Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel ****
Reading dates: 02-21 November 2025
This was my DiaMat choice for our 23 November meetings. I wanted to read it for so long and it did not disappoint. I loved the first three chapters but for me it felt flat on the last one. Having made it my life’s mission, I disagree that one cannot know oneself. Still, the book opens up for me many ideas about desire and arousal, how they are measured and in what ways female desire might be different from what is generally (and simplistically) portrayed.
1. On Consent
Progressive thought has long cast sexuality and pleasure as stand-ins for emancipation and liberation.
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But speech and truth-telling are not inherently emancipatory, and neither speech nor silence is inherently liberating or oppressive.
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If a ‘no’ is meaningless, then how can a ‘yes’ be meaningful?
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it privileges a robust self-knowledge about desire, and a capacity for vocal expression of it.
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Bad sex is a political issue, one of inequality of access to pleasure and self-determination,
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We need a robust critique of consent, not in order to vilify young women supposedly attached to victimhood, but out of solidarity with all women for whom sex can turn into an unhappy bargaining point, a false choice or an economic necessity for survival.
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It’s crucial to maintain the distinction between consent and enthusiasm, precisely so that we can describe what is going on in these dynamics of unequal power.
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For me, consent rhetoric takes the fact of women’s vulnerability to violence – the prevalence of violence against women – and tries to make them invulnerable in response.
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We don’t always know what we want and we are not always able to express our desires clearly. This is in part due to the violence, misogyny and shame that make desire’s discovery difficult, and its expression fraught. But it is also in the nature of desire to be social, emergent and responsive –
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Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal, and it’s an assumption that has been conceded for far too long, to the impediment of conversations about pleasure, joy, autonomy and safety.
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We need to start from this very premise – this risky, complex premise: that we shouldn’t have to know ourselves in order to be safe from violence.
2. On Desire
For Freud, reproductive heterosexuality was not a biological inevitability, but a complex developmental process. In both men and women, he argued, heterosexual desire was acquired rather than inborn – and it was acquired with difficulty, as well as always provisionally.
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Basson’s work insisted that sexuality is lived in context, and that this context is not always conducive to women’s enjoyment.
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Of course, inclusion in the DSM is no marker of liberation, but in the manual, men have desire while women have incentives and motivation; men have desire disorders while women have disorders of interest and arousal. These semantic differences speak volumes: women’s investment in sex is seen as more cognitive, while men’s is more libidinal. Women consider sex, while men want it. Women’s interest in sex is less, well, sexual.
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It is social reality that creates the conditions of possibility for abandon, adventure, release, playfulness.
3. On Arousal
These were vehicles of deep sympathy and kindness, as well as of a double-edged fascination with the classification of ‘deviance’. This mode placed the individual at the centre of a system of knowledge; deep engagement with particularity would yield compelling information about human sexuality.
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It’s tempting to discount the subjective as misleading. But there may be realms in which it is precisely the subjective – what people say they feel, rather than what their bodies display – that matters most. And sex may be this realm par excellence: the realm where the unreliable and the individual are absolutely crucial.
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the body doesn’t lie, but all the body does is provide us with complicated information. The body is no arbiter, should be no arbiter.
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As soon as a woman articulates a desire, her guilt is implicated. Desire and criminality, longing and responsibility, are awakened in tandem. For women, desire invites interrogation; curiosity invites suspicion; longing invites the law into our heads, the forensic into our pleasures.
4. On Vulnerability
In the Cut acknowledges that threat and fear can be recruited to the erotic; something we ignore at our peril.
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‘How’, asks Lorde, ‘to feel love, how to neither discount fear nor be overwhelmed by it, how to enjoy feeling deeply?’
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sex, and desire, compromise our sense of sovereignty, of knowing ourselves, and of being in control.
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What would it be like if more men were able to say – and deeply feel – this: ‘I would like you to do x with me – but I will survive your refusal.’ Can men issue welcoming invitations and tolerate being turned down? Or is everything a request? Can we help men not to feel existentially destroyed by refusal?
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To be a man is to be tremendously exposed.
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Queer theorist Leo Bersani, in his landmark 1987 essay, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, writes of sex as the place where we all – regardless of gender – experience our body’s failure to ‘control and to manipulate the world beyond the self’.
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For Bersani, phallocentrism is not ‘primarily the denial of power to women’, though it is that too; it is ‘above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women.’
