“Might we be looking in the wrong place when we pin our emancipatory hopes on [women's] clear expression of our desire?”
In conversation with Katherine Angel, author of "Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again"
Katherine Angel wants to change how we talk about sex, consent, and desire.
Her new book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, is provocative, challenging, and a fascinating read, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement and a push for a “yes means yes” model of consent. I’m someone who has written pretty exhaustively about the need for for a model of enthusiastic sexual consent (as opposed to a “no means no” model of women shouldering the obligation of sexual refusal), but Katherine’s latest pokes important holes in what is perhaps the over-simplicity of arguing that women’s desires must (or even can) always be clear. In an email Q&A, we talked about why feminists can be ok with women not verbalizing (or even knowing) the full scope of their own desires, the problem with treating “bad sex” as a simple fact of women’s lives, and why “What do women want?” is the wrong question to ask.
Jill: Where did the idea for this book come from? Why this book, and why now?
Katherine: I'd been thinking (and writing) for a long time about how endlessly women have to negotiate their sexual desires with a keen awareness of the risk of sexual violence. But then conversations that emerged during and after the #MeToo movement of 2017-2018 really began to perplex me. I was noticing, in amongst the vital reassertions of the importance of consent around this time, a tendency for some of this rhetoric to place the burden on women to fulfill a certain ideal - of an assertive, expressive sexuality - in order to keep themselves safe. That really worried me, and I wanted to write a book that would explore the messy space between the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ - that would explore my discomfort with the emphasis on being assertive and clear about our sexual desire. Saying yes, and saying no, can be really challenging for women, because we live in a sexual culture that demands our sexual enthusiasm and punishes it simultaneously. I wanted to think about how we can start from the acknowledgement of this, rather than treat this complexity as a threat to our thinking about sex and ethics.
We've seen the #MeToo movement open up a conversation about sexual violence. Key to #MeToo is the idea that speaking out about sexual violence and harassment is powerful. Where are the limits of that analysis?
#MeToo is powerful; seeing and hearing women speak out about the violence they have endured is powerful, and can help women feel less alone. And no woman should be made to feel shame about telling her story. My concern about #MeToo is that it enables us, as societies and cultures, to *feel* we are taking sexual violence really seriously. But rates of sexual violence stay remarkably steady over time, and, as we repeatedly see, some women's stories garner more attention than others: in the UK, Sarah Everard's terrible death has received a lot of media attention, while the murder of Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, two women of colour, last summer did not lead to such scrutiny. What’s more, I'm concerned about the burden placed, yet again, on women to speak out: whether against past wrongs, or in order to protect themselves against future wrongs (as in the injunctions to ‘know what you want and say what you want’ that we so often see). Are we contracting out to women, again, the responsibility for addressing the ills of the culture? What would happen if women’s speech were not required in order for a better sexual culture?
The idea of a “yes means yes” model of consent has been ascendant in feminist movements for decades, and has made its way into the mainstream -- I've written about it, and it’s an idea I believe in. But you argue pretty convincingly that, while affirmative sexual consent is obviously very important, the way we talk about consent is not always aligned with the reality of sex and pleasure and human relationships, nor with the many layers of women’s experiences. Tell me more about that argument, which you summarize as, “Might we be looking in the wrong place when we pin our emancipatory hopes on the clear expression of our desire?”
