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Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo
Women are in a bind. They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Sex researchers tell us that women don't know what they want. And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want—and how can they be expected to?
In this elegantly written, searching book Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science; MeToo-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism; and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood? Why is there not space for the unsure, the tentative, the maybe, the let's just see? In contrast to the endless exhortation to know what we want, Angel proposes that sex can be a conversation, requiring insight, interaction, and mutual vulnerability—a shared collaboration into the unknown.
In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault's sardonic promise, in 1976, that "tomorrow sex will be good again."
Women are in a bind. They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Sex researchers tell us that women don't know what they want. And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want—and how can they be expected to?
In this elegantly written, searching book Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science; MeToo-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism; and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood? Why is there not space for the unsure, the tentative, the maybe, the let's just see? In contrast to the endless exhortation to know what we want, Angel proposes that sex can be a conversation, requiring insight, interaction, and mutual vulnerability—a shared collaboration into the unknown.
In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault's sardonic promise, in 1976, that "tomorrow sex will be good again."
160 pages, Hardcover
First published February 9, 2021
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18508 people want to read
About the author
Katherine Angel
7 books185 followersKatherine 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.
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June 2, 2021
Katherine Angel wrote a really great book about the complexities of desire a few years back, called Unmastered, in which she worked through the implications and the contexts of sexual arousal in a very personal and undogmatic way. Now she has expanded some of those ideas into a fuller treatise on the subjective experience of sexuality (mainly for straight women) taking into account the current narratives around consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability (her four chapter titles).
I really like the way Angel talks about sex, and this felt to me (probably wrongly) as a welcome injection of Britishness into a debate dominated by voices from the US, where experiences and conversations are, I think, often different in important ways from those on my side of the Atlantic. Like I say, that's probably bullshit. But in any case her tone and her approach are much more congenial to my tastes than some other writers in this area.
It is particularly nice to see some current orthodoxies critiqued from a position of (what I read as) sympathetic leftism, rather than abandoning such criticism to rightwing antifeminist spaces. Angel gets away with it because, although this represents more of a general social statement than her earlier book, she retains the same sense of exploring issues as she goes, talking them through with an open mind, rather than approaching them with pre-defined ‘truths’ that need to be defended.
Typically her technique involves explaining a strand of thinking, then discussing criticisms of it, and insinuating by her tone that she finds neither very satisfactory. This is well illustrated in the first and perhaps most interesting section, on consent. Here she is sceptical about the current insistence on ‘consent culture’, but also not very impressed by the counterarguments of people like Laura Kipnis that it ‘encourages women to see themselves as essentially vulnerable to the predations of men’.
Instead, Angel's problem with the debate is more foundational. Firstly, she is concerned about the ‘heavy burden’ being placed on women's speech, which now has to do the job of ensuring pleasure and resolving potential violence. Secondly, the whole thing can be a red herring, since, of course,
Her discussion of these issues makes you realise just how legalistic the state of public discourse has often become: Angel is interested in having sex that is exciting and fulfilling, not sex that is merely uncriminal. With this in mind, she reaches her main point, which is that an insistence on women enthusiastically saying exactly what they want misses the fundamental truth that
To do otherwise, she says appealingly, is ‘to hold sexuality hostage to violence’.
In the following sections, Angel turns her attention to recent scientific approaches to sex, in particular the much-vaunted ‘responsive desire’ model of female sexuality. (Emily Nagoski is called out here, along with many of the other usual suspects.) This concept, Angel says, ‘makes me nervous’, in part because, if women are encouraged to go into sex with the expectation that they might not like it until they get going, then ‘how do we tell the difference between reasonable effort in a relationship and unacceptable pressure into sex?’
This is tied, in Angel's narrative, to a more general tendency to reframe women's sexuality as somehow more cerebral and mysterious than men's. She looks at the latest DSM psychiatry bible, noting that while men have desire, women now have ‘incentives and motivation’. ‘Women consider sex, while men want it. Women's interest in sex is less, well, sexual.’
Similarly, she is deeply sceptical of the famous experiment by Meredith Chivers which measured genital arousal while subjects were shown footage of straight sex, gay sex, lesbian sex, and sex between bonobos. Women became physiologically aroused while watched all of them, regardless of what they said they found arousing; men's arousal, on the other hand, matched what they said they were into.
Angel doesn't touch on the male-female discrepancy, but she does note that genital arousal doesn't say much about ‘a subjective sense of sexual arousal’, and is irritated by the very different case of Viagra marketing, which goes out of its way to present the drug as having nothing to do with arousal but rather a matter of mere hydraulics. The implication is that ‘men are authorities on themselves, while women are not’.
In all of Angel's discussions, the result is a new and, I think, really productive and freeing awareness of the ambiguity, the messiness of sexuality which goes well beyond mindless orthodoxies or their furious dismissals. Her opinions are sensible and heartfelt, and will probably not gain much traction in wider debate because they are too nuanced to be reduced to a comfortable tweet or upvoted reddit comment.
I always read books like this with one eye on my own reactions: do I dislike that point because it makes me defensive? Do I like that argument because it flatters me? Like any good book, there were things in here that I would argue with; it was strange, for instance, to find her claiming that men's desires ‘emerge into the world embraced, valued and protected’, which, in books where men talk about their sexual desires, is pretty much the exact opposite of what they say. But my objection to moments like this is not on the grounds of male experiences per se, which are not really within the book's purview. It is more that I see no need to introduce gender divisons where they aren't relevant to the argument, especially when, in my opinion, most of these problems will only be solved by men and women working together against the bullshit. A utopian view, perhaps – but no more utopian, I don't think, than Angel's plea to break down binary thinking and welcome ‘vulnerability, receptivity, porousness’ back into the ethics of good sex.
I really like the way Angel talks about sex, and this felt to me (probably wrongly) as a welcome injection of Britishness into a debate dominated by voices from the US, where experiences and conversations are, I think, often different in important ways from those on my side of the Atlantic. Like I say, that's probably bullshit. But in any case her tone and her approach are much more congenial to my tastes than some other writers in this area.
It is particularly nice to see some current orthodoxies critiqued from a position of (what I read as) sympathetic leftism, rather than abandoning such criticism to rightwing antifeminist spaces. Angel gets away with it because, although this represents more of a general social statement than her earlier book, she retains the same sense of exploring issues as she goes, talking them through with an open mind, rather than approaching them with pre-defined ‘truths’ that need to be defended.
