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Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

by Katherine Angel

Verso ·2021 ·144 pages
Academic Press
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
28/99
Bottom of the Pile

22/99

Critics' Rating Index

Maybe Someday

33/99

Readers' Rating Index

n/a

Scholars' Citation Index

89/99

Volume of Reviews

62/99

Volume of Reader Ratings

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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

"Her jargon-free prose and nuanced readings of popular culture and postmodern theory enlighten."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Near the Top

"In her view, neither offers the emancipatory potential that their proponents would have us believe, as both underplay the contextual and emergent nature of desire."

Mia Levitin· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Near the Top

"In the middle chapters, she walks us through a lot of other people's, mainly in the interest of throwing cold water on studies that purport to prove some objective truth about women and desire ..."

Alexandra Schwartz· The New Yorker Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Angel borrows her ironic title from the great theorist of power Michel Foucault, joining him in mocking the idea that political liberation will usher in a world of angst-free sex."

Helen Lewis· The Atlantic Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Part of what bothers Angel is that formalising such an idiosyncratic, unwieldy thing as desire is practically impossible."

Hettie O Brien· The Guardian Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Angel doesn't really offer us solutions but shows us some paths through the confusion, new ideals to strive for as we figure things out for ourselves."

Emily S Cooper· The Irish Times Read review ↗ Near the Top

"she makes a clear and well-researched case."

Stephanie Merritt· The Guardian Read review ↗ Near the Top

"As this slim yet philosophically dense volume suggests, consent doesn't guarantee enjoyable sex—and may in fact inhibit it ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Near the Top

"The Antioch policy allows for couples to negotiate throughout sex, deciding on the fly whether both of them are game to try this or that."

LAURA MILLER· Slate Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

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