I think that affirmative consent is broadly the right way forward, and I think it’s vital that women’s sexual desires and enthusiasm should not be stigmatised. Women should be able to want sex, and articulate their desires, without fear of attack, shaming, or reprisal! However, some of the rhetoric around consent - that women in fact have a *responsibility* to articulate their desire clearly - ignores the realities of women’s lives: that these very expressions of desire get used against women, by pushy men, or by arguments in rape trials that invoke women’s desire as evidence against them. So why are we placing so much emphasis on women’s right to say yes, to the extent that women are actually urged to clearly know and voice their desire? The fact is that, for many women, the space between yes and no is much more confusing and unclear. Women may sometimes say no even if they are interested in sex, precisely because they are afraid of being judged and shamed, of not being seen as worthy of protection and care. What’s more, this is also just a fact about human sexual desire - that it can emerge; it's not always clear if we want sex or not. But these phenomena get used against women by pushy men or pick-up-artists to pressurise or coerce women, which obviously is wrong. In addition, that women live in a world where their sexual desire gets used against them, and that many women are dealing with the long effects of sexual assault, can make it difficult for them to discover their desire in the first place. All this is very complex, which may be why the consent and sex ed rhetoric wants to insist that women can and should say yes emphatically, or express their sexual desire emphatically - as a way of protecting women from the risks that this murky terrain can open up. But this involves denying how sexuality works - and if we insist on a way of being in sex that doesn't match up to women's realities, then I think ultimately this only comes back round to hurt women. We have to start from reality!
You write about “bad sex” as a political issue -- not a quasi-assault to be conflated with #MeToo, and not a simple inevitability for women, but as something that should be rigorously examined. When you examine it, what stands out?
‘Bad sex’ often gets invoked as the inevitable ups-and-downs of sexual life, particularly for young people. I think that position is really dangerous, because it naturalises something that is taught - namely, that men have a right to women’s bodies, and to their own satisfaction regardless of the other person’s experience, and that women are inevitably going to experience painful, disappointing sex. None of this is inevitable. What we learn about what we can expect from sex powerfully shapes sex itself; if women are not taught, from a young age, that pleasure is their right - and that any uncertainty they may have should not be used to bully them into sex - then all hope is lost. And if men are not taught from a young age that their desire doesn’t take precedence over a sexual partner’s feelings, changing desires, different sensations, we are doomed too. We need to teach people to be curious about and concerned with other people’s pleasure and enjoyment in sex. And all kinds of power imbalances shape bad sex: being financially dependent on a coercive partner, for instance, or having someone exploit their knowledge of your immigration status, or your precarious and criminalised work, as in the case of sex workers. It’s crucial that we have laws that determine what counts as sexual assault; but it’s also crucial that we create societies which do not render people vulnerable to sometimes agreeing to sex that is unpleasant, humiliating, painful, frightening.
Many, many words have been written about what women want. You essentially argue that it’s awfully hard for women ourselves to know what we want when the world makes impossible and contradictory demands of us -- that even scientific studies of female desire are of course only measuring how that desire has been shaped by the world we live in, not necessarily something inherent and immovable. Under these conditions, we’re just not going to be able to answer the question "what does desire really look like?" for either women or men. So: What better questions should we be asking?
It's so tempting, and understandable, to want to find the answer to that question - of what women (or indeed men) want. But I think it’s a meaningless question. There just is no meaningful general statement about sexual desire in this way. We really only have individuals, living in certain conditions. So we can only ask individuals what they want; what they think they might desire, or be excited by, and help them to discover that, with safety and respect. It might be better, also, to ask: ‘what makes it possible for you to explore what you want?’ Because the conditions in which sex operates - cultural, economic, and social conditions - are a huge part of sex. We are just not purely biological creatures when it comes to sex; we cannot extract sexuality from culture and society, much as we might want to. So, in addition to being curious about individuals’ idiosyncratic sexualities - which will be as informed by their pleasures as their fears - we need to pay consistent attention to the conditions in which sex unfolds. Whose sexual pleasure is prioritised? Whose safety is prioritised? What messages about pleasure are being communicated to men and women? (And I think that the messages communicated to men are not much better - they are just differently problematic!) In what ways do we enable sexual flourishing, in relation to economic precarity, racial justice, conditions of work, availability of healthcare and sex education, and so on?
What do we (and researchers) get wrong when we talk about female sexual arousal?
