Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

Audiobook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
Women are in a bind. They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Sex researchers tell us that women don't know what they want. And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want—and how can they be expected to?
In this book, Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science; MeToo-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism; and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood? In contrast to the endless exhortation to know what we want, Angel proposes that sex can be a conversation, requiring insight, interaction, and mutual vulnerability.
Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault's sardonic promise, in 1976, that "tomorrow sex will be good again."
Contains mature themes.
  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 19, 2020
      Angel (Daddy Issues), a lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London, delivers four thought-provoking essays on female sexuality in contemporary culture. Though consent is “crucial, and the bare minimum” for sexual encounters, Angel writes, the insistence that women vocalize their desires can work against them in cases of rape or sexual assault and fails to recognize that people don’t always know what they want. Reviewing recent sex research, she contends that studies categorizing women’s desire as mostly responding to men’s “urgent biological drive,” rather than arising spontaneously, “risk turning sexual desire into something towards which women must strive—even when they don’t want to,” and casts doubt on theories about women’s arousal that are based on vaginal lubrication in artificial laboratory conditions. “We should prioritize what women say, in all its complexity,” Angel argues, “rather than fetishizing what their bodies do in the name of a spurious scientism.” By fixating on “yes” and “no,” “consent culture” inhibits the potential for mutual exploration, curiosity, uncertainty, and growth, Angel concludes. Her jargon-free prose and nuanced readings of popular culture and postmodern theory enlighten. Readers will value this lively and incisive inquiry into the sexual dynamics of the #MeToo era.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

Languages

  • English

Loading