KATHERINE ANGEL
In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (2021), Katherine Angel makes a clear-eyed intervention in the crossfire of post-#MeToo sexual politics, arguing for a sexual ethics that takes ambiguity as its starting point rather than an obstacle and refuses to see sex’s inherent contradictions as an alibi for violence. Angel completed her PhD in the history of psychiatry and sexuality at the University of Cambridge and is now a lecturer in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her other books include Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (2012) and Daddy Issues (2019).
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-LittlePortrait by Matthew Sperling
Guy Mackinnon-Little In sex and otherwise, do we know what we want?
Katherine Angel No is the short answer. Sometimes we do know what we want, but one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was that I feel disturbed by how attached public conversations around consent and sexual desire seem to be to the idea that not only do we know what we want, but in fact, we have to know what we want in order for sex to go without mishap. It’s just empirically not true that people always know what they want and a certain amount of not knowing what you want is part of sexuality and is part of sexual pleasure. More importantly, not just women, but women in particular, are put in an unbearable bind, where one part of the culture is saying you have to know what you want partly in order to be a good feminist – a good, confident, assertive women who can feel proud about the way in which she moves around in the world – and also so that there aren’t misunderstandings in sex that might lead to a bad experience or, God forbid, to you being in a courtroom. That attachment to the idea of knowing what you want isn’t just a misapprehension about what sex is like or what people are like, it’s also part of a culture of individual risk management where we have outsourced the problem of solving sexual violence to individual women themselves. If you think that part of being a good responsible sexual citizen is knowing what you want, that’s actually very useful, because if something goes wrong, then you can blame that person for not having adequately known what they want or expressed what they want. I don’t think that idea of self-knowledge serves women well at all.
GML The book illuminates some of the shortcomings or deficiencies of consent as the sole paradigm for talking about sexual harm. What do you find lacking in these conversations?
KA It’s tricky terrain because, of course, consent is the bare minimum for sex. We should all only be having sex with people who want to have sex with us. In one sense, what’s happened in the whole culture around consent has been really brilliant, and that work isn’t finished. We need to keep educating people about consent and it remains a really profound problem that a lot of men in particular are taught not to respect women’s own desires for sex. I’m a big fan of conversations around consent, and they need to be ongoing. But another one of the reasons I wrote the book was that I felt disturbed by how certain truisms were being hardened in the public rhetoric around consent, especially in the wake of #MeToo. In some of the very well-meaning conversations in the media around consent, there’s been this sense of women needing to give their consent to sex enthusiastically and assertively, because they’re good, confident, modern sexual subjects. I think that’s worrying because while on the surface we might think that sexual emancipation is about people being able to express their desire emphatically without fear of shame or consequence, that ideal ignores the fact that women are shamed and punished for their sexual desire. Their expressions of confidence and sexual desire that are encouraged by this rhetoric will come back to haunt them in courts of law, where women’s texts, words, behaviour or clothing are used as evidence of their brazen sexual desire and as a way to get men off the hook for assault charges. So already there’s a contradiction. It’s also difficult sometimes for women to be that confident sexual subject precisely because we live in a culture where it’s harder to express our desire, and perhaps even to feel it, given all the shaming and the violence that can come our way. It’s another example of a well-meaning attempt within consent rhetoric to improve sex for women, which actually ends up placing an undue burden on them. It ends up protecting not women, but men who might be accused of sexual assault.
GML Do you understand there to be a relationship between the logic of consent culture and carceral feminism, which advocates for increased policing and prosecution to deal with violence against women?
KA I definitely think they’re related. It is absolutely the case that the law and the criminal justice system let women down massively and efforts need to be made to improve the laws around sexual violence, but the law cannot do everything for us. For a lot of campaigns around sexual violence, the horizon has been stricter laws, getting more men in jail, and making the criminal justice process better for women. There may well be important arguments for that, especially when you think about individual women’s experiences of sexual assault. It may well be really important to feel that this hugely valorised system in society has for once come down on your side. I wouldn’t dismiss the value of that for victims of sexual assault, but the law and the criminal justice system are imperfect systems to put it very mildly. I am suspicious of placing too much faith in the law and the criminal justice system to resolve social problems, because those systems reflect social problems and biases and entrenched hierarchies. I’m not willing to say there’s no use for the criminal justice system, because I think it’s more complicated than that. But I certainly think that socially and conceptually, it’s not where our solutions lie. They don’t change anything at all fast enough or deep enough, and the problems are too deep for individual legal solutions to really play a part.
