Home › Books › Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
by
22/99
Critics' Rating Index
33/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
89/99
Volume of Reviews
62/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo 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 elegantly written, searching 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? Why is there not space for the unsure, the tentative, the maybe, the let's just see? 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—a shared collaboration into the unknown. In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, 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."
Reviews
"Still, Angel raises intriguing questions about commonly accepted assumptions, and she offers reassurance to female readers."
"This seems to allow for what Angel claims consent culture denies: that you might start out thinking you do or don't want to do something, but change your mind along the way."
"As long as some people have more money, options, and power than others do; as long as reproductive labor falls more heavily on one half of the population; as long as cruelty, shame, and guilt are part of the human experience; as long as other people remain mysterious to us—and as long as our own desires remain mysterious too—sex will not be good, not all the time."
"Part of what bothers Angel is that formalising such an idiosyncratic, unwieldy thing as desire is practically impossible."
"Resisting definitive and simplistic conclusions, Angel has been wide-reaching in her research (though potentially too restricted to cis heterosexuality), presenting us with an in-depth history of the study of sex."
"It's good to see Angel pay attention to heterosexual men, to 'welcome them to vulnerability.' They may be the group of people most in need of hearing what she has to say."
"Angel uses snippets of contemporary culture to illustrate her arguments ..."
"Her jargon-free prose and nuanced readings of popular culture and postmodern theory enlighten."
"To insist that women discover their sexual preferences independently and then communicate them clearly to prospective partners, or otherwise bear the blame if the experience turns out to be unsatisfactory or damaging, is just another, subtler version of the idea that it is a woman's responsibility to avoid being raped ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!