Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

Katherine Angel

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781788739160
• eBook ISBN: 9781788739184
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?

In this elegant, searching book-spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism-Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?

In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'

1

On Consent

Sometime in the early 2010s, the porn actor James Deen made a film with a fan whom he called Girl X. He would do this now and then; fans would write to him, wanting to have sex with him, or he would put out a call to ‘Do a Scene with James Deen’, and the results would go up on his website. In an interview in April 2017, only a few months before the media would be overwhelmed with discussions of assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein and others – and only two years after Deen himself was accused of (but not charged with) multiple assaults – he said:

I have a ‘Do a Scene with James Deen’ contest, where women can submit an application, and then, after a very long talk and months of me saying, you know, ‘Everyone’s going to find out, it’s going to affect your future’, and basically trying to talk them out of it kind of, then we shoot a scene.

Little of the Girl X video in fact involves sex. It is mostly a long, flirtatious, fraught conversation, which circles repeatedly back to whether or not they are going to do this: have sex, film it, and put it online. Girl X hesitates; she moves between playfulness and retreat; she is game, then agonized; she lurches ahead, then stalls. She is torn, reflective and self-questioning. She thinks her dilemmas out loud, and Deen tries to follow along.

She presumably wants to ‘do a scene with James Deen’, but when he opens the door to her, she appears to lose some nerve. She walks into the apartment, dressed in PVC leggings, a buttoned-up silk cream blouse with black detail – our gaze is behind the camera, with Deen, filming her – and paces around in agitation, laughing a high-pitched, nervous laugh, saying Oh my God, oh my God. We catch glimpses of the space – it’s generically anonymous: sparkling surfaces, lots of pale wood – and then glimpses of him as he puts the camera down: distressed jeans, big white trainers. He occasionally brings the camera up to her face; she turns away. He teases her – you’re a college girl, you’re smart and shit – as they move back and forth in the kitchen, with its gleaming central island, in the corridor with its bright white dado rails and deep red walls. He asks what she wants to be called; she doesn’t answer. Well, he says, I’m going to call you Girl X, until you decide what your name is.

She’s skittish, nervous – I can’t even look at you – moving away, moving in. She sits down at a shiny chrome table, on a white bench. They discuss a contract; the footage fades out – we are not privy to the details. It fades back in, and she takes a selfie. She’s about to sign, but then she stops and says, What am I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life? She can back out at any stage, he says; they can rip the contract up. More fading in and out; we see her sign. We can figure out a stage name later, he says, unless you just want to be Girl X? I don’t know, she says in a reluctant drawl, I have no idea, I’ve never done this.

Girl X’s nervousness works to flatter Deen – it’s a sign of her awe at meeting this huge, improbable star. But it also works to preempt any repercussions she may be fearing; to undermine what might be taken by Deen, by others, as exhibitionism – as asking, perhaps, for trouble. She is readying herself for exposure.

Girl X is doing something geared towards the hungry gaze of others, something she imagines will excite and satisfy a spectator – including, perhaps, the one inside herself, the one who wants to watch herself having sex with Deen. But when she asks What am I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life? I feel her imagining, too, the gaze of another kind of spectator, a sterner one, a censorious one. Both these spectators – the one egging her on, and the one admonishing her – are most likely internalized within Girl X, as they are within many women: the spectator we are primed to satisfy, and the spectator whose disapproval and reprisal we are afraid to provoke. Girl X is reckoning with the spectators inside her head, and with the power of spectacle itself.

She is the impulsive seeker after pleasure; she is also alienated, self-conscious, and inhibited. She veers between being unabashed, and then wildly aware of the power imbalance between her and Deen. The stakes for her are high, and they make the decision to pursue her own desires immensely difficult to see through. These dissociative flickers, these changes of gear and register – they come precisely from the power of punitive ideas about women’s sexuality and personhood. Girl X is grappling with questions that many women may ask themselves, that I have certainly asked myself, the first time they sleep with a man or the moment they reveal their desire: Will I be in danger? In revealing myself, have I foregone privacy and dignity? Will I be pursued, haunted by my own actions? Will I be able to resist the unwanted desires of others? Has saying yes precluded my ability to say no?

