Berliner Zeitung: Ms. Angel, your book is called “Sex will be good again tomorrow”. How bad is he today?
Katherine Angel: (laughs) Good question. Probably pretty bad. At least that’s what research suggests. Desire and pleasure are definitely unequally distributed during sex. Women feel pain disproportionately often and simply hardly have a fulfilling sex life. The danger of sexualized assaults is high for women, making them particularly vulnerable during sex and thus influencing their sense of pleasure. Although of course there are also many men who experience disappointment, frustration or confusion during sex. Also many men who experience sexualised violence by other men.
But do you think that we are aware of all these feelings during sex? That we just realize that it’s not particularly enjoyable right now?
Certainly there are feelings that we directly experience as unpleasant or as painful. At the same time, we also know that it can take a while for people to understand what is happening to them sexually. We need to think more about power relations, about women being encouraged to put male pleasure before their own.
Do people avoid talking about power when they actually want to talk about sex? Isn’t that kind of conversation sexy?
Clearly, it’s unsexy to talk about complicated social dynamics, unequal power relations, and how these affect people’s sexual experiences. Perhaps one believes that sex is meant to be something unspoken or mysterious. However, it is important to think about sex and how it is influenced. But I understand the fear of taking something away from him by trying to understand sex and make it more tangible.
Hanser
Person & Buch
Katherine Angel works at the University of London and deals with topics related to sexuality, feminism and female sexual disorders in her academic and journalistic work.
She has published articles in Independent and Prospect magazines, among others. In 2013 her book “Untamed. About the desire for which there are no words” at Klett-Cotta.
“Tomorrow sex will be good again” takes up current discourses on female sexuality, power and desire. In four academic chapters, Katherine Angel describes the problems of our sexuality, calls for a new look at our culture of consent and warns us how complex intimacy and sexualised violence are interwoven.
At the end there is the hardly new insight: The private remains political. A sometimes bitter, albeit great reading pleasure!
In your book you write that consent is the most necessary agreement in sex. So is consensus no longer seductive?
We have to be careful when we talk about consensus. On the one hand, it is always a legal term, we use it to define whether someone has consented to an action or not. It’s absolutely critical that we only have sex with people we know want to have sex with us too. Just the bare minimum. It’s almost silly to have to say it like that.
We were guided by this idea that this legal concept can solve all sexual problems. But I don’t think that’s true. At the same time, there are many people who find sex painful or humiliating even though they have consented to it. And there are a variety of reasons for that.
For example?
Perhaps their own pleasure, their feelings were not or simply not enough considered. I think that while we need to emphasize that consent to sex is absolutely necessary, what makes sex good goes beyond that. People have to feel secure in order to be able to openly think about desire and curiosity. When it comes to sex, we should be free to say what we want and that we may not know what we want ourselves. Of course, there is always an area of great uncertainty. But whether consensus is sexy or not is not the point. Instead, we have to think outside of this legal framework.
In the end, if we hardly know what we like, what we want, how can we know if sex is – and will remain – consensual?
The problem with emphasizing consensus is that it gives people a false sense of security. We know we have to get approval, of course, but beyond that, many don’t see the problem. We need to teach people to be more attuned to other people’s signals. Does the other person agree with what I’m doing?
But if we ourselves hardly know what we like, how are we supposed to be able to read foreign signals?
Of course it is extremely difficult. This is one of the reasons why many women, at least according to studies, experience sex that they don’t really enjoy. It’s not an easy problem to solve. In addition, there is a double social standard: women should talk less about their own sexual desires, which makes it difficult for them to know what they like.
But don’t you also think that it is difficult for men – even with the expectations placed on them – to have good sex?
Yes absolutely. It’s very, very interesting how we think about men and women in relation to sex. It takes women longer to get in the mood, but men can always do it. At least empirically, that seems to be the case.
Women must be careful not to be too sexually active, otherwise they could be held responsible for the sexualized assaults they have experienced. At the same time, however, they are being asked to be sexually confident and fearless. It is simply paradoxical and also painful to understand these messages. Heterosexual men, on the other hand, have to withstand this extreme sexual pressure to succeed. That too is painful. If we as a society could bid farewell to the influence of these extreme images of masculinity, men would also be able to enjoy sex more, would be less frustrated and less violent towards women.
But is there any hope at all for good, equal sex in a patriarchal society that builds on the role models just mentioned?
Of course it’s interesting to think about. But what would it mean to abolish patriarchy? How would that affect our intimate relationships? Given the unequal position of women in society, one cannot be considered without the other. Sexualized exploitation, and with it bad sex, always occurs when there is social inequality. We must therefore act on several fronts at the same time: unpaid care work, sexual double standards, unequal pay. Our cultural notions of sexuality and gender also contribute to this inequality. It’s almost impossible to say where to start, everything is connected. It’s like a fabric, a patriarchal fabric, woven together.
So how vulnerable does sex make women in an unequal world? You also write about that in the book.
Statistically, women are disproportionately affected by sexualised violence. So you live quite risky. And sometimes this fear of sexualized violence is used to control women. Women are scared that practical freedoms are being taken away from them.
What do you mean specifically?
A simple example would be that women rarely walk alone in the park at night for fear of being assaulted. We have to navigate our way through this complicated world. We are quick to fear all men because we know that one man alone could hurt us. This also affects our sex life.
Sex is always about people meeting in a very vulnerable state. It is always a state of exposure, of desire, of longing. It makes you very vulnerable because you want something for yourself. And when you can’t or don’t want to provide certain things, it can be scary, even humiliating. In the book, I try to show that we need to acknowledge these realities of violence and fear as part of our sex lives. The more we acknowledge this, the more room there is for lust.
But what I still don’t fully understand is how the threat of sexualized violence affects our own, day-to-day sex life.
Of course, it’s hard to generalize. But it is clear that the idea “No means no” is difficult to express in this context. Women are afraid of the direct reaction because they know the dangers of possible future violence. The man could get angry and outraged because she had “seduced” him or because she wanted to. That keeps people from saying no. The woman would rather be passive than risk something dangerous.
Even an enthusiastic yes is difficult. While this may satisfy one man, it could also make another despise her. Or other people. Women know, at least subconsciously, that an active sex life could be used against them in rape trials. With this double message – yes and no is difficult – it is difficult for women to really enjoy sex. They hardly know how to behave.
Now that you know what is the real key to a fulfilling sex life?
I think talking to each other is really important. This often works indirectly. We can have insanely good sex with people we barely speak a word to. Lust and desire and fun during sex always builds on trust. We need to feel safe. Of course we can also expose ourselves to risky situations in which we might be discovered during sex, but we also have to be able to feel safe with the other person in order to really enjoy it. But I don’t want to generalize anything. Sex is a very individual thing.
Your book is called “Sex will be good again tomorrow”. When will that “tomorrow” come?
Tomorrow is still a day away.