Consent, Bad Sex and Vulnerability with Katherine Angel
In this episode, Hannah is joined by Katherine Angel, who is the author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent. Katherine discusses consent culture and the pressure we put on women to know what we want sexually as a way of protecting us from sexual violence. She and Hannah talk about why bad sex happens and quickly dip into their thoughts on pickup artists. Finally, Hannah and Katherine discuss the social and political landscape of sex and the big V word: vulnerability.
CW: Sexual assault, sexual violence, and a short discussion about the murder of Sarah Everard
Read the episode transcript here!
SHOW NOTES
What we chat about…
Why did Katherine write this book?
Trying to talk about consent and sexuality clearly for educational purposes while also recognising the subtleties
Reclaiming that language of complexity for women
Society making women responsible for managing their own risk of experiencing sexual violence
When risk management infiltrates our notions of sexuality
Some men thinking about consent as insurance
Consent being ongoing
Clarity about consent being used against women in rape trials
Feeling like you aren't allowed to have sex if you're not sure what you want
The unconscious way we assign blame when thinking about female sexuality
The reaction to the Sarah Everard murder
The language used around the Sarah Everard murder
Dividing women into "good" and "bad" victims
What is consent culture?
The social and political landscape of sex
Who gets to say what they want? Who gets to expect pleasure?
Conflating assault with bad sex
Bad sex as a social and political issue rather than an individual issue
What sex education in schools is lacking
Girls being taught to manage risks and feel ashamed when they're interested in sex and suddenly being assumed to be self-confident and all-knowing as soon as they're 18
Men being failed by sex education too
Men being socialised to think about sex as about performance rather than about their own pleasure or their partner's pleasure
Men not being socially allowed to explore or feel vulnerable during sex
Pickup artists
Capitalism and pickup artistry
What is responsive desire?
Would we all experience spontaneous desire if our social and political climate was different?
All sexuality is responsive to context, including men's sexuality, but we see men's sexuality as natural
Desire is invited and affirmed by the context that we live in
What should we be wary about when we're talking about responsive desire?
How pickup artists can abuse the idea of responsive desire
What does sexual liberation look like to Katherine? If she were to build a sexually liberated world, what would that look like?
Accepting and navigating vulnerability
How to balance consent and spontaneity? Are they even actually opposites? (51:51)
Sex work and the importance of making a distinction between consent and pleasure
USEFUL LINKS
Telegraph article about what people wish they were taught in school sex ed
Seduction: Men, Masculinity, and Mediated Intimacy by Rachel O'Neill
MORE ABOUT KATHERINE ANGEL
Katherine Angel is the author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Daddy Issues, and Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. She directs the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Granta, The White Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books amongst other places.
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