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735 reviews for:
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
Katherine Angel
4.04 AVERAGE
735 reviews for:
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
Katherine Angel
4.04 AVERAGE
Engaging, thought-provoking, nuanced, informative. An absolute must-read for anyone who struggles to truly understand sexual politics in the #metoo era, and who thinks the conversation about consent is often dangerously over-simplified and occasionally paradoxial. Actually, must-read for everyone.
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
To be fair to the author, this probably lost a star for the audiobook format which was a very tough listen. I think the author brought up a few of interesting points relating to the vagaries of consent and desire, but I don’t think she offered too much new to the table. I also think if you are going to bring up issues with societies current frameworks of consent, you need to be concrete in your solution and I didn’t feel that she did that. I also think several of her arguments pointing out the flaws of sex positivity in women were weak and underdeveloped.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
What makes sex good? Or what Katherine Angel wants to ask is.. what would make sex seem less of a chore? She tries to answer this by unraveling discourse around consent and the layers of power, pleasure, and desire in heterosexual sex that have yet to be fully articulated by consent alone. The book is almost a short primer on the discourse and provides perfunctory, at times pithy, distillations of them. As someone who is writing on consent as something developed for straight women, she implies the deterministic aura of individual agency in het sex. Angel does not delve into queerness nor variance in gender identity, so the analysis is limited.
Below are the takeaways:
"Many recoil from the idea that agreements, contracts, and transactions may have a role in sex, precisely because this makes sex seem like work, or seems to involve that sex is an often unequal exchange of risks... Others... prickle at affirmative consent because it still represents sex as something a man wants, and something a woman agrees or refuses to yield. It positions sex as an object, access to which women police. After all, consent, even affirmative consent, is still consent to someone else's proposition."
"The rhetoric of consent too often implies that desire is something that lies in wait fully formed within us, ready for us to extract. Yet our desires emerge in interaction; we don't always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn't know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in the doing. This - that we don't always know and can't always say what we want - must be folded into the ethics of sex rather than swept aside as an inconvenience."
"Too often, we let the fear of violence, and the need to manage its risk, determine our thinking so profoundly that we attempt to organize our sexuality around it - to define sexuality in such a way that it will supposedly protect us from violence... [but] the fetishization of certain knowledge does nothing to enable rich, exciting, pleasurable sex, for women or for men. We have to explore the unknown."
Below are the takeaways:
"Many recoil from the idea that agreements, contracts, and transactions may have a role in sex, precisely because this makes sex seem like work, or seems to involve that sex is an often unequal exchange of risks... Others... prickle at affirmative consent because it still represents sex as something a man wants, and something a woman agrees or refuses to yield. It positions sex as an object, access to which women police. After all, consent, even affirmative consent, is still consent to someone else's proposition."
"The rhetoric of consent too often implies that desire is something that lies in wait fully formed within us, ready for us to extract. Yet our desires emerge in interaction; we don't always know what we want; sometimes we discover things we didn't know we wanted; sometimes we discover what we want only in the doing. This - that we don't always know and can't always say what we want - must be folded into the ethics of sex rather than swept aside as an inconvenience."
"Too often, we let the fear of violence, and the need to manage its risk, determine our thinking so profoundly that we attempt to organize our sexuality around it - to define sexuality in such a way that it will supposedly protect us from violence... [but] the fetishization of certain knowledge does nothing to enable rich, exciting, pleasurable sex, for women or for men. We have to explore the unknown."
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
good and short introduction on how sex is socialized in the modern world. i think this could have been longer, but it is a good starting point for everyone interested in the topic.