When Girl X expresses her ambivalence – I want to have sex with you, she says, but I don’t know if I want to show the world – he is receptive: you don’t want to be slut-shamed, he says. She carries on: Like, she says, adopting a blokey voice, ‘I saw you fuck him, why don’t you fuck me?’ This is not an entirely paranoid thought. One of the accused in the 2018 ‘rugby rape trial’ in Northern Ireland, on entering the room after two other men performed sex acts on the plaintiff, asked her to have sex with him, and when she said no, he allegedly replied: ‘You fucked the others, why can’t you fuck me?’ A woman’s (presumed) desire – even just once, for one man – makes her vulnerable. Her desire disqualifies her from protection, and from justice. Once a woman is thought to have said yes to something, she can say no to nothing.

In the film, there are many moments of laughter, joy, and pleasure; it can be quite charming to watch. There’s humour, and playfulness, and teasing. Girl X and Deen seem genuinely to like each other; there’s chemistry. And she punctures him; no longer awed, she is sarcastic, cutting. But there is awkwardness, too, and there are mistimed movements; her ambivalence, his uncertainty as to whether to push or hold back.

Eventually, they overcome the hurdles. They cross the threshold, they have sex. They are sometimes noisy, but there are silent stretches too, and pauses in the action; sometimes she sighs; they laugh; they chat. In as far as it’s ever possible to know from the outside – and it’s not – it looks pretty good, fun, joyous. They sit in silence for a while, smiling, then agree to go for a cigarette on the balcony. You want me to turn the camera off?, he asks. Yes, she says. OK, he says. She starts getting dressed. The camera goes off, he says. The camera goes off, she says. He walks towards the camera, towards us, the viewers. The camera, he says, will go off.

We’ll probably never know what happened after this; what happened in the breaks between the filmed sections; what was edited out, what conversations we didn’t overhear, what sex we didn’t see. We’ll probably never know what Girl X made of the allegations against Deen, or whether there were things that day that made her uncomfortable, that caused her sorrow or anger. I don’t know Girl X’s story. But in the film, I see the painful – and familiar – experience of being pulled in different directions; of having to balance desire with risk; of having to pay attention to so much in the pursuit of pleasure. Women know that their sexual desire can remove protection from them and can be invoked as proof that violence wasn’t, in fact, violence (she wanted it). Girl X shows us, then, that it is not only desire’s expression, but its very existence, that is either enabled or inhibited by the conditions in which it is met. How can we know what we want, when knowing what we want is both something demanded of us and a source of punishment? No wonder Girl X has mixed feelings, is paralysed by uncertainty. James Deen understands none of the melancholic weight of sex for Girl X – he doesn’t have to. Girl X, however, has grown up with impossible demands. She is living out the double bind in which women exist: that saying no may be difficult, but so too is saying yes.

In 2017, the dam broke on allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Subsequently, the #MeToo hashtag – a slogan originated by Tarana Burke in 2006 to draw attention to sexual violence against young women of colour – spread on social media, galvanizing women to tell their stories of sexual assault. Widespread media coverage ensued in the following months, largely about abuses of power in the workplace. And in this environment, the act of speaking out about one’s experiences was taken as a self-evident and necessary good.

I was glad of the coverage, and also dreaded it, having at times to rush to turn off the news and its relentless parade of grim stories. During #MeToo’s height, it sometimes felt that we women were required to tell our stories. The accumulation of stories online – on Facebook, on Twitter – as well as in person, created a sense of pressure, of expectation. When will you tell yours? It was hard not to notice the collective appetite for these stories, an appetite couched in the language of concern and outrage, one that fit neatly with the belief that speaking the truth is a foundational, axiomatic value for feminism. #MeToo not only valourized women’s speech, but risked making it a duty too, a mandatory display of one’s feminist powers of self-realisation, one’s determination to refuse shame, and one’s strength in speaking back to indignity. It also gratified a salacious hunger for stories of women’s abuse and humiliation – though it did so selectively.

