The only problem I have with Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again is its title, which seems to imply that sex was once good (not-antagonistic) and will be that again.

Here he’s saying that sex was never non-antagonistic, right? What does this mean?

“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? 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?

I’m just confused by this. What does he mean by “women know/don’t know what they want”? Is this related to consent, in that, women don’t know if they want to consent? They don’t know if they want sexual interaction?

Any feminist theory should take into account not-knowing as a key feature of sexuality and ground its opposition to violence in sexual relationship not in the usual terms of ‘yes means yes’, but by evoking this not-knowing. This is why the motto that women “must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently” is not just a violent imposition on sexuality but literally de-sexualizing, a promotion of ‘sex without sex’. This is why feminism, in some instances, enforces precisely the same ‘shaming and silencing’ of women’s sexuality that it seeks to oppose. What lies under the direct physical (or psychological) violence of unwanted male sexual advances is the patronizing assumption he knows what the ‘confused’ woman doesn’t know (and is thereby legitimized to act upon this knowledge). It could thus be argued that a man is violent even if he treats a woman respectfully – as long as it’s done under this presumption of knowing more about her desires than she does herself.

Is he saying that women don’t know if they want to consent or not but after having sex they like it and thus consent retroactively?

It may happen that I not only desire something but want to get it without explicitly asking for it, pretending that it was imposed on me – demanding it directly would ruin the satisfaction of getting it. And inversely, I may want something, dream about it, but I don’t desire to get it – my entire subjective consistency depends on this not-getting-it: Directly getting it would lead to a collapse of my subjectivity. We should always bear in mind that one of the most brutal forms of violence occurs when something that we secretly desire or fantasize about (but are not ready to do in real life) is imposed on us from outside.

Umm, so…sometimes women play hard to get and men should force themselves on them? This just reads like he’s taking one particular kink that should be reserved between consenting adults and generalizing them to all relationships. A lot of people have rape fantasies but they’re fantasies for a reason, right? Like, what am I not getting?

The only form of sex that fully fits the politically correct criteria is a sado-masochist contract.

How???