Typically her technique involves explaining a strand of thinking, then discussing criticisms of it, and insinuating by her tone that she finds neither very satisfactory. This is well illustrated in the first and perhaps most interesting section, on consent. Here she is sceptical about the current insistence on ‘consent culture’, but also not very impressed by the counterarguments of people like Laura Kipnis that it ‘encourages women to see themselves as essentially vulnerable to the predations of men’.
Instead, Angel's problem with the debate is more foundational. Firstly, she is concerned about the ‘heavy burden’ being placed on women's speech, which now has to do the job of ensuring pleasure and resolving potential violence. Secondly, the whole thing can be a red herring, since, of course,
much sex that is consented to, even affirmatively consented to, is bad: miserable, unpleasant, humiliating, one-sided. ‘Bad sex’ doesn't have to be assault in order for it to be frightening, shame-inducing, upsetting…
Her discussion of these issues makes you realise just how legalistic the state of public discourse has often become: Angel is interested in having sex that is exciting and fulfilling, not sex that is merely uncriminal. With this in mind, she reaches her main point, which is that an insistence on women enthusiastically saying exactly what they want misses the fundamental truth that
our desires emerge in interaction; we don't always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn't know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want in the doing. This – that we don't always know and can't always say what we want – must be folded into the ethics of sex rather than swept aside as an inconvenience.
To do otherwise, she says appealingly, is ‘to hold sexuality hostage to violence’.
In the following sections, Angel turns her attention to recent scientific approaches to sex, in particular the much-vaunted ‘responsive desire’ model of female sexuality. (Emily Nagoski is called out here, along with many of the other usual suspects.) This concept, Angel says, ‘makes me nervous’, in part because, if women are encouraged to go into sex with the expectation that they might not like it until they get going, then ‘how do we tell the difference between reasonable effort in a relationship and unacceptable pressure into sex?’
This is tied, in Angel's narrative, to a more general tendency to reframe women's sexuality as somehow more cerebral and mysterious than men's. She looks at the latest DSM psychiatry bible, noting that while men have desire, women now have ‘incentives and motivation’. ‘Women consider sex, while men want it. Women's interest in sex is less, well, sexual.’
Similarly, she is deeply sceptical of the famous experiment by Meredith Chivers which measured genital arousal while subjects were shown footage of straight sex, gay sex, lesbian sex, and sex between bonobos. Women became physiologically aroused while watched all of them, regardless of what they said they found arousing; men's arousal, on the other hand, matched what they said they were into.
Angel doesn't touch on the male-female discrepancy, but she does note that genital arousal doesn't say much about ‘a subjective sense of sexual arousal’, and is irritated by the very different case of Viagra marketing, which goes out of its way to present the drug as having nothing to do with arousal but rather a matter of mere hydraulics. The implication is that ‘men are authorities on themselves, while women are not’.
We should prioritize what women say, in all its complexity, rather than fetishizing what their bodies do in the name of a spurious scientism.
In all of Angel's discussions, the result is a new and, I think, really productive and freeing awareness of the ambiguity, the messiness of sexuality which goes well beyond mindless orthodoxies or their furious dismissals. Her opinions are sensible and heartfelt, and will probably not gain much traction in wider debate because they are too nuanced to be reduced to a comfortable tweet or upvoted reddit comment.
I always read books like this with one eye on my own reactions: do I dislike that point because it makes me defensive? Do I like that argument because it flatters me? Like any good book, there were things in here that I would argue with; it was strange, for instance, to find her claiming that men's desires ‘emerge into the world embraced, valued and protected’, which, in books where men talk about their sexual desires, is pretty much the exact opposite of what they say. But my objection to moments like this is not on the grounds of male experiences per se, which are not really within the book's purview. It is more that I see no need to introduce gender divisons where they aren't relevant to the argument, especially when, in my opinion, most of these problems will only be solved by men and women working together against the bullshit. A utopian view, perhaps – but no more utopian, I don't think, than Angel's plea to break down binary thinking and welcome ‘vulnerability, receptivity, porousness’ back into the ethics of good sex.
July 3, 2022
I first came across Katherine Angel when I read Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell earlier this year and I cannot, for the life of me, describe how much I identified with and loved the writing. And of course I immediately looked up if Angel had written more books.
In this book, Angel discusses the tendency within the liberal feminist movement of making sexuality and pleasure stand-ins for emancipation and liberation. The current narrative of consent is limiting, in the sense that it places the responsibility of good sexual interaction on women, it pre-supposes an almost complete knowledge of our desires and wants on our part - but much of sex and the pleasure we derive from it is exploratory, responsive.
Angel writes about the post-feminist movement that posited the image of women as confident sexual selves who know what they want and know exactly how to state it. Outspokenness was then considered necessary factor of feminist subjectivity.
We need a robust critique of consent, not in order to vilify young women supposedly attached to victimhood, but out of solidarity with all women for whom sex can turn into an unhappy bargaining point, a false choice or an economic necessity for survival.
The problem is not that consent appears contractual in nature - this previously agreed upon contract is crucial to ensure the safety of sex-workers and safe practices within bdsm. Rather, Angel writes, that the problem with the current rhetoric of consent is that by centring our thinking about sex on it, we automatically fall prey to the liberal fantasy that equality simply exists. Therefore it ignores the unequal relationships of power that people participate in.
Consent culture reveals the horror of vulnerability and this privatizes our responses to rape culture, shifting the course of action from a collective to the individual - the individual, strong, confident, outspoken woman. It dangerously fixes the narrative to a false dichotomy: that we always either want or don't want sex, it ignores that a lot of us usually hover between the two.
Commentators on the ‘new’ landscape of sex and consent often plaintively ask why it is that men are expected to be able to ‘read a woman’s mind’ when it comes to sex. My question is different: why are women asked to know their own minds, when knowing one’s own mind is such an undependable aim? Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal, and it’s an assumption that has been conceded for far too long, to the impediment of conversations about pleasure, joy, autonomy and safety. If we want sex to be good again – or at all – anytime soon, we need to reject this insistence, and start elsewhere.
Desire is not something that is fully-formed within us, that we project outward whenever we want. An ethics of sexuality must consider this, must make place for the uncertainty of desire. The onus of responsibility of a safety from violence, should not be placed on absolute knowledge of ourselves and of our desires.
