Katherine Angel

Sex has been, and still is, prohibited and regulated in myriad ways, and women’s sexuality in particular has been intensely constrained and policed. But Foucault’s point is worth dwelling on. We are, yet again, in a moment in which it seems to be tomorrow – a tomorrow just on the horizon, close enough to touch – that sex will be good again; a moment in which we conjure away the present and appeal to the future, armed as we are with the tools needed to undo past repression – the tools of consent, and, as we’ll see, of sex research. But speech and truth-telling are not inherently emancipatory, and neither speech nor silence is inherently liberating or oppressive. What’s more, repression can operate through the mechanisms of speech, through what Foucault called the ‘incitement to discourse.’ Consent, and its conceit of absolute clarity, places the burden of good sexual interaction on women’s behaviour – on what they want and on what they can know and say about their wants; on their ability to perform a confident sexual self in order to ensure that sex is mutually pleasurable and non-coercive. Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge. This, as we’ll see, is dangerous.

When I sensed that shudder, that ripple of horror, going through others, I assumed it was the familiar repulsion at a woman speaking frankly about sex – a gendered disapproval, the double standard. But perhaps some of that repulsion always reflects what we all know: that a woman who exposes herself, in a world that both desires and punishes that impulse, is making herself vulnerable. Her vulnerability in turn provokes fear, which is easily converted into either contempt or admiration. The shudder is the spasm of recognition, and it’s the collective warning: watch out.

Instead of resigning ourselves to the inevitability of bad sex, and even romanticizing it as merely youthful mis-adventure, we should subject it to sustained scrutiny. Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in access to sexual literacy, sex education and sexual health services. It trades on unequal power dynamics between parties, and on racialized notions of innocence and guilt. Bad sex is a political issue, one of inequality of access to pleasure and self-determination, and it is as a political issue that we should be examining it, rather than retreating into an individualizing, shoulder-shrugging criticism of young women who are using the tools available to them to address the pains of their sexual lives.
In any case, it’s not just college-age beginners who have bad sex, out of which they will supposedly grow. Women of all ages have sex that makes them miserable and frightened, and a narrative about sex that focuses narrowly on college students enables us to overlook the unpleasant sex and the coercion and assault that affect women in all walks of life, and perhaps especially those who are socioeconomically vulnerable. 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.