Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Thought-provoking
Thought-provoking book exploring female sexuality - as a heterosexual cis-male reader it made me reflect on my own experiences a lot.