow-through, no thesis built upon the observations. When I look back and try to see what it was actually saying - it was nothing more than a series of interesting points, prettified with line breaks and lyrical prose, illustrated with personal anecdotes.

So, a smattering of observations I agree with: It does sometimes feel like we are being coerced by societal expectations to play out gendered roles. But then, sometimes gendered roles are highly erotic. Our lovers live up, and down, to our expectations. Our desires can be wildly independent of what we want to desire. Both pro- and anti- pornography activists can be simplistic and reductive. Abortion is more difficult and complicated than public argument allows for. When a man lowers his head to kiss your body, the view down his back, especially that vulnerable spot between his shoulder blades and his neck, is simply breath-taking.

The title is taken from Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction: 'One goes about telling, with the greatest precision, what is most difficult to tell'. Perhaps, if we are trying our best to be honest and precise, then it is impossible to tie up the erotic in some neat, satisfying theory of everything.

[Roxane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book on sexuality, feminism, femininity and masculinity. Lots to think about throughout. Provocative, sexy, strange, smart.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Early on I thought Angel had begun to explore some challenging ideas about female desire, but midway she left them (the ideas, questions) and began describing a past abortion, at which point I lost the thread of how that connected to her sexual desire - I mean, I did not follow/comprehend how this traumatic incident informed her thesis. The link was probably laid out in poetic metaphoric prose but I just missed it since I was impatient with this abortion section (though the entire book was personal, there it became positively insular). Yes, she's studied Sheri Hite and wants to reconsider pornography, but I'm unconvinced that this book could have been the product of much academic research (Angel is a British scholar with a research fellowship). I suppose the final third was meant to be recursive, but I was adrift by that last shift back to the bedroom. Reviews to read at Salon and other online sites that I could respond to here if I were inclined to.

[Hesper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just to be clear, this is white, upper class and very heteronormative desire. Angel repeatedly invokes Sontag and Woolf, claiming for herself a branch on that intellectual family tree. No problem there; desire is personal, inextricable from the social context of the individual inflamed with it. You can take the urchin off the streets, but never the streets out of the urchin, that sort of thing.

Therein the issue. This book, meditative, confessional, occasionally philosophical without ever losing its well mannered tone, is hardly all encompassing of female desire. It's personal. It's a journal of erotic encounters, polished up for public consumption. If points of connection are forged between the reader and its content, they happen in the same psychological space occupied by saying, "I totally get that" when someone confesses a non particularly shocking secret. It is beautifully written. It has capital-P points to make.

But it exists, like an exquisitely cut jewel, firmly embedded in its cold, filigreed setting--a piece that not everyone will like or afford.

[Rae · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a kind of poetic essay on how sexuality doesn't always gel harmoniously and conveniently with ones ideals and beliefs. It's a book about desire in all its messy complexity. It won't be everyone's cup of tea.

It was an interesting exploration of the clash between how the author feels versus how she/society thinks she should feel.

I'll give it 3 stars because I wished it had gone a bit deeper, really peeled back the layers of desire, pushed the boundaries a bit more. Still, I would consider reading another of her books.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the very beginning of Katherine Angel’s opening sentences, I knew I was in for a delicious treat. Fine writing and such an interesting and important topic. Thanks to Charlotte Shane, elevated author of Prostitute Laundry and the unfailing ex-persona Nightmare Brunette, a book recommendation that finally ensures not to disappoint. And contrary to some negative reviews I absolutely love the book’s format, the larger font and white spaces, and the thoughtful, piercingly direct sentences and insightful quotations scattered liberally throughout. Please read the rest of my review here:

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/un...

[Isha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personal, fragmentary, poetic writing that brings together the messiness of the experience of one's desires and sensations, to create a portrait of sexuality. The book also exposes the limits of the emancipatory politics of our times that forces us to choose a side and box our selfhoods into something acceptable for the political ideas we admire and aspire to be a part of.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too many people are complaining about all the white space and how this book should really be only 100 pages, but nevermind all that. This fast, flighty, flashy dissection of love and lust is powerful and daring. Fans of Maggie Nelson would probably love Angel's academic rigor and semi-nostalgic tone.
From pg 70: Sex, said Sontag--"unlike writing a book, making a career, raising a child"--is "not a project."
Sex "consumes itself each day. There are no promises, no goals, nothing promised. It is not an accumulation.

[Hafidha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very impressed by good use of this prose poetry essay memoir - however you want to call it. I may change rating from 4 to 5 after rereading the end. I felt the book started out stronger than it ended, and final third or quarter seemed to run parallel to the rest (as opposed to coming after). But otherwise, a thought provoking read, with great use of terrific Sontag quotes.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating read of delicate language which gives a glimpse of the greatest desire of mankind. An amazing portrait of the struggle of feminist and masculinity- a match but also a symphony.A quick read but scent in every word is long-lasting.

[Courtney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Strange....

[Ipsa]

it's slippery. it's wet. a book on desire, most difficult to tell.

[aslı · Rating 2 out of 5]

angels approach to desire i love, but the writing style oh my god, if ur gonna write about desire and sex, please dont refer to penises as coccyx

[Sarah]

3.5

A good companion piece to Angel’s recent essay collection.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson's Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn't to say this book is bad, just that it didn't hit me quite like Nelson's did. Unmastered was a quick read for me (there's a lot of white space) and I read it twice over the course of a week, finding myself struck by different bits each time.

The book is, as the subtitle says, about desire: about Angel's own desires and experiences with desire, and also about sexual desire more generally, women's and also men's. Though Angel quotes Virginia Woolf on the androgynous mind— "'It is fatal,' wrote Woolf, 'to be a man or woman pure and simple'" (95)—this book looks at and thinks about desire in very gendered terms. "I am proof of your masculinity," Angel writes (30). And "I lock him into his masculinity. I am anxious to protect it, for it pains me, it pains my femininity, to see it fragmented" (109). And "he puts down anchor in me, and finds his masculinity there. I put down anchor in him, in his masculinity, and find my femininity there" (112). All of which is interesting to me, but feels very removed from my own experiences. (My gender identity is basically "tomboy," and I've dated both men and women, and I'm more comfortable with the idea of gender as a spectrum than a binary thing.) When Angel writes about things like pornography, or domination and submission, it's mostly in a gendered way—even when she flips things and talks about a woman being dominant, it's still in relation to the idea of a dominant man and a submissive woman, which isn't really how I think about these things. Angel writes about women's experiences in contrast to men's experiences: she writes about the entitlement men may have, while women may find it harder to know/voice/own desire. She writes about the way society, women included, can work to contain women's sexuality, to contain women's bodies and wants. She writes about the "unruly, lustful body," and how we react to things like unplanned pregnancy and abortion (264).

I think I like this book best not when Angel is quoting Virginia Woolf or Susan Sontag (this book's other guiding spirit, in a way), but when she's writing about her own experiences, in and out of the bedroom. "I have become a body," she writes, and "I have sounds, but I have fewer words" (42). "When he grabs my hair, when he presses my throat, when he holds my hands down, I know—because I feel—that this is pitch-perfect" (90). I like writing that captures the experience of feeling open, feeling awake to the possibilities of pleasure, and when Angel does this, she does it really well, as in this, one of my favorite passages in the book:

Crossing Waterloo Bridge, that spritely spring, that razor-sharp spring, looking over at St. Paul's, I sniffed pleasure—openness—light—in the air.

I could feel it in my hips. (332)

[Priya Bhakta · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting book. I started it not quite sure what it was - poetry, prose, short stories, non-fiction - and I suppose it is all of those things.

Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell is just that - a book about desire. Told by Katherine Angel and informed by her own experiences and knowledge. I found myself folding over the bottom corners - something I do when there's something to go back to, there's plenty of that.

The book is broken into sections with semi-cryptic names such as 'To Spend Oneself, To Gamble Oneself' and 'More Gone' and, in these, she covers a range of topics - including her own desire, communication, pornography and abortion. I'll be honest the abortion chapter threw me a bit, it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book, but it was clearly something so personal to the author and so tied in with her ideas of desire that she felt it relevant to include it.