The onus is not on women to have a sexuality that admits of no abuse; it is on others not to abuse them. The fetishization of certain knowledge does nothing to enable rich, exciting, pleasurable sex, for women or for men. We have to explore the unknown.
In this book, Angel discusses the tendency within the liberal feminist movement of making sexuality and pleasure stand-ins for emancipation and liberation. The current narrative of consent is limiting, in the sense that it places the responsibility of good sexual interaction on women, it pre-supposes an almost complete knowledge of our desires and wants on our part - but much of sex and the pleasure we derive from it is exploratory, responsive.
Angel writes about the post-feminist movement that posited the image of women as confident sexual selves who know what they want and know exactly how to state it. Outspokenness was then considered necessary factor of feminist subjectivity.
We need a robust critique of consent, not in order to vilify young women supposedly attached to victimhood, but out of solidarity with all women for whom sex can turn into an unhappy bargaining point, a false choice or an economic necessity for survival.
The problem is not that consent appears contractual in nature - this previously agreed upon contract is crucial to ensure the safety of sex-workers and safe practices within bdsm. Rather, Angel writes, that the problem with the current rhetoric of consent is that by centring our thinking about sex on it, we automatically fall prey to the liberal fantasy that equality simply exists. Therefore it ignores the unequal relationships of power that people participate in.
Consent culture reveals the horror of vulnerability and this privatizes our responses to rape culture, shifting the course of action from a collective to the individual - the individual, strong, confident, outspoken woman. It dangerously fixes the narrative to a false dichotomy: that we always either want or don't want sex, it ignores that a lot of us usually hover between the two.
Commentators on the ‘new’ landscape of sex and consent often plaintively ask why it is that men are expected to be able to ‘read a woman’s mind’ when it comes to sex. My question is different: why are women asked to know their own minds, when knowing one’s own mind is such an undependable aim? Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal, and it’s an assumption that has been conceded for far too long, to the impediment of conversations about pleasure, joy, autonomy and safety. If we want sex to be good again – or at all – anytime soon, we need to reject this insistence, and start elsewhere.
Desire is not something that is fully-formed within us, that we project outward whenever we want. An ethics of sexuality must consider this, must make place for the uncertainty of desire. The onus of responsibility of a safety from violence, should not be placed on absolute knowledge of ourselves and of our desires.
The onus is not on women to have a sexuality that admits of no abuse; it is on others not to abuse them. The fetishization of certain knowledge does nothing to enable rich, exciting, pleasurable sex, for women or for men. We have to explore the unknown.
April 20, 2021
Engaging, thought-provoking, nuanced, informative. An absolute must-read for anyone who struggles to truly understand sexual politics in the #metoo era, and who thinks the conversation about consent is often dangerously over-simplified and occasionally paradoxial. Actually, must-read for everyone.
August 2, 2021
« Men, after all, hate women so that they don’t have to hate themselves. »
September 15, 2020
I am not familiar with the author's work, but I admit I had expected the book to be much more in the journalistic quasi-self-help vein of books like Emily Nagoski's 'Come As You Are' and various other titles, featuring interviews with or vignettes of women and their various experiences with sex.
Instead, 'Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again' is a highly academic text, the kind I might have expected to be assigned to read at university. This often does the author's vital analysis a disservice - there were many times when the same point was reiterated repeatedly and unnecessarily, and the language was often opaque. For example: "These kinds of maximally inclusive accounts in fact push the concept of 'reasons' to the limits of intelligibility".
That said, I honestly feel liberated by this book. It has torn the covers off so many social and cultural phenomena that have made me quietly uneasy without being able to articulate the reasons for this. The author's analysis was new and original to me, and yet, it instinctively spoke to me. Her prose could also - when not hung up on maintaining dry academic appearances - be astoundingly beautiful, profound, and even erotic.
This is a treatise that I wish every person in the world would read. I just hope the style of writing and argument doesn't put the book's potential readership off.
(With thanks to Verso Books and NetGalley for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review)
Instead, 'Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again' is a highly academic text, the kind I might have expected to be assigned to read at university. This often does the author's vital analysis a disservice - there were many times when the same point was reiterated repeatedly and unnecessarily, and the language was often opaque. For example: "These kinds of maximally inclusive accounts in fact push the concept of 'reasons' to the limits of intelligibility".
That said, I honestly feel liberated by this book. It has torn the covers off so many social and cultural phenomena that have made me quietly uneasy without being able to articulate the reasons for this. The author's analysis was new and original to me, and yet, it instinctively spoke to me. Her prose could also - when not hung up on maintaining dry academic appearances - be astoundingly beautiful, profound, and even erotic.
This is a treatise that I wish every person in the world would read. I just hope the style of writing and argument doesn't put the book's potential readership off.
(With thanks to Verso Books and NetGalley for a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review)
September 4, 2022
superbly written and incredibly thought-provoking, katherine angel's advocacy for not-knowing - and for the vulnerability that keeps us open to such uncertainty during sex - was powerful. this is the sort of nuanced, potent, and compulsively readable prose that i want to see more of in academia!
February 18, 2023
"O sexo é uma interação, decididamente social e interpessoal - muito mais próximo de outros fenómenos sociais do que distinto deles. O sexo, como qualquer fenómeno social, é um processo, um desenvolvimento, uma revelação. O sexo é uma conversa; e, como qualquer conversa pode ser promissor e estar à altura dessa promessa - ou pode ser desapontante."
June 29, 2021
This is a short book but my oh my does it pack a punch. Katherine Angel unpacks consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability over four chapters and takes a deep dive in sex research, asking deeply insightful questions like why are women expected to know what they want in isolation when the act of knowing is relational and relative?
Drawing from literature that she doesn't agree with as well as the work of queer authors, she tries to give us pathways to understanding consent culture, confidence culture and our obsession with knowing female sexuality. I had to read many parts twice because while the language is easy to understand, she packs so many ideas in one paragraph it's a testament to her writing and critical thinking abilities. Highly recommended.
Drawing from literature that she doesn't agree with as well as the work of queer authors, she tries to give us pathways to understanding consent culture, confidence culture and our obsession with knowing female sexuality. I had to read many parts twice because while the language is easy to understand, she packs so many ideas in one paragraph it's a testament to her writing and critical thinking abilities. Highly recommended.
