Can we ever know what we truly want? We think so!
Our book club member Sophie Whittle rounds up our February book club discussions of Katherine Angel's Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Guest post written by Sophie Whittle
Content warning: this post discusses sexual assault and rape. Links to support can be found here.
This month we discussed Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel, a collection of essays exploring female sexuality in a post-Me Too era. Angel presents four chapters, each an essay on a different topic: consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability. We all agreed that the book is a challenging read, with a lot of academic references (meaning you have to really be in an academic frame of mind to engage with it), so it’s not the most accessible read in terms of digesting information.
It’s often an uncomfortable read, and potentially triggering in parts, too, especially as there are a number of anecdotes which go into real life experiences. We used the words ‘conflicted’, ‘difficult’, ‘triggering’, ‘philosophical’, ‘validating’, ‘struggle’, and ‘academic’ to describe our experiences of reading the book. Personally, I feel the book does justice to several areas that are typically presented from a male gaze, but it is sometimes contradictory and lacking in conclusions and proposals for how we can act to create a more equitable society.
On changeability
The first chapter, On Consent, explores the complexities of sexual consent, and goes beyond the idea of consent as a simple resounding ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In a way, this chapter builds on what we discussed last month: we should be teaching younger generations how to build healthy sexual relationships with one another, rather than boiling consent down to an oversimplified ‘how to not assault someone’. In this chapter, Angel denounces ‘confidence culture’, problematising the misplaced pressure on women to avoid sexual assault, rather than on the perpetrators who commit sexual violence.
“How can we couple this acknowledgement that desire is complex, fluid and potentially ‘unknown’, with the practical need for a simple, accessible way to teach young people how to respect each others’ bodies?”
Alongside this discussion, the author proposes that women don’t really know what they want in sex, making the compelling point that understanding our sexual desires should not be a prerequisite for safety from violence. The author quite rightly identifies that desire is not always tangible, and it’s okay to not always know what you want, or to be surprised by what you like, but some might argue that a broad assumption that desire is entirely ‘unknown’ makes it harder (or even impossible) for women to set boundaries. As discussed in the final chapter of the book, there is a pleasure in vulnerability, taking risks, and stepping into the unknown, but should we be reducing women’s desire to an ‘unknowing’? Or could we instead develop a definition of changeability in sexual desire? We have many wonderful teachers in our book club so we also considered how consent can be taught to the next generation. How can we couple this acknowledgement that desire is complex, fluid and potentially ‘unknown’, with the practical need for a simple, accessible way to teach young people how to respect each others’ bodies?
Validating women’s desire
I found the On Desire chapter incredibly validating as Angel shifts the discussion of desire away from a male perspective. She argues that male entitlement to women’s bodies is celebrated, while women’s sexual desire shamed, and discusses how male desire is rarely connected to vulnerability but is rather framed as the pursuit of power and the need for control. For men, there is supposedly no ‘desire’ to pursue a mutually pleasurable experience. In the final chapter of the book, On Vulnerability, Angel emphasises that it is often the power tropes in pornography that can lead to men thinking they can always have access to women’s bodies and should never show any vulnerability. She brings in the work of queer theorist, Leo Bersani, who states that sex should not always be framed as power (even in a capitalist, patriarchal society), because this leads to the idea that we are always at someone else’s mercy during sex.
Back in chapter two, On Desire, Angel refers to a number of studies investigating sexual response and desire in men and women. The author critiques the thesis that women tend to experience responsive desire (feeling desire in response to sexual pleasure) while men tend to experience spontaneous desire (feeling desire that seems to come out of nowhere). She warns of the opportunities this narrative opens up for coercive and abusive behaviour and instead advocates for a more broadly contextual definition of ‘spontaneous’, rather than over simplistically considering women to be mere ‘reactors’ to the sexual advances of men. I feel this is a necessary framing, which emphasises the relational and emerging aspects of sexual desire without suggesting stark differences between men and women. What we felt was missing from this chapter, however, was an overall conclusion, a link between what this means for women’s desire and how we move towards equitable sex.
What now?
So, where do we go from here? One of the main positives of the book is that it is clear there is no rule book on what knowledge we should bring to the table in terms of sex. However, we felt the book would have benefitted from a more robust conclusion with practical suggestions for how we might work towards a future of safer, more inclusive, more pleasurable sex. There are a number of teachers in our book club who are already doing brilliant work to transform young people’s education, but what about those teachers who feel complete despair about the system and don’t know where to turn to next? How do we empower them?
What do we do in an age where we’re seeing men turning to alt-right, incel groups that justify and encourage violence against women? How do we incorporate all bodies and identities (this book was explicitly predominantly focused on cisgender heterosexual relationships)? Who should be doing this work? Can we ever be comfortable with not knowing what we desire? Is there a nuance to be had in terms of knowing what we desire, and knowing that it may be constantly changing? These are the questions we still have, and we would love to hear your thoughts!