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

Author:Katherine Angel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

Why do we take genital arousal as a stand-in for pleasure and desire? In part because arousal – lubrication – is important in order for sex to be subjectively pleasurable at all; the decline of lubrication around and after meno-pause is a frequently cited cause of distress in women. What’s more, heterosexual women themselves may emphasize wetness because of men’s tendency to rush to penetrative sex before a woman is ‘ready’ for what is consistently framed as the main act. Wetness, then, can stand in for good sex; can be a clue that ‘foreplay’ has taken place, that sex has gone at a woman’s pace, not just a man’s. Because genital arousal is conducive to pleasure and helps reduce discomfort, we have tended to treat it as the very same thing as a subjective sense of pleasure – particularly given the heterosexual focus of so much sex research and advice.

There are other reasons for a focus on genital arousal. It is notoriously difficult to get at what people really do or feel in research; we routinely lie about, or underestimate, or fail to adequately judge any number of phenomena: how many hours we sleep, how much alcohol we consume, what our level of bias is. Individuals are unreliable and often ashamed, especially when it comes to talking about sex – they can be uncomfortable about what they enjoy, and want to be seen as normal. This makes self-report woefully undependable in social and psychological research. A reliance on ‘hard’ physiological data is an appealing solution to this human incapacity to accurately self-observe, and it is a solution that has a powerful historical pedigree.

Two distinct modes of talking about sex emerged during the course of the twentieth century. The first was rooted in the late nineteenth century, typified by the case studies of Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Freud. These were vehicles of deep sympathy and kindness, as well as of a double-edged fascination with the classification of ‘deviance’. This mode placed the individual at the centre of a system of knowledge; deep engagement with particularity would yield compelling information about human sexuality.

The second mode is associated with figures such as Alfred Kinsey (whose reports were published in the late 1940s and early 50s) and William Masters and Virginia Johnson (whose first book, as we saw, came out in 1966). This approach sought safety in numbers and in mass aggregate: repeated observations of innumerable bodies. Kinsey and colleagues levelled a volley of questions at thousands of subjects (sixteen thousand, in fact), seeking to quantify the secrets of a population. Masters and Johnson’s laboratories of the 1960s were intrusive in a different way, with voyeuristic mechanisms displaced onto penetrative cameras, probes and sensors in an erotics of machinery.

Kinsey, an entomologist by training, was rigorously – obsessively – committed to data-gathering; his work was remarkable for its sheer scale of quantification, his tireless counting and cataloguing. Before his sex research, he had crossed the US meticulously delineating gall wasp species. Now he

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