When do we ask women to speak, and why? Who does this speaking serve? Who is asked to speak in the first place – and whose voices are listened to? Though any woman’s allegation of sexual violence tends to encounter powerful resistance, wealthy white women’s accounts were privileged during #MeToo over those, for example, of young black women whose families had sought justice from musician and sexual abuser R Kelly for decades. Studies show that black women reporting crimes of sexual violence are less likely to be believed than their white counterparts (with black girls seen as more adult-like and sexually knowing than their white peers), and that rape convictions relating to white victims lead to more serious outcomes than those relating to black women. Not all speech is equal.

And yet it is not only in retrospect that women are urged to speak – it is also prospectively, into the future, protectively: clear speech is a necessary ingredient for preventing future wrongs, not just addressing past ones. In recent years, two requirements have emerged for good sex: consent and self-knowledge. In the realm of sex, where the ideal, at least, of consent reigns supreme, women must speak out – and they must speak out about what they want. They must, then, also know what it is that they want.

In what I’ll call consent culture – the widespread rhetoric claiming that consent is the locus for transforming the ills of our sexual culture – women’s speech about their desire is both demanded and idealized, touted as a marker of progressive politics. ‘Know what you want and learn what your partner wants,’ urged a New York Times article in July 2018, promising that ‘good sex happens where those two agendas meet.’ ‘Have the conversation,’ a sex educator exhorted on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The New Age of Consent’ in September of that same year – meaning the direct, honest conversation about sex: whether you want it, and if so, exactly what you want. Have it before you are in the bedroom, we were told; have it in the bar, have it in the cab home – any awkwardness will be worth it later. ‘Enthusiastic consent’, wrote Gigi Engle in Teen Vogue, ‘is necessary for both parties to enjoy the experience’ – a common stance that scholar Joseph J. Fischel has glossed as the view that ‘enthusiastic consent, from which we can read desire, is not simply a baseline for sexual pleasure but nearly its guarantor.’ Here, women’s speech bears a heavy burden: that of ensuring pleasure; of improving sexual relations, and of resolving violence. Consent, as Fischel puts it in Screw Consent, gives ‘moral magic to sex’.

This rhetoric is not entirely new; feminist campaigning has focused intensely on consent since the 1990s especially, provoking in the process much agitated commentary (more on this shortly). Rachel Kramer Bussel wrote in 2008 that ‘as women, it’s our duty to ourselves and our partners to get more vocal about asking for what we want in bed, as well as sharing what we don’t. Neither partner can afford to be passive and just wait to see how far the other person will go.’ That we must say what we want, and indeed know what we want, has become a truism it is hard to disagree with if one takes seriously women’s autonomy and pleasure in sex. And this injunction to women to clearly know and speak their desire is framed as inherently liberatory, since it emphasizes women’s capacity for – and right to – sexual pleasure.

Progressive thought has long cast sexuality and pleasure as stand-ins for emancipation and liberation. It was precisely this that philosopher Michel Foucault was critiquing in 1976, in The Will to Knowledge, when he wrote that ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’. He was paraphrasing, sardonically, the stance of the counter-cultural sexual liberationists of the sixties and seventies; the Marxists, the revolutionaries, the Freudians – all those who believed that, in order to be liberated from the past’s moralizing clutches, from a repressive Victorian past, we must finally tell the truth about sexuality. Foucault, in contrast, was sceptical of the way ‘we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future’, and argued that the stuffy Victorians were in fact intensely verbose about sex, even if that verbosity took the form of outlining pathologies, abnormalities and aberrations. Not only did he revise the classic take on the Victorians as prudish, repressed, and wedded to silence; he also opposed the truisms that speaking out about sex amounts to liberation, and that silence amounts to repression. ‘We must not think’, he wrote, ‘that by saying yes to sex one says no to power.’

