Laura: The modern rule for good sex seems simple enough: 'enthusiastic consent.' Yes means yes. Sophia: Right, it’s the gold standard. It’s what we’ve all been taught is the key to ethical, empowered interactions. Laura: But what if that very rule, the one designed to protect and empower women, is actually setting them up to fail? Sophia: Hold on, that’s a huge claim. Are you saying consent culture is a bad thing? That sounds like the most controversial take possible right now. Laura: It’s an incredibly provocative idea, and it’s at the heart of the book we’re diving into today: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel. She argues that the way we talk about consent has created a trap. Sophia: Katherine Angel. I’m not familiar with her. What’s her background? Is she a journalist, an activist? Laura: This is what makes her perspective so unique. She has a PhD in the history of psychiatry and sexuality from Cambridge and is also in psychoanalytic training. So she’s looking at this with a deep historical understanding of how we’ve defined, and often pathologized, female desire for centuries. Sophia: Okay, that’s a heavy-hitting background. She’s not just a cultural commentator; she’s a historian of the very ideas she’s questioning. So where does she even begin to dismantle something as seemingly fundamental as enthusiastic consent?

Laura: She starts by clarifying that consent itself—the legal and ethical baseline—is absolutely necessary. Her critique is aimed at the discourse around it. The culture that insists a woman must be a perfect, confident subject of her own desire, able to know it fully and express it clearly at all times. Sophia: But isn't knowing what you want and being able to say it the whole point of empowerment? We’re encouraged to find our voice, to be assertive. Laura: Exactly. But Angel points out a terrifying double bind. Society often punishes women for being sexually assertive. She brings up the 2016 retrial of the Welsh footballer Ched Evans, who was accused of rape. Sophia: I think I remember that case. It was highly publicized. Laura: It was. And in the retrial, the defense brought in two other men to testify about the accuser's sexual history. They claimed she had a preference for certain sexual acts and had previously said things like "Fuck me harder." Sophia: Oh, I see where this is going. They used her past enthusiasm against her. Laura: Precisely. Her previous expressions of desire and enjoyment were framed as evidence that she would have consented in this instance, regardless of what she said or did at the time. It creates an impossible situation. If a woman is silent or uncertain, she can be seen as a passive victim who didn't say no clearly enough. But if she has a history of being vocal and enthusiastic, that can be weaponized to suggest she's always up for anything. Sophia: Wow. That’s… chilling. You're damned if you're quiet, and you're damned if you're loud. There's no right way to be. Laura: It’s a perfect trap. And it reinforces this idea that the responsibility for preventing bad experiences, or even violence, falls squarely on the woman's shoulders. It’s the same logic we hear from people like Harvey Weinstein's lawyer, Donna Rotunno, who said women need to be "prepared for the circumstances they put themselves in." Sophia: That’s just a more polished way of saying "she was asking for it." It puts the entire burden of risk management on the potential victim, not the potential perpetrator. Laura: And Angel's argument is that this entire framework is built on a faulty foundation. It’s not just that society punishes women for their desires—it’s that the very idea that desire is something we can perfectly know and articulate in advance is a myth.