As the book is personal it's very heteronormative - mentioning lesbians once (in the section about pornography) and brushing over gay men and bisexuality entirely however because this isn't an academic book I found that okay/acceptable though lacking.

The book isn't trying to offer answers, it does ask some questions, and it brings some up, especially in terms of male-female relationships - for example in her chapter on communication Angel writes:

"I am proof of your masculinity, of your endless potency.

I must reassure you. This is what I must do."

Other passages aren't trying to ask you anything - they just are. They're about her desire, the way she feels when she is desired, how she feels when she comes.

The style of writing is quick to read - it's almost a stream of consciousness- and whilst I doubt I'll read the whole thing again there are definitely passages I'll return to.

[Libby · Rating 1 out of 5]

reread, 17 January 2021:
I was deciding what to donate from my bookshelves and this is absolutely leaving. I reread it, I went in thinking maybe it would mean more this time, I wanted to like it - but it's just not the book for me. I don't know who it is the book for, in all honesty. I don't feel like she actually really writes about desire properly at any point, anything more than vague platitudes or literary references. There must be better examples of women being horny and conflicted; thinking like this can't be the only way!!

original review, 24 August 2017 (3*)
I think if my friend, lately obsessed and madly in love with a new boyfriend, read this book instead of me, she'd have loved it. But I read it, and I didn't love it.

I think if you'd told me about the idea of it, or if I'd read it at another point (before, when I was in love, or maybe in the future, when I am again) I'd have underlined passages, texted them to friends, reread pages feeling understood. But I just felt really underwhelmingly disconnected from this whole book.

It felt - god, the only word I can think to use is masturbation, isn't that typical? - it felt like a fun project for the writer, maybe not much fun for anyone else. There's some well-written bits, some interesting thoughts, but I think it's just mostly not for me, not right now.

[Helen McClory]

A slender book with a firm heart, seeking to shift around easy categorisation or arguments. Desire, the politics of desire, the desire taken in a crisp sunny day -
I loved the author's smart resistance while in lectures of one sort or another, her urge to question, dispute, to break the cosy bubble around certain discussions.
As a note to other readers - the focus is on heterosexual love and desire (and without shame on the desiring of the self). Also provides a leaping off point for writings on sex in the form of a reading list notation at the back of the book.

[Taylor T · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through her personal experiences and scholarly work, Katherine Angel explores desire, femininity, masculinity, power, choice, love, grief, and culture from a modern feminist perspective, with appropriate nods to Woolf, Sontag, Foucault, and others. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, it's written in snippets of lyrical prose that connect to create a moving, erotic, funny, critical, honest essay about that thing "most difficult to tell" (especially for women who are disproportionately conditioned to feel ashamed, be submissive, and expect exploitation), even though we all do and love it.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

.

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much appreciated about 2/3s of this book. I'm writing about my own teenage self, and many of Angel's observations about the slippery nature of desire and the way it resists definition ring true. Many of her observations about gender ring true--for 17-year-old me living in the 90s. Some of the gender stuff feels distinctly out of date, but that it is the nature of books: they age. I don't know why the abortion is in this book. Or, like, I do, but it just deflates the whole thing and then I don't know what happens next because all the tension was gone. I'm sure this is somewhat the point, but it was still an odd fit and I question it as a craft choice and as a thematic choice. (Though, again, this probably felt more relevant 10 years ago than it does today.)

[elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

an interesting read, although i did want more out of it. it lined up a lot of salient ideas: how either sides of the pro/anti porn and the pro/anti choice movement tend to flatten the discourse and fall into being reductive, the erotics of playing into (and finding comfort in) gendered roles and expectations in a romantic/sexual relationship, and crafting a personal kind of feminism that is able to envelop (femme) sexual desire especially when directed towards men… or sexual desires that have been deemed problematic or gauche at least in the eyes of mainstream feminism that tends to reject masculinity and/or male sexual desire.

poetic, romantic, and erotic, though i did want it to dig deeper and expound. but it was a good read to get a short taste of the points it was trying to make

[SuzannevHaaften · Rating 2 out of 5]

Het hele boek voelt als een braindump, later genummerd per paragraaf waardoor het overzicht krijgt. Net als in ieders hersens worden er gedachtensprongen gemaakt, en wordt er weer teruggegrepen naar een eerder onderwerp.
Dat gezegd hebbende is het erg knap dat iemand zijn volledige gedachtengang zo durft te delen, helemaal over een gevoelig onderwerp als seksualiteit en verlangen. Met vlagen herkenbaar, en dan spreekt het ook aan, maar verder onsamenhangend.

