Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent - Katherine Angel
Published in 2021 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
160 pages
ISBN: 978-1-788739160
Sex in the modern world can often seem a bit heavy to talk about and laden with mixed emotions. All but the most fortunate of us have tales of sexual experiences that have either gone wrong at the moment or have caused us to look back on them with regret. Despite the prevalence of apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, many of us in the Millenial and Gen Z generations struggle with pervasive anxiety and the paradox of choice, which leads us to be less likely to pursue and commit to romantic partnerships in the first place. Although we typically think of younger generations as more permissive in their sexual habits, recent studies have shown that young Americans are having less sex than previous generations, most likely due to factors such as increasing academic pressure, stress from having less expendable income, and technologically-driven social isolation over the past two decades.
Additionally, when it comes to topics such as consent and contraception, sex education, while generally becoming more accessible, is unevenly taught across the country. Funding for comprehensive sex education is comprised of an uneven patchwork of policies and decisions regarding sex education are left to individual states, counties, and even individual schools, which means that the quality of education can vary wildly from school to school. Additionally, Republican-led states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida have recently attempted to restrict access to sex education as a part of the ongoing culture wars against gender identity and teenage access to contraceptives. As such, teenagers today are less likely to report that they have received comprehensive sex education than they did in 1995.
While sex and sexuality continue to be policed, prohibited repressed, and managed through myriad ways across the globe, many women have found empowerment through speaking up about their experiences with sexual abuse. The #MeToo campaign in the late 2010s exposed a wide range of high-profile cases of sexual exploitation and abuse, particularly in Hollywood. These cases had a trickle effect around the world, as millions of women shed the stigma of shame and shared their stories of sexual abuse. As such, in many feminist circles, the act of naming and speaking the truth about one’s experiences became an act of resistance against the dominant structure of hetero-patriarchy.
When it comes to the modern discourse of sex and sexuality, we have come to rely on the concept of consent as the litmus test that sets the boundary of acceptable sex. Yet, while enthusiastic and informed consent is undoubtedly important to establish in any sexual encounter, should it be the sole arbiter of good sex? In her 2021 book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, Katherine Angel complicates our common reliance on consent as a guarantor of good sex.
Overview:
This slim volume examines the discourses around consent and sexuality over the past several decades and offers a critique of consent culture as a sufficient measure and means of sexual satisfaction. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again offers a counter to the common idea that the key to good and risk-free sex is to loudly declare our intentions and desires. In this view, it is the responsibility of women to be outspoken and confident in their desires. This individualist approach places the burden of full self-knowledge on women to know exactly what they want out of a sexual encounter and to vocalize it clearly, or else risk abuse. As Angel writes, “In recent years, two requirements have emerged for good sex: consent and self-knowledge. In the realm of sex, where the ideal, at least, of consent reigns supreme, women must speak out -- and they must speak out about what they want. They must, then, also know what it is that they want” (7).
This provokes a double-edged conundrum for consent: it demands that women possess full self-knowledge and vocalize their clearly defined desires, even though neither one can be fully realized. The current discourse on consent is limited because it relies on a liberal fantasy that ignores the dynamics of power and centers the individual’s self-knowledge over a collective shaping of desire. It places sole responsibility on the individual to know their innermost desire and to articulate it unambiguously, setting up a false binary that we either fully desire sex or do not at all.
Rather, Angel points out that most of us live in the grey area between the two, our desires often shifting depending on the context of who we’re with or how we are feeling at a particular moment. According to Angel, real life is much more messy and ambiguous than our common notions of consent allow. Since our relation to the Other often shapes our desire, we are not always sure of what we want until it appears before us. While consent sets up a minimal standard for legal recourse in the case of sexual assault, a flourishing and healthy sexual ethic beyond mere consent must account for the fluidity and uncertainty of desire and its relational construction. As she writes, “The fixation on yes and no doesn’t help us navigate these waters; it’s precisely the uncertain, the unclear space between yes and no that we need to learn to navigate. And it’s in this space that an exploratory process can unfold, one that can bring us intense pleasure; a process, as writer Dodie Bellamy puts it, between ‘two people in mutual need and at equal risk’” (111).
