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.

None of this means, of course, that we should jettison consent. But it cannot sustain the weight of all our emancipatory desires; we must be clear about its limits. Consent – agreement to sex – should not be conflated with sexual desire, enjoyment or enthusiasm, not because we should be resigned to bad sex, but precisely because we should not be. That women experience so much misery-making sex is a profoundly social and political issue, and consent cannot solve it for us.

Even if it were empirically true that women weigh up interests in sex, might there be more to this than meets the eye? If women are motivated by non-sexual reasons – keeping a partner happy, for instance – this may describe a social phenomenon, rather than anything about male or female sexuality per se, least of all something deeply biological. If women’s pleasure is not routinely attended to; if the conditions of women’s sexual lives are often not conducive to lust (it’s hard to feel desire if your pleasure isn’t treated as important), then it’s unsurprising that women will have sex for reasons that are not themselves sexual.
Likewise, if it were empirically true that women’s desire is more responsive to context than men’s, and that, as Emily Nagoski claims, women display more sensitivity to inhibiting factors around sex than men, this too is likely to be a social factor: Girl X can be slut-shamed, but James Deen is only a stud. Women’s sexuality is frequently punished; women are routinely harassed, and their bodies policed; they are constantly reminded of their susceptibility to male violence, and made to feel responsible for it. Shame, fear, cultural proscriptions and trauma – often sexual trauma – can be profound inhibitors to sexual enjoyment. Yet women are urged to claim their desire with confidence. No wonder many women have a complicated relationship to their desire; no wonder it may need careful eliciting, and that they are easily inhibited.

Men, after all, hate women so that they don’t have to hate themselves.

his risks tapping into the worst contractual model at the root of coercive, bullying behaviour by men. If women weigh up their interests and value the intimacy they may get in exchange, they will agree to sex; it’s a short step to a requirement that women must provide sex if they are to expect the things they value; if they are to be given the gift or the promise of intimacy. This view of women’s sexuality not only tends to legitimate male sexual aggression, but it also further alienates women from their own desire and pleasure.
Seeing responsiveness – to context and to others – as an essential feature of female sexuality, without similarly scrutinizing our ideas of male sexuality, raises troubling clichés about men as those who want and ask for sex, and women as those who, after weighing up their non-sexual interests, may go along for the ride. In a world where women saying no to sex is so routinely met with entitled disbelief and pushy cajoling, and where women saying yes to sex is subjected to both shaming and rationalizations in the service of allegedly higher aims, it’s profoundly problematic to make receptivity to sex a definitional aspect of female sexuality, all the while leaving male sexuality intact as a drive . This is a scenario in which men want and push, and women have to calculate, decide, and resist; one entirely exploited and exploitable by men who already see their desire as biological entitlement, and women as persuadable accessories to it. Seeing women’s desire as responsive without interrogating gendered power dynamics can quickly turn into a nightmarish, coercive fantasy.

Men, too, are motivated to pursue sex for non-sexual reasons, just as women are – by a need to assert their masculinity; by the link between erection, ejaculation and power; by the social punishments that follow if they fail. It is not that women have reasons and incentives for sex while men have pure desire; it is that we render men’s non-sexual motivations – their reasons, their incentives – invisible. We leave these uninterrogated, and treat male desire as a biological given, rather than the socially enabled, sanctioned and enforced behaviour that it is.
We must be careful not to write, into our models of sex, phenomena that are in fact social – namely, an assumption that sex is inherently satisfying to men, along with a resignation to sex being, for women, merely a trade-off for something else of value to them. In acknowledging that having sex can bring about other valued effects – connection, intimacy, bonding – we must also be careful not to rule out sex itself as capable of providing these. Why not aim for sex itself as being deeply mutually pleasurable? Why not aim for a culture that embraces and enables women’s sexual pleasure, in all its complexity, and admits the complexity of male desire too? Could we not aim for a wondrous, universal, democratic pleasure detached from gender; a hedonism available to all – for what Sophie Lewis has called a ‘guards-down, polymorphous experimentation’, for everyone?
All sexuality is responsive; all sexual desire emerges in a culture which in turn shapes it. Could we take what is important from Basson’s model – the emphasis on the relational, emergent nature of desire – without harnessing it quite so much to a rhetoric of divergent sex drives between men and women? Sexuality is lived, learnt, developed over time, in particular contexts; this is why sex means something to us – it is never pure function, but always rich and burdened with significance. If we want sex to be joyful and fulfilling, it is on sex’s contexts that we should focus our emancipatory energies.