[Cordelia Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a shame this book and Angel’s writing in general has been labelled ‘controversial’ and ‘bold’. It seems all (even some feminist) sides want to control women’s desire. Our sexuality is never ours, it belongs to external structures, a direct result of something outside of our control. It needs to be placed neatly into a box, inspected, examined. This collection of vignettes reminds us that women’s desire is, and has always been ours, untethered and unbound.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly smart, staccato, emotionally raw narrative that looks at desire and its uncomfortable complexities and takes issue with all of the dominant narratives around women's desire. Short, erudite, and really made me think.

[Grace Clover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cheeky cheeky Nia giving me this to read on the train (thank you).

[Reckless abandon and coming into to dock safely. The warmth of embrace and the all-encompassing surrender of bodies. Hunger. Sea air. All very interesting.]

[Keith Livesey]

A Lot Of Sex But Not Much Revolution

Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell-Katherine Angel 10.99 Paperback 368 Pages / Published: 03/07/2014
Daddy Issues-Katherine Angel £6.00 Paperback 128 Pages / Published: 13/06/2019
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again-Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel hardback £10.99-160 pages / March 2021 / 9781788739160-Verso publications
"Once in a while, a book appears that is so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudo poetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking "dirty talk," you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell".
Cristina Nehring
"Monogamy was the first form of the family not founded on natural, but on economic conditions, viz.: the victory of private property over primitive and natural collectivism."
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
"The first class antagonism appearing in history coincides with the development of the antagonism of man and wife in monogamy and the first class oppression with that of the female by the male sex."
― Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
"Passion and expression are not really separable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind, which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends to self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going".
De Rougement, Denis. Love in the Western World.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, 173. Print.
"Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"
Virginia Wolfe
It is hard to fathom why a gifted academic historian would write three largely substandard books that, from an intellectual level, hardly rise above the magazine Tit-Bits.
It is usually the case that a person who talks a lot about sex is not getting any, but this is evidently not the case for Angel, who appears to be getting more than her fair share. Given her significant number of sexual conquests, you would have thought she would change her name.
All three books were written amidst the rise of the #MeToo movement, and one would hate to believe that they were written purely to make the author and her publisher's a lot of money. They do not seem to serve any other purpose than this.
Also, I fail to see how writing about your sex life can enlighten young women about the huge sexual, social, political and economic problems they confront within a capitalist society. None of the books situates women's sexuality within the context of history, and this must be a deliberate act because Angel is not unfamiliar with the plight of women under capitalism. A single reading of Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, would give young women a deeper insight into the problems they deal with on a daily basis than these three books put together.
These books are a product of the 'MeToo# movement, and they reflect the domination of postmodernism inside academia. It is not a very healthy atmosphere. As Cristina Nehring writes, "In the groves of academe that Angel inhabits, sex is anything but a laughing matter. The relation of Anglo-American academics to sexuality remains a troubled one—at once obsessive and puritanical, criminalising and infantilising—even in our day and even (or especially) in disciplines specifically devoted to gender studies. This is a culture where a graduate student can cry sexual harassment if her academic adviser closes his door during office hours but turn around and solicit congratulations for personal tell-alls bearing titles with some variation on Vagina, which inflict far more violence on her intimate space than any indiscretion she has ever charged. (More or less, this is the career path of Naomi Wolf".
Unmastered is a very strangely structured book, with most of the book being blank pages, and some pages only have a few lines on them. Angel had a very tolerant editor, and the book stretches to 368 pages.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect has been the largely sycophantic reviews from reviewers who seem more interested in safeguarding their highly paid salaries than calling out a poorly written book. "It is hard to overestimate . . . [the] exquisite sensuality" of Angel's book, its "artfulness" and "richness," wrote Olivia Laing, or this one from Publishers Weekly which called the book "ghostly and poetic.". It is hard to choose which comment makes you want to vomit the most.
