Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again questions a demand that appears to support women: why should they know in advance what they want and always state it clearly and confidently? She does not treat consent as an obstacle to sexual ethics. She challenges the attempt to solve every risk through women’s self-knowledge and communicative competence. Someone need not become certain about every desire to deserve safety, respect and room to explore.

Four essays address consent, desire, arousal and vulnerability. First published in 2021, the edition recorded here is the Verso paperback of February 8, 2022, ISBN 9781788739207.

Why clear speech cannot do everything

In her interview with Megan Hustad, Angel identifies a double bind. Women are asked to express sexual desire confidently, but doing so can expose them to shaming; desire can even be invoked to discredit an account of harm. Meanwhile, responsibility for preventing violence returns to women, as though correct self-description could protect them. Speech can help someone establish boundaries without removing the responsibility of people who coerce or of environments that sustain inequality.

The question is not whether women should speak less or whether language is useless. It is the difference between having the right to express oneself and having to perform expression well enough to merit protection. Someone may fear losing a relationship, anticipate ridicule, struggle to understand a feeling or change their mind. Safety should not be a reward for confidence. Understanding these conditions cannot license a partner to claim superior knowledge of what the person really wants.

Uncertainty about desire does not turn silence, ambiguity or hesitation into consent. In the same interview, Angel explicitly rejects bullying or coercing someone who is vacillating. FemRes reads her ethical direction as requiring room to stop, refuse, ask again and change a decision. Exploration belongs to the person choosing it; another person cannot turn it into a reason to keep advancing.

Desire has more than one sequence

The publisher’s excerpt, “Is Sexual Desire a Biological Drive?”, examines the linear model in which desire precedes arousal and orgasm. Angel sets it alongside film and television scenes of fast, efficient sex, asking how such a sequence becomes a standard for real bodies. If someone’s lack of an initial urgent impulse is classified as deficient sexuality, the context and relationship may be mistaken for a personal malfunction.

Responsive desire introduces another possible sequence: interest can develop through appropriate interaction and conditions. Trust, power, stress, bodily experience and available pleasure can facilitate or impede it. This is not a new division into passive women and active men. Nor does it instruct someone who does not want contact to accept it and see whether arousal follows. A model can explain variation without permitting any activity lacking consent.

Angel does not announce the revised model as liberation’s endpoint. She asks how diagnostic language can continue to cast men as desiring subjects and women as people responding to someone else’s initiation. A classification intended to reduce pathologization may still allocate wanting to one person and accommodation to another. This is the book’s historical critique of sexology, not a current diagnostic guide or authority for an editor to determine whether a reader’s desire is normal.

What matters is not accepting one model as universally correct, but recognizing the politics of evaluation. Once intensity, speed and initiative become evidence of a body’s adequacy, women can move from an obligation to have no desire into an obligation to have the right desire. An expansive discussion should allow differences rather than offer a choice between two mandatory scripts.

Vulnerability does not mean abandoning boundaries

In her interview with Rachael Rakes, Angel discusses trust and risk while rejecting a simple hierarchy of strong and weak, active and passive women. She also recognizes the importance of explicit agreements about acts and limits in physically risky practices and sex work. Her criticism of perfect self-knowledge cannot be used to portray negotiation, language or boundaries as impediments to pleasure.

Vulnerability here means being affected and unable to control an experience entirely in advance. It can permit mutual discovery; inequality can also turn it into an opportunity for exploitation. These are not benefits and costs that cancel one another out. Pleasure cannot justify coercion, and protection cannot depend on making women invulnerable. The difficult task is to build relationships capable of accommodating change while keeping refusal effective.

The form has limits. Essays and interviews illuminate sexual politics but cannot themselves supply housing, income, care or protection against retaliation. An anti-prescriptive work is not a crisis-response manual. Read it with The Right to Sex to connect the problems of knowing within intimacy to institutional power. Miss Sophia’s Diary lets a literary character’s repeated self-interpretation remain more than an abstract illustration of uncertainty.

Following the four essays, ask what consent answers and what it leaves open; which experiences a model treats as standard; and whose exposure to risk makes trust possible. These questions preserve firm boundaries while preventing those boundaries from being mistaken for an already completed freedom.