February 1, 2022
Ugh. I was so frustrated by this book, which felt at times like an endless scroll of nested citations. Angel pulls out obscure films/books/papers to bolster her points, but sometimes she's using them to argue one way, sometimes another. I had a hard time knowing if she was expounding on something in order to agree or disagree with it. I began to suspect that this was a reworked thesis fairly early on, and nothing happened to disabuse me of this notion. Further, she focused on the problems and issues with consent and didn't offer any viable alternatives.
The authorial view is relentlessly cis-het-white.
Consent is problematic for a lot of the reasons Angel cites, but it's better than what we were working with before.
The authorial view is relentlessly cis-het-white.
Consent is problematic for a lot of the reasons Angel cites, but it's better than what we were working with before.
June 18, 2021
"Hay un libro de Waqcuant, sociólogo discípulo de Bourdieu, en cuya portada podemos ver a una persona racializada que lleva una pancarta que dice «Please, help me learn to be more “responsible”», con toda la carga irónica del entrecomillado. Esta sería sin duda la mejor representación de la tesis de Angel, que podemos resumir con la pregunta: «¿por qué debe la mujer, y por qué debe la propia sexualidad, cargar con el peso de fenómenos que son inherentemente sociales y claramente colectivos, que están inextrincablemente ligados con las normas de la masculinidad?». Porque la lógica de responsabilizar a las mujeres tanto de las violencias sexuales como de que el sexo sea satisfactorio se parece mucho al discurso de la cultura de la violación y sus materializaciones jurídicas. Si a esto añadimos las ideas del feminismo pop, que bebe de la cultura del trust yourself, tenemos un cóctel explosivo: no sólo eres responsable de la violencia sexual y del sexo satisfactorio, sino que además, si no sabes poner los límites, si no tienes un grado de autoconocimiento que te permita expresar y accionar clara y activamente tu deseo, eres una loser.
Pero entonces, puede que se estén preguntando, ¿qué propone Angel? Por un lado, es consciente de que por ahora es la herramienta jurídica menos mala, y por otro desafía a buscar herramientas que comprendan la sexualidad como un fenómeno complejo que va cambiando con el paso del tiempo, que tiene que ver con la biografía misma de los sujetos (y por tanto, con lo social) y, sobre todo, que es un fenómeno que implica abrirse a lo desconocido. Ser vulnerables a lo desconocido. Con más preguntas que respuestas, Angel nos exhorta a pensar una ética sexual que no se conforme con la cultura del consentimiento y la visión estructural de la violencia, sino parta de la vulnerabilidad compartida y de que, nos guste o no, la sexualidad es un terreno en el que no existen certezas absolutas y en el que (como en todo lo que tiene que ver con el sujeto) no somos soberanes de nosotres mismes aunque tengamos agencia." Pol Cirujano
Pero entonces, puede que se estén preguntando, ¿qué propone Angel? Por un lado, es consciente de que por ahora es la herramienta jurídica menos mala, y por otro desafía a buscar herramientas que comprendan la sexualidad como un fenómeno complejo que va cambiando con el paso del tiempo, que tiene que ver con la biografía misma de los sujetos (y por tanto, con lo social) y, sobre todo, que es un fenómeno que implica abrirse a lo desconocido. Ser vulnerables a lo desconocido. Con más preguntas que respuestas, Angel nos exhorta a pensar una ética sexual que no se conforme con la cultura del consentimiento y la visión estructural de la violencia, sino parta de la vulnerabilidad compartida y de que, nos guste o no, la sexualidad es un terreno en el que no existen certezas absolutas y en el que (como en todo lo que tiene que ver con el sujeto) no somos soberanes de nosotres mismes aunque tengamos agencia." Pol Cirujano
July 17, 2021
This was a deeply infuriating mix of 'things I wish I had read ten years ago' and 'wow, heteronormative, cisnormative, much?' Wild one-two of validation-invalidation.
The best chapter by far is the last, and that would be because that's the chapter which engages in depth with queer theory - Foucault and Edelman in particular. There's a shorter version at Granta if you're interested.
The problem with this book is it pronounces repeatedly on what 'women' are like, and while very often it says things about women that are true of me and which I have not seen articulated as such outside of weird Christian discourses (or kink discourses- but there, rarely limited to 'women'), it ... just... keeps doing the thing. With the essentialism. Angel acknowledges there are wide variances not only to individual women's makeup but to social structures bearing upon women - she makes no claim to speak for Black women, but does regularly nod to Black writers who have written on adjacent topics. Whereas for trans and queer women, and indeed queer men, she merely footnotes in the first chapter that she thinks it likely what she has to say will resonate but it's for someone else to do the work.
... as if trans and queer writers haven't been *doing* that work, of unpacking what it means to desire, the difference between arousal and desire, the intersection between sex and and sexual self, and so on. As if trans and queer communities haven't been forging that themselves, while the sexologists whom Angel rightly critiques have been busy measuring engorgement and the straight ladies busy telling each other that you cannot really enjoy sex with others until you know exactly what you want, somehow divorced from who you want.
Even when Angel draws on queer theory, she doesn't... engage... with queer anything. In fact it's almost as if she doesn't engage with *gender* despite writing about the gender binary?
She's an academic: she can do better. I'm reasonably certain that if this went to peer review someone would demand she do better, but here it is, and she hasn't.
The best chapter by far is the last, and that would be because that's the chapter which engages in depth with queer theory - Foucault and Edelman in particular. There's a shorter version at Granta if you're interested.
The problem with this book is it pronounces repeatedly on what 'women' are like, and while very often it says things about women that are true of me and which I have not seen articulated as such outside of weird Christian discourses (or kink discourses- but there, rarely limited to 'women'), it ... just... keeps doing the thing. With the essentialism. Angel acknowledges there are wide variances not only to individual women's makeup but to social structures bearing upon women - she makes no claim to speak for Black women, but does regularly nod to Black writers who have written on adjacent topics. Whereas for trans and queer women, and indeed queer men, she merely footnotes in the first chapter that she thinks it likely what she has to say will resonate but it's for someone else to do the work.
... as if trans and queer writers haven't been *doing* that work, of unpacking what it means to desire, the difference between arousal and desire, the intersection between sex and and sexual self, and so on. As if trans and queer communities haven't been forging that themselves, while the sexologists whom Angel rightly critiques have been busy measuring engorgement and the straight ladies busy telling each other that you cannot really enjoy sex with others until you know exactly what you want, somehow divorced from who you want.
