This is a rather academic look at women and sex following the MeToo movement, but it is nonetheless engaging. The author examines three areas: consent, desire, and arousal. It is complicated territory, but important to consider.

Ugh. I was so frustrated by this book, which felt at times like an endless scroll of nested citations. Angel pulls out obscure films/books/papers to bolster her points, but sometimes she's using them to argue one way, sometimes another. I had a hard time knowing if she was expounding on something in order to agree or disagree with it. I began to suspect that this was a reworked thesis fairly early on, and nothing happened to disabuse me of this notion. Further, she focused on the problems and is...

This book deserves a standing ovation. Full thoughts to come.

This is a short book but my oh my does it pack a punch. Katherine Angel unpacks consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability over four chapters and takes a deep dive in sex research, asking deeply insightful questions like why are women expected to know what they want in isolation when the act of knowing is relational and relative?Drawing from literature that she doesn't agree with as well as the work of queer authors, she tries to give us pathways to understanding consent culture, confidence cult...

Really an eye opening book about the politics around consent and women’s bodies

Brilliant. Rtc after I attend a London Review Bookshop author event with Angel and Olivia Laing on Monday.

Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine AngelKatherine Angel uses science studies and popular culture to examine female desire, consent and sexuality. It's a non-fiction piece split into four parts: On Consent, On Desire, On Arousal and On Vulnerability.Her chapter 'On Consent' was probably the most fascinating for me. Her discussions surrounding the MeToo movement and how there was almost a culture of pressure that emerged from this. A pressure that arguably was forcing individuals to share their s...

I am not familiar with the author's work, but I admit I had expected the book to be much more in the journalistic quasi-self-help vein of books like Emily Nagoski's 'Come As You Are' and various other titles, featuring interviews with or vignettes of women and their various experiences with sex. Instead, 'Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again' is a highly academic text, the kind I might have expected to be assigned to read at university. This often does the author's vital analysis a disservice - there...

Katherine Angel wrote a really great book about the complexities of desire a few years back, called Unmastered, in which she worked through the implications and the contexts of sexual arousal in a very personal and undogmatic way. Now she has expanded some of those ideas into a fuller treatise on the subjective experience of sexuality (mainly for straight women) taking into account the current narratives around consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability (her four chapter titles).I really like th...

This was a deeply infuriating mix of 'things I wish I had read ten years ago' and 'wow, heteronormative, cisnormative, much?' Wild one-two of validation-invalidation.The best chapter by far is the last, and that would be because that's the chapter which engages in depth with queer theory - Foucault and Edelman in particular. There's a shorter version at Granta if you're interested. The problem with this book is it pronounces repeatedly on what 'women' are like, and while very often it says thing...

This was so good! Like a modern day Beauvoir - the only criticism I have is that I wish it was a bit more radical. It’s kind of quite basic in what it’s addressing but I’m very happy to have read it!

Katherine Angel's 'Tomorrow sex will be good again' is a very fine book that, although short, helps open up the discussion about consent. Consent is great, if only we lived in a society in which women are invited and allowed to think about their desires, which we do not. Angel's prose hardly ever loses its flow, focus and structure. This is all the more admirable as she easily hops from a source, to an analysis, to judgement and opinion. This book doesn't read like a self-help book, yet it did v...

This presented so many new ideas and ways of thinking for me that I can’t help but call it liberating. It’s more academic in nature, which I prefer. But it also feels very exploratory in itself at the same time, which is inviting. It feels like Angel is learning along with you almost - and exploring ideas new to her as well. Obviously I don’t know if this is true, but I liked the tone it set. Great stuff here. I practically highlighted the whole thing.

Focused and insightful book, teasing out countless strands surrounding sex, power dynamics, societal pressures, and consent in a very thoughtful and intelligent way. It reminded me in parts of What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life, but arguably coming from a more empathetic and nuanced perspective. Very readable, well-researched, and not pretending to have any quick answers to a very messy and complex part of human life and society. Hig...

Engaging, thought-provoking, nuanced, informative. An absolute must-read for anyone who struggles to truly understand sexual politics in the #metoo era, and who thinks the conversation about consent is often dangerously over-simplified and occasionally paradoxial. Actually, must-read for everyone.

This is precise and eye-opening writing. Katherine Angel takes us through how consent, sexuality, arousal and desire have been thought about in feminist, pop-culture and scientific circles over time and why those conceptions need to change. Consent is not a guarantee for great sex or even safe sex. It presumes that women possess confident self-knowledge about their desires, formulated beforehand, when desire is itself relational, changing, unsure and tentative. So while the consent rubric sets a...

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

I first came across Katherine Angel when I read Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell earlier this year and I cannot, for the life of me, describe how much I identified with and loved the writing. And of course I immediately looked up if Angel had written more books.In this book Angel discusses the status of making sexuality and pleasure stand ins for emancipation and liberation. The current narrative of consent is limiting in the sense that it places the responsibility of good se...

A smart and very interesting short essay collection that problematizes and probes in interesting ways aspects of the current discourse around sex, desire, and consent. The title comes from Foucault and is somewhat ironic, but this is also a call to a more nuanced and potentially emancipatory view of sex. The format becomes slightly predictable - bad old idea, new idea that seems better, but wait, it’s problematic too. However, the author’s angle is thought-provoking. For example, in the first es...