One of the more perceptive reviewers, Cristina Nehring , poses the question. "Why is it that a book as bad as this garners reasonable reviews and makes it to America from the United Kingdom? The answer seems to lie in the ingredients' combination—if not the quality or authenticity. Unmastered purports to combine philosophy with fellatio, intellect with erotica. It allows us to be voyeurs and lawyers at the same time. It gives us a good conscience reading porn But in truth? Unmastered does porn a disservice. Not to side with Angel's maligned professor, but real porn is a lot more "democratic" than this: It includes flesh-and-blood people—not the two-dimensional "hypostasized" extras of this book. It also focuses on a few different body parts—not only on the author's navel.".
Angel's postmodernist language obscures rather than enlightens her readers. Like many academics of her generation, her reliance on pseudo-left philosophers like Foucault is problematical. Foucault emphasised the necessity of developing micro-politics and micro-struggles. Such a strategy appeals to advocates of single-issue type politics: separatists and nationalists of every shade, environmentalists, and utopian feminists, like Angel.
Michel Foucault (1926-84) was a philosopher from an early age. He studied with Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser at the Ecole Normale Superièure. For a brief time, Foucault was a member of the French Communist Party, leaving in 1951. Although breaking organisationally from the French CP, he never broke politically and philosophically and retained much of its anti-classical Marxism and anti-Trotskyist baggage. He later became a leading member of The Frankfurt School.
Angel's musings on pornography are hardly groundbreaking. One does not have to be a Marxist to understand that sexual relationships under capitalism have largely been turned into a commodity or, as the Marxist writer Emanuele Saccarelli puts it in a comment on the movie Boogie Nights, "The subject of pornography naturally leads toward these considerations. Pornography is the commodification of sexual relations, a more modern, sanitised, impersonal, and therefore more peculiarly bourgeois form of prostitution. Instead of accepting the moralistic posturing of the defenders of the status quo, one must consider the possibility that, far from being a perverse deviation from the dominant values of a capitalist society, pornography might be the most logical and limpid translation of bourgeois values into the sexual sphere. Boogie Nights decisively points in that direction. Acts and relations that are natural and spontaneous are turned into commodities to be purchased and sold.
Angel seems to be more intent on titillation than a social and political comment. Asking a question in a lecture, she states, "given that orgasm during vaginal sex is elusive for many women, and clitoral stimulation is crucial, how then is clitoral pleasure represented in the swathes of pornography you have surveyed?" Politics are absent in her writings, and she writes nothing of the growing attempt to increase state censorship in the guise of a clampdown on pornography.
Angel's use of Virginia Woolf, who wrote the groundbreaking book A Room of One's Own, is legitimate. Her book unmastered was taken from a line in Virginia Woolf's diaries, "Why do we like the frantic, the unmastered?". Wolfe also wrote, "It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple." Angel likes this quote so much she repeats it several times. Wolfe is worth reading, and the modern woman can learn a lot from her books. As the writer, David Walsh perceptively puts it, "In Woolf's work, in my view, there is always a conflict between a rather anaemic and claustrophobic upper-middle-class self-involvement and a more penetrating, sharp-eyed and self-critical approach to reality. She referred once to her "terror of real-life" and, unhappily, there is something to the comment.
The attraction to social reformism had perhaps both class and psychological roots. In any event, the emphasis in her works on ordinariness, the incremental, the mundane seems in part the literary corollary of the Fabian's "gradualism" and "socialism through attrition." One can certainly argue whether Woolf grasped or was capable of grasping the depth of the social crisis in Britain in Mrs Dalloway, a book published on the eve of the bitterly fought General Strike of 1926. The novelist always draws back from the sharpest criticism. Nonetheless, there is in every one of Woolf's works a genuine concern with the welfare of humanity and the state of society, and not simply, as we find in The Hours, a complacent celebration of the privileged Manhattanite's daily routine. While Woolf had one foot in the camp of official society, she was able to bring to bear an honest and questioning intellect to her work."