Sophia: What do you mean by that? I mean, you know if you’re attracted to someone, right? You know if you want to go home with them. It feels like a pretty basic, knowable thing. Laura: It feels that way, because we're steeped in a very specific, and very gendered, model of sexuality. Think of the stereotype, which author Neil Straus summed up perfectly in his book The Game. He wrote, "Show a man the cover of Playboy, and he’s ready to go. In fact, show him a pitted avocado and he’s ready to go." Sophia: That’s a ridiculous and hilarious image, but yes, it captures the cliché: male desire is simple, spontaneous, and always on. Laura: Right. The linear model: desire leads to arousal, which leads to orgasm. But a huge body of research shows that for many women, it doesn't work that way. They often experience what’s called "responsive desire." Desire doesn't come first; it emerges in response to stimulation, to context, to feeling safe and connected. Arousal can actually precede the subjective feeling of desire. Sophia: So, you might not feel like you "want it" until things are already underway and you realize, "Oh, actually, this is nice." Laura: Exactly. And this is where the science gets really wild and challenges our assumptions about what our bodies are telling us. Angel dives into the work of researcher Meredith Chivers, who studied genital arousal. Sophia: How does one even study that? Laura: With a device called a plethysmograph, which measures blood flow to the genitals. In these studies, women were put in a lab, hooked up to these devices, and shown a wide range of erotic video clips. Sophia: Okay, I’m picturing a very awkward lab setting. Laura: Extremely. And the clips included heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, and, famously, a clip of bonobos having sex. Sophia: Bonobos?! You're kidding. Why on earth would they include that? Laura: To test the specificity of arousal. And what they found was fascinating. While men's arousal was typically category-specific—straight men were aroused by women, gay men by men—women's bodies responded with increased blood flow to all of it. Including the bonobos. Sophia: Wait, so their bodies were physically aroused by… primate videos? That is bizarre. But they didn't subjectively feel turned on, did they? Laura: That's the crucial point. This phenomenon is called "non-concordance." There's often a major gap between a woman's physical, genital response and her subjective, mental feeling of arousal. Her body might be saying "something is happening!" while her brain is saying "I'm not into this at all." Sophia: That has massive implications. Because if we're told to "listen to our bodies," what part are we supposed to be listening to? Laura: And it can be dangerously misinterpreted. Angel brings up the infamous spanking scene in Fifty Shades of Grey. Anastasia is in pain, she's crying, she's trying to move away. But Christian Grey puts his fingers inside her and says, "Feel this. See how much your body likes this, Anastasia." He uses her physical lubrication—her genital response—as the "truth" that overrides her words, her tears, and her pain. Sophia: He’s basically saying, "Your mouth says no, but your body says yes." That’s the classic, terrifying line used to justify assault. He's appointing himself the expert on her experience. Laura: He is. And it reveals the core problem. We've built a culture that demands women be the ultimate authorities on their own desire, while simultaneously telling them their bodies hold a secret truth that they might not even be aware of, a truth that others can claim to know better than they do.

Sophia: Okay, let me try to wrap my head around this. Our modern model of consent requires women to clearly state a desire that, according to the science, they might not even be able to 'know' until an experience is already happening. And on top of that, their bodies might be sending physiological signals that don't match their actual feelings, which can then be used against them. This is… incredibly messy. Laura: It is profoundly messy. And Katherine Angel’s ultimate point is that we have to stop demanding certainty in a realm that is inherently uncertain. The solution isn't to create more rigid rules or demand that women become perfect mind-readers of their own psyches. Sophia: Then what is the alternative? If the 'enthusiastic yes' model is flawed, where do we go? Laura: We shift the burden. Instead of placing the responsibility on a woman to have a flawless, pre-packaged 'yes,' we place the responsibility on everyone in the encounter to be curious, attentive, and caring. Sex stops being a transaction where one person gives consent and the other receives it, and it becomes a conversation. It's about mutual exploration and a shared responsibility for pleasure and safety. Sophia: So it’s less about a single moment of permission and more about an ongoing process of checking in and being attuned to each other. Laura: Exactly. It's about creating a context of trust where vulnerability isn't a liability. Where someone can say "I'm not sure" or "let's try" or "let's stop" without fear. The book's title, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, is a bit ironic. It's from a Foucault quote, hinting at this utopian promise. But Angel suggests that for sex to be good, we have to let go of the fantasy of perfect, knowable desire and instead embrace the messy, uncertain, and deeply human reality of it. Sophia: That feels like a much more compassionate, and frankly, more realistic approach. Laura: It leads me to a final question for everyone listening to reflect on: If we stopped seeing consent as a contract to be signed, and started seeing it as a continuous conversation, how might that change the way we approach intimacy? Sophia: That’s a powerful question to sit with. It changes everything from a first date to a long-term relationship. It’s about the quality of the connection, not just the permission. Laura: This is Aibrary, signing off.