Through the book, Angel takes the reader through the history of how consent, desire, and arousal have been conceptualized in recent feminist and scientific thought, dialectically revealing their shortcomings and limits. For example, in Chapter Three, she aims at the overly reductionistic view that genital lubrication is a clear indication of sexual desire. In an infamous experiment by Canadian sexologist Meredith Chivers, men and women were shown multiple pornographic videos of straight couples, queer couples, and sex between animals. The experiment measured their genital response and showed that the men’s arousal corresponded with their stated preferences, while the women in the study were aroused during every video. Angel finds the connection between objective genital arousal and subjective sexual desire to be tenuous at best. The human body is complicated and full of automatic responses that do not always correspond with mental states. This study, however, reveals a gendered disparity around how we talk about sexual desire, as Angel writes,
Women – so writers, pick-up artists, and Christian Grey tell us – are disconnected from, or dishonest about, the truth that their bodies ‘scream’ out. In the framing of Viagra, in contrast, there was no possibility that a man’s feelings are ‘disconnected from’ the truth his body tells us. On the contrary, his subjective sense of interest in sex, despite his impotence, is taken as the truth. It is he, not his body, that speaks the truth – and we believe him. Personhood, and its relationship to the body, is different in men and women: men are authorities on themselves, while women are not. (84)
For Angel, neither full self-knowledge nor scientific research will empower or protect women. While consent is still important, the key to good sex should be to focus on the fluid subjective experiences of both parties as they remain open to the riskiness of vulnerability. Good sex should be exciting, joyful, and fulfilling, not simply something free from legal repercussions. Verbal consent, while undoubtedly an integral part of healthy communication before, during, and after sex, often misses that we are fickle beings who don’t always know what we want. Instead of ignoring it, this uncertainty must be reckoned with in constructing a comprehensive and fulfilling sexual ethic. Angel writes beautifully on this point, which is worth quoting at length:
If we want good sex – sex that is exciting, joyful, and non-coercive – we need to not be required to behave and speak as if we do always know. Too often, we let the fear of violence, and the need to manage its risk, determine our thinking so profoundly that we attempt to organize our sexuality around it – to define sexuality in such a way that it will supposedly protect us from violence. But women’s sexuality should not have to be immune to abuse in order for women not to be abused. 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…When it comes to sex, there is pleasure to be had in vulnerability. It can be what makes sex joyful – the giddy rewards of stepping haltingly into the water, the gasp on contact, the relief in the finding of ecstasy. We need to be vulnerable – to take risks, to be open to the unknown – if we are to experience joy and transformation. That’s the bind: pleasure involves risk, and that can never be foreclosed or avoided. It is not by hardening ourselves against vulnerability that we – any of us – will find sexual fulfillment. It is in acknowledging, and opening ourselves to, our universal vulnerability. (92, 99)
Commendations:
Angel makes many salient points within this small volume. She brilliantly illuminates the messiness of sex and sexuality, as it is laden with webs of symbolic meaning that must be navigated. She rightly critiques the requirement for self-knowledge as a buttress against bad sex, as she argues that we shouldn’t have to always know what we want to be safe from abuse. We need to be attentive to how sexual desire is often messy, filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, and cannot fit into a simple binary of “yes/no.” Her vision of sex places the responsibility on each of us to be caring, respectful, curious, and vulnerable in our sexual lives, holding space for uncertainty and the changing nature of desire. I found this to be incredibly compelling and hopeful as a model for building a healthy sexual ethic beyond mere consent.
Even at just over 100 pages, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again is densely packed with philosophical and sociological insights while also being attentive to the dynamic contours of sexual desire. Through a dialectic back-and-forth between competing frameworks of sexual ethics over the past several decades, Angel astutely dismantles the reductionistic narratives that have shaped our current discourses on sex. Whether through some strands of feminist thought or sexology, it is all too easy to reduce complicated and relational phenomena into a concrete and simplified story. Her critique of our overreliance on consent revealed how much the language of the law has pervaded our discourses and understandings of sex. As such, her critiques of standard, orthodox conceptions of sexual desire from a Left perspective were exhilarating to read and serve as a useful counter against critiques that come from an anti-feminist, right-wing perspective.
