Abstract
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel is a public facing, scholarly book which takes the polarizing debates surrounding affirmative consent and puts them in conversation with equally polemical theories on the science of female sexuality. Sprinkled throughout are meditations on what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sex with dedicated engagement to intersectional analysis.
Angel begins by mapping feminist engagement with the concept of affirmative consent, from the 1970s No Means No Campaigns to the recent #me too movement. Initially, I thought that Angel was taking the culture of affirmative consent to task for its anti-eroticism, but her argument is far more nuanced, acknowledging that ‘good sex’ requires both vulnerability and consent.
Indeed, Angel critiques post-feminist arguments that shame women for not speaking up. She insists that contrary to the Sheryl Sandberg brand of empowerment, ‘individuals do not bear equal relationships of power to one another’ (30) and structural factors shaping sexual interactions across lines of gender, race, and class present real life challenges for individual self-assertion. Moreover, according to Angel, consensual sex does not necessarily equal ‘good’ sex. As she highlights, ‘a woman can still leave a sexual encounter justifiably feeling mistreated, while she feels safe in the knowledge that he “acquired” consent. He asked, she said yes’ (32). ‘Bad’ and/or unpleasurable sex ‘trades on unequal power dynamics between parties, and on racialized narratives of innocence and guilt’ (28). In other words, ‘bad’ sex is political.
Angel’s argument takes a valid but less original turn when she ponders literature on the ‘new science’ of female desire and arousal. Rather than focusing on how this work medicalizes sexual difficulties, as scholars like myself have done, she questions their implication for sexual consent. For instance, Dr Rosemary Basson’s ‘female sexual response cycle,’ which positions female sexual desire as inherently responsive rather than spontaneous, has been applauded for challenging androcentric assumptions about sexual desire. Based on her clinical experience in sexual medicine, Basson argues that women are more likely to be sexually motivated for non-sexual reasons, often reaching desire after the arousal that typically follows sexual initiation. However, as myself, and far more extensively, Alyson K Spurgas (2013, 2016, 2020) have done in the past, Angel cautions, this model risks essentializing social conditioning. As she writes, ‘We must be careful not to write, into our models of sex, phenomena that are in fact social- namely, an assumption that sex is inherently satisfying to men, along with a resignation to sex being, for women, merely a tradeoff for something else of value to them’ (67).
Angel also calls into question recent scientific theories that pretend to ‘cut through the truth’ about female sexual arousal using technologies such as vaginal plethysmographs. The supposedly feminist research by Meredith Chivers highlights a ‘non-concordance’ between what women say they are aroused by and what the plethysmograph reveals as producing vaginal lubrication. Again, much like the work of Spurgas (2013, 2020), Angel untangles the flawed methodologies inherent to this research, including the analytical conflation of lubrication with arousal. She critiques the ‘forensic, detective slant to these studies- the hunting down of female sexuality’ (91), claiming it is ‘animated by the need to find out if a woman really wanted something.’ Linking these theorizations with debates over consent, Angel contends, ‘We make this self-knowledge a condition of women’s safety in sex; of the possibility of pleasure and non-violence; of men’s protection from confused accusations- as well as, of good, assertive feminism’ (91).
Angels firmly concludes that the solution to rape culture and/or ‘bad’ sex is not as simple as individual women knowing their desires, consenting to sexual activity, and feeling genital arousal. She positions consent as ‘the least bad standard for sexual assault’ but is bold enough to imagine a tomorrow where the sexual landscape will be better for women.
When reading Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, I enjoyed seeing the kinds of issues that spark debate in everyday life written with such theoretical precision. I also enjoyed the vibrancy of Angel’s writing that blends scholarly works with sexual scenarios as raised in fiction, film, and porn. There is a sexual pulse to this book, oddly a rarity in critical sexual studies.
With that said, I have one significant note of caution for readers of Sexualities. While this book is made more lively by its public-facing style, unburdened by the conventions of heavy-duty academic citation practices, many of the references are found only in the 'Notes' section at the back of the book and not in the text itself or in a final reference list. In other words, you may have to dig for reference to your work and the work of your peers as I did. I felt there was particular overlap with the work of Spurgas (2013, 2016, 2020), who was never referenced in the text itself or in the reference list, but rather acknowledged in just one of the chapter 'Notes.'
