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. Only then will we bring about Michel Foucault’s sardonic promise, in 1976, that “tomorrow sex will be good again." In this crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions of perfect self-knowledge. Why, she asks, do we expect desire to be easily understood? Why is there not space for the unsure, the tentative, the maybe, the let’s just see? In contrast to the endless exhortation to know what we want, Angel proposes that sex can be a conversation, requiring insight, interaction, and mutual vulnerability–a shared collaboration into the unknown. In this elegantly written, searching book Katherine Angel surveys medical and psychoanalytic understandings of female desire, from Freud to Kinsey to present-day science #MeToo-era debates over consent, assault, and feminism and popular culture, TV, and film to challenge our assumptions about female desire. In this environment, how can women possibly know what they want–and how can they be expected to? And men are on hand to persuade women that what they want is, in fact, exactly what men want. Sex researchers tell us that women don’t know what they want. They are told that in the name of sexual consent and feminist empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of #MeToo
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