Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

by Angel, Katherine

• ISBN13: 9781788739160
• ISBN10: 1788739167
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-03-02
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women—and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?

In this elegant, searching book—spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism—Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?

In today’s crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault’s teasing promise, in 1976, that “tomorrow sex will be good again.”

Author Biography

Katherine Angel is a writer and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell (2012) and Daddy Issues (2019). Her writing and research focus on sexuality, psychiatry, feminism, and gender in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Katherine has a PhD in the history of psychiatry and sexuality from the University of Cambridge's History and Philosophy of Science Department.