It was also incredibly refreshing to see Angel correctly summarize Foucault’s view of the historically constructed discourses of sexuality and his critique of sex as emancipatory. The common misreading of this aspect of Foucault’s thought is a personal pet peeve of mine, so let me explain why. When I was in graduate school at Harvard, I remember several of my peers very confidently asserting that Foucault posited an emancipatory view of sex in The History of Sexuality. I remember this group of classical liberals and faux-progressives assured us that Foucault was an open advocate of free sex as a path toward political and social emancipation and that the prudish and repressive Victorians were a counter-example of how contemporary discourses of sex have become so much more open and less taboo since those days of ignorance.
I remember thinking to myself, “Did they even do the reading, or are they simply talking out of their ingrained, yet unearned sense of self-assuredness in their own brilliance” (as I learned, many Ivy League students are prone to do). I remember gently speaking up in protest, telling another small group that had turned to me in the hallway that Foucault believed the exact opposite. As Angel succinctly writes,
Foucault, in contrast, was sceptical of the way ‘we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future,’ and argued that the stuffy Victorians were in fact intensely verbose about sex, even if that verbosity took the form of outlining pathologies, abnormalities and aberration. Not only did he revise the classic take on the Victorians as prudish, repressed, and wedded to silence; he also opposed the truisms that speaking out about sex amounts to liberation, and that silence amounts to repression. ‘We must not think’, he wrote, ‘that by saying yes to sex one says no to power.’ (8-9).
While I am critical of Foucault on other issues, I do agree with his skepticism toward open sex as a path toward an emancipatory and liberated future. It was so refreshing to read someone correctly utilizing Foucault’s argument about sex and sexuality in their work, and it worked to soothe my anxiety about her theoretical framework from the outset. While my overly confident peers at Harvard might have completely missed the mark, reading through Angel’s description of Foucault was a nice validation of my admittedly more rigorous undergraduate training at Appalachian State (also, shout out to Dr. Behrent for patiently teaching us the nuances and contours of Foucaldian thought).
Critique:
On the other hand, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again suffers from a few drawbacks. First, even though the book is short in length, it is densely packed and can be overly obtuse in its language. While there are plenty of insightful ideas here, they are often overshadowed by Angel recounting other people’s work and restating the same argument time and time again. The book is also organized into four chapters that are only loosely tied together, reading more like a series of extended literature reviews rather than a cohesive monograph of original analysis. This makes for a rather repetitive read at times, and Angel’s slightly opaque and dense writing style can alienate the casual reader.
While Angel admits as much at the outset, her account focuses exclusively on heterosexual relationships. She acknowledges that there are vibrant and necessary discourses on consent and sexual desire from a queer framework, but that, since she does not identify as LGBTQ+, she does not feel comfortable or qualified to speak about it. On one hand, I think that it is a sign of humility to know one’s limited situated knowledge, acknowledge it, and then proceed accordingly. On the other hand, to simply ignore the vast amount of literature that has been written about queer desire seems to be a huge missed opportunity. I feel like her argument could have been much more robust and nuanced with the inclusion of these scholars and ideas, as well as how the historical construction of sexual desire and consent are also invariably tangled up in the construction of racialized bodies. Overall, while it is not a death knell to her brief and narrowly focused book, it does make her argument for a universal sexual ethic based on vulnerability seem incomplete and underdeveloped.
Conclusion:
Overall, Tomorrow Sex Will be Good Again is a quick and insightful critique of our overreliance on consent as the sole guarantor of good sex. While overly dense in places and short on answers, Angel’s slim book serves as a necessary and thoughtful meditation on female desire and sexuality. Angel subtly reveals the cracks within mainstream feminist discourses on consent and scientific theories of arousal as she makes a compelling case for abandoning individualistic and reductionistic accounts of sexual desire in favor of the messiness of relationally shaped eroticism. Sex is undoubtedly complicated, and while consent is still an integral part of it, we must be willing to hold space for the risk of uncertainty and vulnerability within our sexual ethics if we hope to have sex that is joyful, fulfilling, and truly liberating.