Even when Angel draws on queer theory, she doesn't... engage... with queer anything. In fact it's almost as if she doesn't engage with *gender* despite writing about the gender binary?
She's an academic: she can do better. I'm reasonably certain that if this went to peer review someone would demand she do better, but here it is, and she hasn't.
March 14, 2021
This is precise and eye-opening writing. Katherine Angel takes us through how consent, sexuality, arousal and desire have been thought about in feminist, pop-culture and scientific circles over time and why those conceptions need to change.
Consent is not a guarantee for great sex or even safe sex. It presumes that women possess confident self-knowledge about their desires, formulated beforehand, when desire is itself relational, changing, unsure and tentative. So while the consent rubric sets a minimal legal standard for sexual assault law, it is far too narrow a vision for a utopia where ‘sex will be good again’.
I was relieved that Katherine is conscious of race in her analysis and it’s myriad implications for desire. It might be too much of a white feminist agenda to regard sexuality as the primary locus of women’s emancipation. Especially when black men’s sexuality has been deemed dangerous and black women have been historically hyper-sexualised.
There is plenty to write here, but anyone interested in a discussion of female sexuality that is both thoughtful and mercifully free of #girlboss language should pick up this book.
Consent is not a guarantee for great sex or even safe sex. It presumes that women possess confident self-knowledge about their desires, formulated beforehand, when desire is itself relational, changing, unsure and tentative. So while the consent rubric sets a minimal legal standard for sexual assault law, it is far too narrow a vision for a utopia where ‘sex will be good again’.
I was relieved that Katherine is conscious of race in her analysis and it’s myriad implications for desire. It might be too much of a white feminist agenda to regard sexuality as the primary locus of women’s emancipation. Especially when black men’s sexuality has been deemed dangerous and black women have been historically hyper-sexualised.
There is plenty to write here, but anyone interested in a discussion of female sexuality that is both thoughtful and mercifully free of #girlboss language should pick up this book.
March 6, 2021
This is a rather academic look at women and sex following the MeToo movement, but it is nonetheless engaging. The author examines three areas: consent, desire, and arousal. It is complicated territory, but important to consider.
September 10, 2025
MARAVILLOSO, me voló la cabeza y aprendí muchísimo
reseña en:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DOZuLmuDyln/
reseña en:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DOZuLmuDyln/
January 23, 2025
4.5. This is a thought provoking, over arching discussion of sex and desire (mostly focused on straight women). It is a really great introduction to desire and intimacy through a feminist lense, but wasn’t hitting all of the intersectional points I was looking for. As a straight woman, I felt connected and intrigued by Angel’s arguments, but it fell short of being *perfect*. I still think most people should read this… it’s super academic but fairly short and cuts right to the point.
July 4, 2021
A smart and very interesting short essay collection that problematizes and probes in interesting ways aspects of the current discourse around sex, desire, and consent. The title comes from Foucault and is somewhat ironic, but this is also a call to a more nuanced and potentially emancipatory view of sex. The format becomes slightly predictable - bad old idea, new idea that seems better, but wait, it’s problematic too. However, the author’s angle is thought-provoking. For example, in the first essay, on consent, she draws attention to the ways modern consent culture enjoins women to know and voice exactly what they want, not only in order to ward off violence but also to create the conditions for good sex - and she suggests that we are asking consent and women’s speech to do too much work (“But consent has a limited purview, and it is being asked to bear too great a burden, to address problems it is not equipped to resolve.”). She also explores, in essays on desire and arousal, how sex research has given rise to problematic models of sexuality, e.g. studies of genital arousal that have been interpreted to suggest that physical reaction measured with sensors tells us ‘what women really want,’ or DSM definitions that reify men as having a sex ‘drive’ and women as ‘receptive.’ Ultimately the author advocates in favour of recognizing the complexity, ambiguity, and deeply contextual nature of sex( which sounds vague but she presents it more articulately).
April 1, 2021
This was so good! Like a modern day Beauvoir - the only criticism I have is that I wish it was a bit more radical. It’s kind of quite basic in what it’s addressing but I’m very happy to have read it!
September 10, 2022
Topla, jasna, prijateljska i iskrena knjiga, hrabra i empatična autorka, vrlo prijatno iznenađenje.
August 21, 2021
Katherine Angel's 'Tomorrow sex will be good again' is a very fine book that, although short, helps open up the discussion about consent. Consent is great, if only we lived in a society in which women are invited and allowed to think about their desires, which we do not.
Angel's prose hardly ever loses its flow, focus and structure. This is all the more admirable as she easily hops from a source, to an analysis, to judgement and opinion.
This book doesn't read like a self-help book, yet it did very much help me to understand female sexual struggles. It also helped me to understand my own. Therefore I found it all the more saddening that, I assume, men will less often pick up this book than women. It would be great if more men would read this.
Angel's prose hardly ever loses its flow, focus and structure. This is all the more admirable as she easily hops from a source, to an analysis, to judgement and opinion.
This book doesn't read like a self-help book, yet it did very much help me to understand female sexual struggles. It also helped me to understand my own. Therefore I found it all the more saddening that, I assume, men will less often pick up this book than women. It would be great if more men would read this.
March 16, 2021
This presented so many new ideas and ways of thinking for me that I can’t help but call it liberating.
It’s more academic in nature, which I prefer. But it also feels very exploratory in itself at the same time, which is inviting. It feels like Angel is learning along with you almost - and exploring ideas new to her as well. Obviously I don’t know if this is true, but I liked the tone it set.
Great stuff here. I practically highlighted the whole thing.
It’s more academic in nature, which I prefer. But it also feels very exploratory in itself at the same time, which is inviting. It feels like Angel is learning along with you almost - and exploring ideas new to her as well. Obviously I don’t know if this is true, but I liked the tone it set.
Great stuff here. I practically highlighted the whole thing.