GML This intolerance of ambiguity also seems to inflect other contemporary framings of sexuality, especially in online cultures. I have in mind things like the “tradwife” meme where there’s a performative return to more conservative, submissive relationship structures and the clearly defined gender roles that implies. Do you see some of the tendencies you describe in the book as part of a broader drive towards social atomisation?
KA I want to take uncertainty really seriously. In sex, you don’t know whether you’re going to like what happens next, because nothing is repeatable. If we deny that we’re doomed, because it’s only in acknowledging that unfolding, emergent element, not just of sexuality but also of personhood, that we will have any chance of finding models of conversation and negotiation and exchange that will ever stand us in good stead. The tendency to say, “This is what I like” or “I’m a this” or “I’m a that” makes perfect strategic sense to me. We all do versions of that in life, because that’s how we minimise risk and avert stressful situations, but I think we have to see it for what it is: a way of coping with the risk of violence and a way of coping with the fear that is inevitably involved in sex. I want to be clear-sighted about what’s going on when we make categorical statements about who we are. But I also want to be compassionate and not judgmental about why we do that in all kinds of realms. Again, it’s about trying to see what has been contracted out to us as individuals to bear, which is here the inevitable fear of being social creatures who have to negotiate with one another and maybe not get what we want or be pressured into something that we’re not sure we want. Those are all understandable ways to manage and tolerate that, but how might we actually improve the situation so that we don’t have to rely on more fixed ways of dealing with risk and fear?
GML There’s a sense too in which you can understand how violence can itself be motivated by a frantic disavowal of that vulnerability.
KA Absolutely. The men who push women to sex are not well served by the gender norms that we live by either. That approach to sex precisely reflects an inflexible relationship to the relationship between oneself and the other. Everyone is the victim of a world where sex is a resource that some people have to give and that some people have to extract. Men are vulnerable too, and I’m not saying that to humiliate them; I’m saying that to welcome them to this domain that they’re not usually associated with. Men are by a great majority the perpetrators of sexual violence, so we don’t want to think of them as weak, perhaps there is a sense in which we need to think of them as strong and as liable to exploiting their strength. So it feels very risky to say men are vulnerable, too, but they are. For one thing, men are vulnerable to other men’s violence, sexual or otherwise, but more fundamentally, everyone is vulnerable in sex. Coming back to your question about the carceral and punishment, I am also wary of conversations that want to humiliate men. Humiliation gets us nowhere precisely because the reason for which people are often violent is because they feel humiliated. Men are more likely to commit domestic violence or sexual violence when they feel humiliated through loss of status or loss of markers of masculinity. Which isn’t to say that we should never point out when men are vulnerable because they might lash out in violence, but it is to say that we need to rethink these notions of vulnerability and work towards a world in which it’s not humiliating to be vulnerable.
GML You write about how a recognition of that vulnerability is not just a way to ameliorate harm or remedy a broken system, but something which should be valued in its own right for its potentially transformative effects. How do you craft the conditions in which that kind of acknowledgement of our common vulnerability is possible?
KA In concrete terms, I think we need to unlock some of those rigid gender norms, especially around masculinity: talking to boys and men about their own feelings about sex, about their own fears and vulnerabilities, which are there for all to see. If you’ve ever had any kind of intimate conversation with a man, you know that stuff is there. It’s not not happening. There’s this pose of mastery and control that is imprisoning for men, as well as really dangerous for women. Another thing I’m interested in is thinking about it through pleasure, because it’s undeniably the case that women are missing out on a lot of pleasure in the sexual culture that they inhabit. I also think that’s true for men. It’s telling that a lot of the really eloquent writing about this comes from within queer theory, where men have been grappling with this question for so long about what masculinity is if it’s not a heterosexual kind of control. That’s why I use people like Leo Bersani in the book. If we all think collectively about our powerlessness and our collective fear of sex and intimacy, that’s actually where the pleasure might come in. What I would really like to be possible for everybody is an ability to tolerate a lack of self-knowledge and an ability to explore in curiosity and excitement what might emerge from that, but I’ll add that we’re lucky if any of us get moments of that in life. It’s a really difficult thing to do not just because of the sexual culture that we live in, but because it’s scary to have a desire and want to see it realised. People sabotage their desires in endless ways. I don’t want my utopian imaginings to be read as a kind of dismissal of the very real fears and risks that we all have to manage every day, but wouldn’t it be great if things weren’t so narrow and we could experience vulnerability without such fear? ◉