Sex has been, and still is, prohibited and regulated in myriad ways, and women’s sexuality in particular has been intensely constrained and policed. But Foucault’s point is worth dwelling on. We are, yet again, in a moment in which it seems to be tomorrow – a tomorrow just on the horizon, close enough to touch – that sex will be good again; a moment in which we conjure away the present and appeal to the future, armed as we are with the tools needed to undo past repression – the tools of consent, and, as we’ll see, of sex research. But speech and truth-telling are not inherently emancipatory, and neither speech nor silence is inherently liberating or oppressive. What’s more, repression can operate through the mechanisms of speech, through what Foucault called the ‘incitement to discourse.’ Consent, and its conceit of absolute clarity, places the burden of good sexual interaction on women’s behaviour – on what they want and on what they can know and say about their wants; on their ability to perform a confident sexual self in order to ensure that sex is mutually pleasurable and non-coercive. Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge. This, as we’ll see, is dangerous.

In an interview, one target of Weinstein’s campaign of sexual intimidation spoke of having been afraid to ‘poke the bear’; afraid, when confronted with his demands, to do anything to inflame his anger, violence or desire for retribution. In Weinstein’s January 2020 trial in New York, one witness told the court that, if he ‘heard the word “no”, it was like a trigger for him’. Women are taught – not least by coercive men themselves – to care inordinately about men’s feelings; they are socialized to feel responsible for men’s wellbeing, hence also their anger and their violence. They are also taught that if they ‘give signals’, they must see things through; that if they say no after apparently showing interest, the repercussions are ones for which they only have themselves to blame. A hurt male ego is one more likely to lash out, and since much social communication is indirect, especially when fear enters the picture, women may say no cautiously, gingerly, covertly, so as to allow a man to save face, and to avoid antagonizing him.

A cautious no, however, can fail to be understood as a no, and its very caution and delicacy can come back to haunt a woman, in courtrooms, in the realm of allegations and scrutinized behaviour. Did you say no loudly enough? Did you push the bear away?

Saying no, then, is difficult. But so too is saying yes; so too is expressing desire. For one thing, the vocal expression of desire does not guarantee pleasure for women, despite the gung-ho, enthusiastic tone of much consent discourse. In Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, writer Arabella and her actor friend Terry are in Italy, staying in a swanky flat in which Arabella is trying to finish her manuscript. They go out clubbing, and Terry ends up leaving early, navigating her way home via a bar where a local man comes on to her. Previously, we have seen him with a friend, pinpointing her – but by the time Terry meets him, he is alone. They dance, the sexual tension builds; something looks sure to develop. Then the other man arrives; they don’t reveal they know each other. From Terry’s point of view, the three-some that ensues seems organic, fortuitous. When they have had sex – or rather, after the men have come – the two unceremoniously get dressed, in a hurry to go home, leaving Terry hanging. They acquired their pleasure, they reached orgasm; but where did hers figure? She had been up for the sex, but that doesn’t preclude her feeling used and let down. Deflated, she watches them walk down the street together, in complicit camaraderie; their friendship and its concealment seem clear now. Terry has a disturbed inkling that alongside her own sexual curiosity was their manoeuvring her into place, through a subtle, ambiguous form of deception. Are consent, saying yes, and expressing desire a guarantor of pleasure? Do they preclude men’s instrumentalization of women? Of course not. Pleasure, and the right to it, are not equally distributed.

Saying yes, and naming one’s desires clearly, is also difficult because of the sexist scrutiny to which women are relentlessly subjected. Many rape and assault trials turn not on whether the act took place, but on whether a victim consented to sexual activity. Consent then gets blurred with enjoyment, pleasure and desire. The ideal victim, as one prominent British barrister has put it, ‘is preferably sexually inexperienced or at least respectable’. Evidence that a woman has used apps...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. On Consent
• 2. On Desire
• 3. On Arousal
• 4. On Vulnerability
• Acknowledgements
• Notes