February 24, 2025
záver knihy je rushed a trochu horší oproti zvyšku, ale inak autorka rozpracováva zaujímavé tézy
November 22, 2021
Desde una perspectiva cishetero y binaria, la autora plantea cuatro paradigmas: el consentimiento, el deseo, la excitación y la vulnerabilidad, bajo sesgo de género, en las relaciones sexuales entre hombres y mujeres. Con un lenguaje asumible y plagado de referencias audiovisuales, el ensayo plantea la necesidad de dejar atrás el consentimiento que sitúa a la mujer como ente pasivo que accede o no a las relaciones sin mostrar un deseo; rechazar el autoconocimiento como solución a problemas sociales en torno a la experiencia sexual; desestimar la sexualización estereotipada de las mujeres así como la relación entre la respuesta física de la excitación y el verdadero deseo. Finalmente, la autora nos lanza a indagar en los límites de la vulnerabilidad para tratar de averiguar con franqueza lo que se desea.
Un texto con lugares comunes para las mujeres (heterosexuales o no) que hemos nacido en la cultura del miedo a la violación y en la era de consentir en lugar de consensuar.
Un texto con lugares comunes para las mujeres (heterosexuales o no) que hemos nacido en la cultura del miedo a la violación y en la era de consentir en lugar de consensuar.
February 27, 2021
Brilliant. Rtc after I attend a London Review Bookshop author event with Angel and Olivia Laing on Monday.
July 20, 2024
Not normally the kind of thing that I'd pick up unprompted, but I recently heard the author being interviewed on a podcast and this sounded like a fresh take on a somewhat tired subject (and that title practically sells this book on its own).
Thank god I'm not dating today! is something I've said more than once these past few years. These feel like fraught times to be single, to say the least, and much of the discourse around this subject in America, I think it's important to add, has been crazy.
So let's see what a British author has to say about it all!
Maybe it's unsurprising that someone outside of the too-often overly politicized, toxic discourse here in the US actually makes sense on this issue, but Katherine Angel does.
To review, that aforementioned discourse in the US seems to have settled around the all-consuming importance of a single word — yes.
Yes, you can kiss me.
Yes, you can touch me there.
Yes, there too.
Yes, and there.
Yes, you can do that.
And yes, that too.
Or, at least, that's what we've been told. It's like 2-step verification, but for sex. And it's more like 50-step verification.
And yes, while consent is, of course, paramount before proceeding with any act of that particular congress, this constant verbal negotiating of terms feels, to me, overly robotic and to emphasize the transactional nature of the whole thing.
Can sex only exist inside a capitalist worldview?
Does this negotiation always have to be spoken out loud?
And does stating the terms out loud mean that both partners are now on equal footing? That all the complexities of human biology, all the baggage and trauma that we're each bringing to this encounter, have now been negated?
In addition, it seems to reinforce, in heterosexual relationships at least, an outdated, misleading stereotype — that because the emphasis is always put on the men to ask, it's the men who are doing the wanting and the women who are doing the submitting.
But can we really boil sex and desire down to a simple yes and no question (even if that "yes," we're told, needs to be repeated ad nauseam)?
No, Angel posits, things are a bit more nuanced than that. And by a bit, she means a lot.
And doesn't that only make sense?
We are, or at least most of us are, an incredibly indecisive species. I don't know what I want to eat for dinner (I always ask the waiter or waitress to choose for me), so sex?
Reader, do you really believe that the majority of people out there know themselves with complete certainty when it comes to what they want in sex? I certainly don't.
It just depends, doesn't it? On the mood, on the day, on the partner ... maybe boiling things down to a simple "yes" or "no" is simplifying things a bit too much. Maybe, rather than coming into things with the expectation that you just need to ask this question, men and women need to instead focus on getting better at understanding one another ... and themselves.
Maybe it's this getting to know one another in ways that go beyond "yes" that's part of the joy of the whole thing.
Thank god I'm not dating today! is something I've said more than once these past few years. These feel like fraught times to be single, to say the least, and much of the discourse around this subject in America, I think it's important to add, has been crazy.
So let's see what a British author has to say about it all!
Maybe it's unsurprising that someone outside of the too-often overly politicized, toxic discourse here in the US actually makes sense on this issue, but Katherine Angel does.
To review, that aforementioned discourse in the US seems to have settled around the all-consuming importance of a single word — yes.
Yes, you can kiss me.
Yes, you can touch me there.
Yes, there too.
Yes, and there.
Yes, you can do that.
And yes, that too.
Or, at least, that's what we've been told. It's like 2-step verification, but for sex. And it's more like 50-step verification.
And yes, while consent is, of course, paramount before proceeding with any act of that particular congress, this constant verbal negotiating of terms feels, to me, overly robotic and to emphasize the transactional nature of the whole thing.
Can sex only exist inside a capitalist worldview?
Does this negotiation always have to be spoken out loud?
And does stating the terms out loud mean that both partners are now on equal footing? That all the complexities of human biology, all the baggage and trauma that we're each bringing to this encounter, have now been negated?
In addition, it seems to reinforce, in heterosexual relationships at least, an outdated, misleading stereotype — that because the emphasis is always put on the men to ask, it's the men who are doing the wanting and the women who are doing the submitting.
But can we really boil sex and desire down to a simple yes and no question (even if that "yes," we're told, needs to be repeated ad nauseam)?
No, Angel posits, things are a bit more nuanced than that. And by a bit, she means a lot.
And doesn't that only make sense?
We are, or at least most of us are, an incredibly indecisive species. I don't know what I want to eat for dinner (I always ask the waiter or waitress to choose for me), so sex?
Reader, do you really believe that the majority of people out there know themselves with complete certainty when it comes to what they want in sex? I certainly don't.
It just depends, doesn't it? On the mood, on the day, on the partner ... maybe boiling things down to a simple "yes" or "no" is simplifying things a bit too much. Maybe, rather than coming into things with the expectation that you just need to ask this question, men and women need to instead focus on getting better at understanding one another ... and themselves.
Maybe it's this getting to know one another in ways that go beyond "yes" that's part of the joy of the whole thing.
February 6, 2023
Gut reaction: Uhm so that was mega weird: 3/4 essays were brilliant and the last one was terrible/weak af lmao.
This collection of four related essays explores the limits of "consent rhetoric" as an answer to rape culture and the way patriarchy/androcracy affects sexual relations between men and women (the author makes it very clear her analysis is limited to heterosexual dynamics, so I find it pointless to criticise her for the limited scope of her treatise since that was a deliberate choice on her part).
