Angel writes witheringly of 'confidence feminists,' who object to female hesitance and uncertainty ... Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again is most exciting at the start and at the end, where Angel is boldest in her own ideas. 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 ... 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.
As consent culture has evolved, it has assumed some of the characteristics of Sheryl Sandberg-style confidence feminism, prizing sassy self-expression and individual empowerment over political transformation. The risk for Angel is that exhorting women to know and express their desires in the language of positive affirmation places the responsibility for preventing sexual violence on women’s conduct, rather than examining why violence occurs in the first place ... Part of what bothers Angel is that formalising such an idiosyncratic, unwieldy thing as desire is practically impossible. Desire doesn’t work like a legal contract: it’s difficult to always know what you want, a sense of intimacy changes in the heat of the moment, and a 'yes' given at one point may be retracted soon afterwards. The language of consent is asked to stand for so much it begins to strain under the weight of its significance ... she is reaching towards something else: a world where desire does not have to be known and fixed in advance to protect people from violence. That this is an unlikely prospect doesn’t make it any less attractive.
Angel uses snippets of contemporary culture to illustrate her arguments ... The problem with an over-emphasis on consent, she points out, is that it shifts the responsibility for societal imbalances of power onto individuals. Consent only works as a standard if one feels one has the right to refuse ... Armed now with the tools of consent and sex research, 'we are, yet again, in a moment in which it seems to be tomorrow … that sex will be good again,' writes Angel. 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.
... as Katherine Angel shows in her succinct and thought-provoking book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, consent itself is a murky concept that cannot be separated from existing power dynamics ... 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 ... she makes a clear and well-researched case.
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. United by a refusal to offer sweeping answers, these writers are honest about the clash between our political pronouncements and our revealed preferences ... No, tomorrow sex will not be good again. 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. We will never simply want the things we should.
... intriguing, philosophical ... Angel hasn’t really convinced me that consent culture does this. It doesn’t, for example, always insist that women map out their preferences beforehand. 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. 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.
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 is through her examination of sexology – from physical experiments to gender and pornography theory – that we develop a feeling that things are much more complicated than we might have assumed ... 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.
As this slim yet philosophically dense volume suggests, consent doesn't guarantee enjoyable sex—and may in fact inhibit it ... British academic Angel considers the relatively new concept that sexual interaction should rely on a man asking for, and a woman granting, permission for each sequential act involved ... Because she builds her case on her own observations and experiences more than scholarly research, some readers may be skeptical about her authority while others will find the logical arguments that she makes convincing. Some might also wish for even more personal stories to be woven into what is generally a cerebral and abstract book. Still, Angel raises intriguing questions about commonly accepted assumptions, and she offers reassurance to female readers. A provocative counterargument to recent feminist dogma.
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 ... 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.
