by ADRIAN KREUTZ
Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (London/Verso 2021. 160 pp., £ 10.99 pb ISBN 9781788739160)
I remember vividly the nightlife-Zeitgeist of the early 2010s, when I was an undergraduate student: a blasé form of sex-positive feminism infiltrated the heads and the bodies (yes, literally) of young heterosexual women. Fuck your way to self-emancipation; be that ideological virgin who claims to be a whore (but isn’t). The sexual morality of that time: the last offspring of withering ‘Samanthaism’.
Now, ten years later, it is almost as if Saturn had launched a series of returns. In the wake of the events on Clapham Common in London, many of my friends, notably women in their late 20s, epiphanically opened up about sexual harassment, about having been spiked, stealthed, or worse – not yesterday, not last week, not last year; but almost a decade ago, in those sex-positive days. Hermeneutical gaps first had to be closed.
Katherine Angel’s intervention into post-feminist discourse fits the script of recent events and sits at what’s hopefully the tail end of post-feminist discourse, otherwise known as ‘the sex wars’. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again urges us to rethink the notion of consent as the be-all-end-all of ‘good’ sexual encounter. Consent-culture has told us that as long as consent isn’t violated, sex is empowering, in the best case emancipatory, but in any case, legal, unharmful, and almost always, in fact by definition, ‘good’.
Consent has to be problematised. For many reasons. Consent is a slippery notion. That doesn’t mean that consent must altogether vanish from our sexual ethics. Angel’s argument is that we must consider consent as the absolute baseline, something that is prior to a much needed, more elaborate sexual ethics. Consent is a legal concept, after all, not an ethical notion, and itself riddled with uncertainties. The ethics of sex goes beyond mechanical questions of consent. In other words, consent (and it’s non-violation) is necessary but not sufficient for sex to be ‘good’ (in a robust ethical sense).
Consent requires a speech-act of some sort. The debates about whether consent must be an affirmative speech-act, whether it has to be (as the Teen Vogue propagated, sounding somewhat pornographically) ‘enthusiastic’ for it to count as genuine consent-giving (6), are vexed, confused and permeated by diverging incentives, both from inside and outside feminist discourse. How loud does one have to give consent? Is a cautious ‘no’ enough to express dissent? Does silence mean consent? Whose consent is meaningful? Polemically put, can we demand men (i.e. those who occupy a man’s position in power relations) to ‘mind-read’ women? Do women ‘have to push the bear away’ for dissent to be expressed clearly?
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