It’s very pervasive to assume that the body tells us some kind of essential truth about sexuality - that our body’s arousal is a measure of enthusiasm or desire ('she was so wet!'). That's wrong, and many sex researchers acknowledge this - that physiological arousal does not tell us categorically about someone's desire, or provide consent (physiological arousal does not equate to willingness or enthusiasm; arousal can occur in assault). However, this itself is often used to argue that women are out of touch with their ‘real’ sexuality - which is an appealing view, I think, since we know that the culture women live in often does alienate them from their own pleasure. But can we separate out a real, essential sexuality from the culture in which sexuality unfolds? I don't think so. Sexuality is always about both the body and about everything else too: our fantasies, our memories, our fears, and all the ideas about sex that we swim in, all the time. So, the body’s arousal does not tell us everything about someone's feelings of excitement or desire. But nor should we then make the leap to insisting that it is individuals themselves who know their own desire - because, as I’ve said, we don't always know our own desire. And nor should we! It's inevitable and understandable that we don't always know our desires; not just because a misogynistic world makes it fraught for us to discover and explore it, but because there is something in the nature of desire itself (for everyone!) that is not readily accessible, and that relies on interaction with others. That is no bad thing - but it shouldn’t be weaponised against us.
You write about the inherent vulnerability of sex, and how men often respond to their own vulnerability with rage (or how for some men, desire is intertwined with contempt). What does that mean for a "yes means yes" model of enthusiastic consent? What does it mean for our concept of consent broadly, and for the experience of women who have sex with men? Are men the real problem here?
Women are disproportionately vulnerable to male violence - and women every day are reminded of that vulnerability, often in ways that seek to curtail their movement, or hold them responsible for trouble that they may encounter. The question is how to acknowledge women’s vulnerability without holding them hostage to it. Part of the answer to that, I think, is to acknowledge vulnerability as a foundational human experience - and to underline that men are vulnerable too. Men are vulnerable in sex, because everyone can be physically hurt, and everyone can experience sex as a realm of fear, risk, and potential humiliation. The stakes are very high for men in sex, I think, because of the way heterosexuality is inculcated through an insistence on sexual conquest. Men have to work very hard to keep the risk of failure at bay, in ways that I think must be exhausting, and rage-inducing. In the book I am attempting to widen the tent of vulnerability, to emphasise that it is a shared experience. If men didn’t have to defend themselves so intently against vulnerability, they might experience greater pleasure - and they might not feel so enraged by having their vulnerability exposed. And if women could experience their vulnerability without having that vulnerability turned against them - used as an entry-point for domination over them - then we too could expand into greater joy. None of this is easy; it would require some deep change in the way we think about bodies, about pleasure, about boundaries, and about the act of sex itself. It’s an utterly understandable response, to the fact of sexual violence, for women to need to assert their boundaries forcefully, and to keep their vulnerability at bay. But my ardent hope is for a world which didn’t require women to close off their vulnerability out of the very legitimate fear of violence.
You end the book with such an important insight: “Working out what we want is a life’s work, and it has to be done over and over and over. The joy may lie in it never being done.” This is (thankfully) not a how-to book. But what do you keep in mind, and what questions do you ask yourself, as you do this life-long work?
Such a good question! It truly is life-long work, and I think what's key is remembering that things change - that how one feels one day is not how one feels on another day. Sexuality is so responsive to our lives and the contexts we're living in. Our sexuality is both intensely individual, and cultural. We don't live in a vacuum. And so trying to remain open and agnostic in our sexual lives can be really helpful I think; trying not to harden ourselves or define ourselves into rigidity. Thinking about how the culture affects our individual sexuality can be helpful, as can thinking about how our histories, biographies, and private inner worlds affect it too. And focusing on pleasure, on sensation, on what brings us joy! Even the tiny things. Despite the constant ads encouraging us to buy scented candles or whatever, I think women’s pleasure - and a deep connection with our capacities for joy - is routinely admonished out of us. We can try to resist that, in ways both big and small, and without tipping over into injunctions that we must all be loudly assertive about sex. We have the right to experience pleasure! Whether it's with sex or food or whatever. I try to remember this. I don’t always succeed!
Katherine’s book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, is out now.
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xx Jill