Angel's book Daddy Issues was published by Peninsula Press in 2019. It is largely a bland work devoid of controversy, serious political comment, or analysis, much like her previous books. Many of the book reviews have a similar modus operandi, and Mia Levitan's review is the pick of the bunch, being largely uncritical and blindly complimentary.
The basic premise of Daddy Issues is that if only men could become better parents, or in her words, 'We need to keep the modern, civilised father on the hook, the world would be a good and safe place for young women to grow up in. Angel's book is a muddled mess. She writes, "Contemporary feminism has, however, re-embraced thinking about the big ideas – capitalism, work, care – and the concept of patriarchy is having a resurgence. In the waves of marches after Donald Trump's inauguration, it has featured heavily on banners; it circulates widely in highly instagrammable commodities, on t-shirts, on mugs, on tote bags. It is rolling around the mouths of pundits, commentators, and politicians. It has made a public comeback.
By "contemporary feminism", she means the MeToo#movement, which is neither anti-capitalist, progressive or utopian in any way. Again according to Walsh, "The ostensible aim of this ongoing movement is to combat sexual harassment and assault, i.e., to bring about some measure of social progress. However, the repressive, regressive means resorted to—including unsubstantiated and often anonymous denunciations and sustained attacks on the presumption of innocence and due process—give the lie to the campaign's "progressive" claims. Such methods are the hallmark of an anti-democratic, authoritarian movement, and one, moreover, that deliberately seeks to divert attention from social inequality, attacks on the working class, the threat of war and the other great social and political issues of the day".
Angel's choice of Trump as a bad father is baffling. Trump is a monster and a terrible father by any stretch of the imagination. But that aside, he is an American fascist, which Angel seems to have left out of her book. Why is Trump's fascism not written about in Angel's book, which is far more dangerous than Trump being a sexist pig? or bad father. I mean, did Hitler plunge mankind into a murderous war and carry out the holocaust because he was a bad lover.
In 2021, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent were published by Verso. This book leans heavily on the French philosopher Michel Foucault book The History of Sexuality. Angel is a utopian without being a socialist, saying, "My utopian ideal is if we could live in a society where everybody could feel their vulnerability and try to ride it with excitement. That we would not have to harden ourselves against that vulnerability, whether in the form of very inflexible notions of our desires or very inflexible contracts or in the form of insisting, as in the consent rhetoric, that we know exactly what we want. Because not always knowing is part of the pleasure of life and sex, unfortunately, it also makes it very risky".
As was said earlier, Angel's choice of Focualt as her guide on sexuality is troubling. She writes of Foucault. "I think it was a very wry phrase (Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again) in this incredibly sardonic and playful book that he was writing, in kind of oblique opposition, I would say, to the countercultural movement of the '60s and '70s, where there was a real faith being placed partly in psychoanalysis and also in Marxism as the roots out of sexual repression. So it was a reading of this kind of possible future with the tools to un-repress ourselves and emancipate ourselves from social oppression. And that these tools would finally kind of reveal this 'better tomorrow' where we would be free from the shackles around sexuality".
To clarify, the uninitiated Focualt was never an orthodox Marxist, and was part of a coterie of philosophers and writers that coalesced around the Frankfurt School . Foucault's writing on sexuality are largely worthless and reflect his general philosophy "that the objective world is not a world of facts that can be objectively probed and studied; instead, Foucault's world consists of discourses, stories—interpretations lacking any secure means of determining which "discourse" is superior".
To conclude, it is not difficult to sum up, the value of these three books. Like many books written under the auspices of the MeToo# movement, they are not worth the paper they are written upon, and they do not advance the struggle for female emancipation one iota.
The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once said, "Women's suffrage is the goal. But the mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women alone but is a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat. The worst and most brutal advocates of the exploitation and enslavement of the proletariat are entrenched behind the throne and altar as well as behind the political enslavement of women. Monarchy and women's lack of rights have become the most important tools of the ruling capitalist class". Angel should read some of her work. Maybe her next book on sex will be good.