Consent and Other Culprits in Katherine Angel’s "Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"
In London last month, a thirty-three-year-old named Sarah Everard was murdered by a police officer on her way home. Everard had been careful to wear sneakers, call her boyfriend during the walk and stick to well-lit streets–measures women are told to take to protect themselves. In response, the Metropolitan police urged women in the area to stay inside and forcibly dispersed a peaceful park vigil of masked mourners. Women quickly condemned the Met’s actions; law enforcement paid to protect them were murdering, arresting and stripping them of agency.
The women who attended Everard’s vigil in March would find their injustice sensitively considered by Katherine Angel in her new book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Angel, a professor at Birkbeck University of London, focuses on the erosion and spotlighting of female agency by critiquing contemporary heterosexuality and consent culture. The result is a mosaic of feminist theory, sex studies, #MeToo reportage, and cultural references to books and films.
Angel’s book is organized in a Montaigne style, with four sections: “On Consent,” “On Desire,” “On Arousal” and “On Vulnerability.” In her first section, “On Consent,” Angel states, “The rhetoric of consent too often implies that desire is something that lies in wait, fully formed within us, ready for us to extract. Yet our desires emerge in interaction; we don’t always know what we want….Desire is uncertain and unfolding, and this is unsettling. It is unsettling because it opens up the possibility of women not knowing themselves fully, and of men capitalizing on that lack of certainty by coercing or bullying them….We must not insist on a sexual desire that is fixed and known in advance, in order to be safe. That would be to hold sexuality hostage to violence.”
Angel pushes against the assumed protections of consent culture and the assertive, post-feminist bent of “confidence culture” to make space in the middle, where she considers complexity. She remains on the side of vulnerability and the potential for equality–allowing women to feel vulnerable to the changeable pleasures of their bodies and desires.
Her breakdown of “confidence feminism” is a fascinating take on a currently beloved stance that individual outspokenness, self-knowledge and activism protect a woman from bad or unwanted sex and consequently, project her as impermeable. Angel argues that through this warped lens, a woman who is hurt or experiences mediocre sex has only herself to blame.
One of the most fascinating elements Angel weaves into her discussion of female arousal is sexuality’s reliance on context and landscape. It’s no surprise, she argues, that many women don’t report having as many sexual fantasies as men when the threat of violence, victim blaming and negative connotations of “slutiness” have been embedded in our culture for so long. With this in mind, Angel also examines the ways women’s sexual arousal has–only very recently–been probed for answers and found to be non-linear and dependent on numerous stimuli. In my reading, this analysis felt comforting. To allow women distinctions from men and prove desire arises in interaction helps illuminate female pleasure. But even with this data, Angel pulls back to consider the “cost-benefit analysis” sex scientists and therapists may be shepherding women into. She worries they’re perpetuating the belief that women have sex for “noble” causes, such as intimacy and fidelity, independent of bodily satsifactions. Her bone to pick is that we risk rationalizing female sexuality by seeing it as gifts to men who give something (intimacy, fidelity) in return, versus men’s sexuality, which is easily enmeshed in their personhood.
In her section “On Arousal,” Angel pokes holes in the data collected on women’s sexual responsiveness. She outlines a study in which women are shown stimulating images while their arousal, i.e., wetness, is measured by a plethysmograph. During each set of pornography, the women are always wet. However, when the scientists question them afterwards, they express negativity about certain segments they’ve watched. They were not turned on though the plethysmograph says otherwise. Angel calls this a red herring. We cannot measure a woman’s arousal through a tube in her vagina–wetness, she states, is an evolutionary response and genital arousal does not equal full arousal. We could make use of these sex studies if Angel weren’t correct in pointing out that they make women sound like unreliable narrators. A woman says she’s not turned on but someone else claims her body says differently. I think I’ve heard that one before.
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again lacks the concision and imaginative poeticism of Rebecca Solnit (whose influence on Angel is surely undeniable). And yet, that’s not an entirely fair criticism to level as Angel is an academic and her use of pop culture references, from Susanna Moore’s In the Cut to the HBO drama “I May Destroy You”, energize the dry language.
One of the surprises of her work is her willingness to include “bad sex” (the kind women are told is unavoidable) into this discussion while still giving credence to assault and its survivors. Angel believes the onus should not always be on a woman, an individual, to mitigate the threat of violence or the likelihood of mediocrity but on men and the system as well.
Speaking of men, in her last section, Angel whips into a voluble analysis of the pain men suffer, and subsequently make women suffer, in desiring sex: “The hostile tropes often found in pornography–Take this, bitch. You fucking love it, bitch–express, to be sure, an idea that women shouldn’t desire sex; that if she does love it, one can feel contempt for her. But they also work...to deny and displace vulnerability–the vulnerability men experience in feeling desire for a woman. It’s a response that wants to punish the feeling of desire for opening up a chasm in the facade of mastery...I don’t want; you want. Heterosexual men get to work out here the aggression they feel towards their own...vulnerability to desire. And this may be why desire, a troubling symbol of the loss of control, gets refigured so insistently as triumph over the woman; as denigration of her; as humiliation of her. These are the ideals of mastery and power with which men punish women, but also themselves.”
Funnily enough, I wanted more of this. Instead of littering sexuality with fine-print warnings for women, we need this kind of attention placed on men. The Londoners told to stay home after Sarah Everard’s death wondered why men, instead of women, weren’t told to stay inside. Perhaps they’d be well-occupied at home reading a book like this.
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Katherine Angel
147 pages. 2021
About Olivia Nathan
Olivia Nathan is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College where she writes about femininity, agency, and her life so far. She is a proud alumna of Barnard College and originally from Los Angeles.