In the first three essays, On Consent, On Desire, and On Arousal, the author takes a look at research into, and discourse about, female (and male) sexuality, critiques it and emphasises just how culture-bound human sexuality, truly is – for everyone. I thoroughly appreciated just how measured, nuanced and determined she was in her critique, analysis, and overall arguments. I especially liked her questioning of the ideas of female "responsive desire" and polymorphous arousal put forward and/or popularised by Emily Nagoski and Meredith Chivers. I found myself agreeing with most of her points, quite frankly, and rated the first three essays with two 10s and a 9.
Then I read the fourth and last essay, On Vulnerability... and thoroughly disliked it. Just... what the hell? The author just took a tangent there and ran with the idea that self-knowledge is never truly attainable, whether about one's own sexual preferences or own's being in general. And that vulnerability that allows risk is not only an inherent part of sexual relations, but a positive aspect of them. Consent rhetoric, presumably, minimises this facet of human sexuality... Uhm. How about fuck that? a) Just because you can't know yourself perfectly, in bed or outside of it, doesn't mean there isn't value in trying or that you can't know anything about your preferences either. b) I don't find the risk of injury or harm in sex erotic in the fucking slightest, thank you very much. c) As a victim of CSA, I know for a fact I have experienced fantasies that were a direct result of this and know for a fact I have zero wish to indulge them, ever. d) As an autistic person, I find enormous value in predictability and routine, including when it comes to love-making. e) Presumably, if you've been with the same partner for a while, you can in fact expect certain things from them and minimise risk to a great degree. The vulnerability you experience there is limited, and only erotic insofar as it fosters shared intimacy (ideally). But that doesn't mean vulnerability is always positive in and of itself, like hello?! Female sexual preference is not infinitely mutable/variable. That is such patent bullshit. The way the author formulated it, it sounded like dudebros who argue you should try everything at least once to know if you really like it, including dick to lesbians... News flash: you don't have to try something to know it's not for you. Period. No ifs and buts about it. Also points taken away for drawing on fucking Freud and Virginie Despentes.
It was such an infuriating and weak-arse conclusion because it undermined a previously nuanced analysis of consent rhetoric that still acknowledged it as the best solution we currently have at our disposal. No alternatives were offered to consent rhetoric, which is a shame in and of itself but, in that last chapter, it almost seemed to undermine the idea of consent wholesale, which left a very bad taste in my mouth.
So... yeah, I would still recommend this book, for the sheer quality of the first three essays, but holy crap was that last one a massive letdown in light of that!
This collection of four related essays explores the limits of "consent rhetoric" as an answer to rape culture and the way patriarchy/androcracy affects sexual relations between men and women (the author makes it very clear her analysis is limited to heterosexual dynamics, so I find it pointless to criticise her for the limited scope of her treatise since that was a deliberate choice on her part).
In the first three essays, On Consent, On Desire, and On Arousal, the author takes a look at research into, and discourse about, female (and male) sexuality, critiques it and emphasises just how culture-bound human sexuality, truly is – for everyone. I thoroughly appreciated just how measured, nuanced and determined she was in her critique, analysis, and overall arguments. I especially liked her questioning of the ideas of female "responsive desire" and polymorphous arousal put forward and/or popularised by Emily Nagoski and Meredith Chivers. I found myself agreeing with most of her points, quite frankly, and rated the first three essays with two 10s and a 9.
Then I read the fourth and last essay, On Vulnerability... and thoroughly disliked it. Just... what the hell? The author just took a tangent there and ran with the idea that self-knowledge is never truly attainable, whether about one's own sexual preferences or own's being in general. And that vulnerability that allows risk is not only an inherent part of sexual relations, but a positive aspect of them. Consent rhetoric, presumably, minimises this facet of human sexuality... Uhm. How about fuck that? a) Just because you can't know yourself perfectly, in bed or outside of it, doesn't mean there isn't value in trying or that you can't know anything about your preferences either. b) I don't find the risk of injury or harm in sex erotic in the fucking slightest, thank you very much. c) As a victim of CSA, I know for a fact I have experienced fantasies that were a direct result of this and know for a fact I have zero wish to indulge them, ever. d) As an autistic person, I find enormous value in predictability and routine, including when it comes to love-making. e) Presumably, if you've been with the same partner for a while, you can in fact expect certain things from them and minimise risk to a great degree. The vulnerability you experience there is limited, and only erotic insofar as it fosters shared intimacy (ideally). But that doesn't mean vulnerability is always positive in and of itself, like hello?! Female sexual preference is not infinitely mutable/variable. That is such patent bullshit. The way the author formulated it, it sounded like dudebros who argue you should try everything at least once to know if you really like it, including dick to lesbians... News flash: you don't have to try something to know it's not for you. Period. No ifs and buts about it. Also points taken away for drawing on fucking Freud and Virginie Despentes.
It was such an infuriating and weak-arse conclusion because it undermined a previously nuanced analysis of consent rhetoric that still acknowledged it as the best solution we currently have at our disposal. No alternatives were offered to consent rhetoric, which is a shame in and of itself but, in that last chapter, it almost seemed to undermine the idea of consent wholesale, which left a very bad taste in my mouth.
So... yeah, I would still recommend this book, for the sheer quality of the first three essays, but holy crap was that last one a massive letdown in light of that!
July 21, 2023
really interesting discussion on consent culture and how we’ve placed the responsibility on women to avoid bad sexual interactions. by shifting the narrative to emphasize the importance of confidence and being strong and outspoken, we ignore the nuances and place the onus on the individual— namely, women— to avoid violence and abuse. we’ve attempted to over simplify the conversation when we do not live in a simple world. the conversation around sex itself and how we frame it as desiring vs being receptive deserves to be questioned in how it contributes to stripping women of their personhood. very thought-provoking and informative regarding sexual politics.
April 6, 2021
Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel
Katherine Angel uses science studies and popular culture to examine female desire, consent and sexuality. It's a non-fiction piece split into four parts: On Consent, On Desire, On Arousal and On Vulnerability.
Her chapter 'On Consent' was probably the most fascinating for me. Her discussions surrounding the MeToo movement and how there was almost a culture of pressure that emerged from this. A pressure that arguably was forcing individuals to share their stories in order to display their "feminist powers". Her exploration of "consent culture" and how it places the focus and onus on the woman to explore what she wants, to say what she wants was really quite thought-provoking for me. She talked about the difficulties of understanding our own desires can make this problematic and how consent culture can lead us into a trap of only seeing women agreeing to sex rather than desiring sex. Her arguments surrounding consent culture were very nuanced and this is only a small glimpse, and she was by no means saying consent is not important.
