Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel

Girl X, however, has grown up with impossible demands. James Deen understands none of the melancholic weight of sex for Girl X – he doesn’t have to.

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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again' 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.

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. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently.

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel