Narrator: A young woman, a fan, stands nervously in the apartment of a famous porn star, James Deen. She won a contest to film a scene with him, but now, on the verge of signing the contract, her uncertainty is palpable. Pacing the room, she asks herself, "What am I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life?" She signs the contract anyway. The scene they film captures this deep ambivalence, a mix of desire, anxiety, and doubt. Did she truly consent? And if she did, what does that consent actually mean when it’s so clearly tangled with uncertainty?

This complex and unsettling scenario is at the heart of the questions Katherine Angel explores in her provocative book, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent. Angel argues that our modern focus on enthusiastic, clearly communicated consent, while well-intentioned, has created a new set of impossible standards for women, overlooking the profound complexities of desire, power, and vulnerability.

Narrator: At first glance, the modern mantra of consent seems liberating: women should know what they want, say it clearly, and expect an enthusiastic "yes" in return. However, Angel argues this creates a paralyzing double bind. Society simultaneously demands that women be confident, assertive sexual subjects, yet it often punishes them for that very assertiveness.

This contradiction becomes dangerously clear in the legal system. Consider the 2016 retrial of Welsh footballer Ched Evans. His initial rape conviction was overturned, and the retrial focused heavily on the accuser's sexual history. Two other men testified that she had a predilection for "unusual" sex, describing specific acts and words she supposedly enjoyed. The defense used this to argue that her past behavior indicated a general willingness for certain kinds of sex, effectively using her own expressions of pleasure against her. As Angel notes, this case demonstrates how a woman's sexual appetite can be weaponized to exonerate male violence. Once a woman is thought to have said yes to something, a dangerous assumption emerges that she can say no to nothing.

This places the burden of risk management squarely on women's shoulders. It’s a message echoed by figures like Harvey Weinstein's lawyer, Donna Rotunno, who stated, "Women need to be very clear about their intentions, and prepared for the circumstances they put themselves in." This logic insists that women must become perfect communicators and flawless risk assessors to avoid harm, deflecting responsibility from perpetrators and the systems that enable them.

Narrator: A core tenet of modern consent culture is that individuals, especially women, must first know their own desires before they can communicate them. The advice is to look inward, discover what you "really, really want," and then express it. Angel challenges this premise as fundamentally flawed. Desire, she argues, is not a static object waiting to be discovered. It is often uncertain, emergent, and shaped by the interaction with another person.

Insisting on perfect self-knowledge beforehand ignores the reality that we often discover what we want in the process of an encounter. This creates a situation where consent is not just a necessary legal and ethical baseline, but a guarantee of a good experience, which it can never be.

The character Terry in Michaela Coel's series I May Destroy You provides a powerful illustration. While on vacation in Italy, Terry meets a man at a bar, feels a genuine spark, and ends up in a threesome that she initially perceives as a fortuitous, exciting adventure. She actively consents and participates. Yet, the moment the men are finished, they get dressed and leave without a word, leaving her feeling used and instrumentalized. Her consent was real, but it did not protect her from a "bad" sexual experience rooted in unequal pleasure and a lack of care. Her story shows that saying "yes" doesn't magically erase power dynamics or guarantee fulfillment. Demanding that she should have "known" the outcome in advance is an impossible and unfair expectation.

Narrator: A particularly dangerous idea that Angel dismantles is the belief that a woman's body reveals a "truth" about her desire that her words might conceal. This notion, popular among pick-up artists, suggests that a woman's "no" is merely a social script, while her physical arousal—her wetness—is an involuntary confession of her true, voracious desire.

This idea is disturbingly reinforced in popular culture, like a scene in Fifty Shades of Grey. When Anastasia Steele screams in pain during a spanking, Christian Grey puts his fingers inside her and says, "Feel this. See how much your body likes this." He uses her physiological response as proof that she secretly enjoys the pain, overriding her explicit distress.

Angel shows how this logic has even seeped into sex research. Studies by researchers like Meredith Chivers have used vaginal plethysmographs to measure genital blood flow in women as they watch various sexual stimuli. The research famously found that women often show physical arousal to a wide range of stimuli, including things they report finding unappealing, like videos of bonobos having sex. This gap between physical response and subjective feeling is called "non-concordance." While fascinating, this data has been interpreted by some to mean that women's bodies betray their "true," unruly desires.

However, as sex educator Emily Nagoski states, genital response is "not desire." It's not even pleasure—"it is simply response." Arousal can be a purely automatic physiological reaction, much like getting goosebumps in the cold. To treat it as an "unambiguous agent of sincerity," as one philosopher put it, is to dismiss a woman's own voice and grant others the authority to interpret her body for her, a logic that can easily be used to justify coercion.

Narrator: If demanding certainty, perfect self-knowledge, and clear communication isn't the answer, what is? Angel's conclusion is that the path to better, more ethical sex lies in a radical direction: embracing vulnerability. The book argues that we must stop demanding that women become invulnerable authorities on their own desire as a prerequisite for not being harmed. No one, male or female, is a perfect authority on their desire.

Sex, at its best, is a site of exploration, surprise, and transformation. It requires a degree of surrender and a willingness to be open to the unknown. This is inherently a vulnerable state. The character Frannie in the novel In the Cut embodies this complexity. Entangled with a detective she suspects might be a murderer, her desire is inextricably linked with fear. She longs to be "held down. Opened," while simultaneously being terrified of the very real violence that surrounds her. Her experience is messy and contradictory, defying any simple model of "enthusiastic consent."

Angel suggests that true sexual ethics requires moving away from a model of sex as a transaction—where terms are agreed upon beforehand—and toward a model of sex as a conversation. It's an interaction that unfolds in real time, requiring mutual attunement, curiosity, and the grace to navigate uncertainty together. This means acknowledging that men are also vulnerable and that their denial of this vulnerability often leads to hostility and a need to assert power. The goal is not to eliminate risk by hardening ourselves, but to cultivate a partner's capacity to be trusted with our vulnerability.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again is that our modern pursuit of a perfect, risk-free model for sex has paradoxically failed us. By placing the burden of perfect knowledge and communication on women, we have ignored the fundamental nature of desire itself: that it is often uncertain, emergent, and discovered only through vulnerable interaction. The solution is not more rigid rules, but a greater capacity for mutual care and a shared acceptance of the unknown.

The book leaves us with a challenging final thought, captured in Michel Foucault's wry phrase that gives the book its title: "Tomorrow sex will be good again." This isn't a simple promise, but a recognition of our ongoing, imperfect struggle for connection. It asks us to consider a profound shift in our approach to intimacy: what if we stopped performing certainty we don't have and instead learned to navigate the beautiful, frightening, and transformative territory of what we don't yet know, together?