I also really appreciated her explorations in the chapters 'On Desire' and 'On Arousal' surrounding the scientific studies and the problems with examining sex in a scientific context. Who is willing to come forward and talk about sex and their sexual desires truthfully? Who is willing to have sex for a science experiment? Who has been selected for these studies, is it just white cisegendered heterosexual men? And can sex be science or is it all just the erotic?
I thought her considerations surrounding physical arousal and connections with consent, desire, and sexuality were also really interesting and something that I have not seen discussed enough.
I will say the final chapter 'On Vulnerability' disappointed me a little and I felt that the whole book lacked a conclusion drawing it together. In addition to that the book read quite academically in places. I do think the book can still be accessible for people invested in the topic though.
My one major complaint is the referencing in this book which is just page numbers listed at the back with no footnote references so I don't know whilst reading when there is a reference. I'm not sure if this is a new trend to try and promote these books as more accessible and less academic, but really is just a poor stylistic choice for me. Especially when the book clearly has a specific target audience and listed as non-fiction.
On the subject of intersectionality, Angel acknowledges the piece is largely heteronormative and cis-gendered focused but hopes those in gay/queer relationships and trans individuals will find some resonance with the book. However, given her own experiences and identity she doesn't feel best placed to explore the more nuanced details of those relationships in this context. This isn't to say she ignores queerness for the rest of the book and she still gives some considerations to binary nature of sex studies, to attitudes towards sex and gender more broadly. She also considers how racial divisions feed into sex and sexuality and discusses elements like the oversexualisation of women of colour. Given the shortness and realms of the book I thought Angel offered insight to these subjects, but there almost certainly require full books of their own for further exploration.
Overall though, Katherine Angel has a really fascinating book with a lot of nuance and thought and I really appreciated the whole reading experience. It gave me a lot to think about.
Katherine Angel uses science studies and popular culture to examine female desire, consent and sexuality. It's a non-fiction piece split into four parts: On Consent, On Desire, On Arousal and On Vulnerability.
Her chapter 'On Consent' was probably the most fascinating for me. Her discussions surrounding the MeToo movement and how there was almost a culture of pressure that emerged from this. A pressure that arguably was forcing individuals to share their stories in order to display their "feminist powers". Her exploration of "consent culture" and how it places the focus and onus on the woman to explore what she wants, to say what she wants was really quite thought-provoking for me. She talked about the difficulties of understanding our own desires can make this problematic and how consent culture can lead us into a trap of only seeing women agreeing to sex rather than desiring sex. Her arguments surrounding consent culture were very nuanced and this is only a small glimpse, and she was by no means saying consent is not important.
I also really appreciated her explorations in the chapters 'On Desire' and 'On Arousal' surrounding the scientific studies and the problems with examining sex in a scientific context. Who is willing to come forward and talk about sex and their sexual desires truthfully? Who is willing to have sex for a science experiment? Who has been selected for these studies, is it just white cisegendered heterosexual men? And can sex be science or is it all just the erotic?
I thought her considerations surrounding physical arousal and connections with consent, desire, and sexuality were also really interesting and something that I have not seen discussed enough.
I will say the final chapter 'On Vulnerability' disappointed me a little and I felt that the whole book lacked a conclusion drawing it together. In addition to that the book read quite academically in places. I do think the book can still be accessible for people invested in the topic though.
My one major complaint is the referencing in this book which is just page numbers listed at the back with no footnote references so I don't know whilst reading when there is a reference. I'm not sure if this is a new trend to try and promote these books as more accessible and less academic, but really is just a poor stylistic choice for me. Especially when the book clearly has a specific target audience and listed as non-fiction.
On the subject of intersectionality, Angel acknowledges the piece is largely heteronormative and cis-gendered focused but hopes those in gay/queer relationships and trans individuals will find some resonance with the book. However, given her own experiences and identity she doesn't feel best placed to explore the more nuanced details of those relationships in this context. This isn't to say she ignores queerness for the rest of the book and she still gives some considerations to binary nature of sex studies, to attitudes towards sex and gender more broadly. She also considers how racial divisions feed into sex and sexuality and discusses elements like the oversexualisation of women of colour. Given the shortness and realms of the book I thought Angel offered insight to these subjects, but there almost certainly require full books of their own for further exploration.
Overall though, Katherine Angel has a really fascinating book with a lot of nuance and thought and I really appreciated the whole reading experience. It gave me a lot to think about.
June 2, 2024
devastating cautiously uplifting and indispensable
May 16, 2023
Gostei muito, mesmo que tenha entrado um bocado num reading slump (se calhar estava a precisar de ler ficção, ou então não me sentia confortável a ler o livro no metro com medo de comentários hipotéticos irritantes kkk).
Mt bons insights relativamente ao jogo de poder incorporado no sexo e no consentimento.
Uma resposta mt boa à ideia que vê o sexo como algo transacional de que só quando conhecemos o nosso corpo é que faz sentido sexo com um parceirx. Ideia certa, quando a comparamos com a vergonha imposta as mulheres relativamente ao sexo, mas pouco consistente por si só// “A maneira como entendemos o sexo é indissociável da maneira como entendemos o que é ser uma pessoa. Não podemos negar que somos criaturas flexíveis e sociais, ingerindo, incorporando e reformulando constantemente aquilo que assimilamos. A fantasia da autonomia total e do autoconhecimento total não é apenas uma fantasia, é um pesadelo”
Mt interessante!!
Mt bons insights relativamente ao jogo de poder incorporado no sexo e no consentimento.
Uma resposta mt boa à ideia que vê o sexo como algo transacional de que só quando conhecemos o nosso corpo é que faz sentido sexo com um parceirx. Ideia certa, quando a comparamos com a vergonha imposta as mulheres relativamente ao sexo, mas pouco consistente por si só// “A maneira como entendemos o sexo é indissociável da maneira como entendemos o que é ser uma pessoa. Não podemos negar que somos criaturas flexíveis e sociais, ingerindo, incorporando e reformulando constantemente aquilo que assimilamos. A fantasia da autonomia total e do autoconhecimento total não é apenas uma fantasia, é um pesadelo”
Mt interessante!!
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