Desire in the age of consent w/Katherine Angel

We talk to the author of "Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again" about choice and desire in the #MeToo era, and the burden on women to know what they want.

– By Editorial Staff – Tuesday, 9th March 2021

In the era of #MeToo, it’s assumed that the empowered woman can and must express her desires clearly. But in her new book Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again, Katherine Angel argues that this an unreasonable burden to place upon women. In this seventh episode of With Reason, she explains why to Niki and Samira as they ask: How do we make sex good again, while attending to power and violence? What do we risk in speaking out about sex? And how can we do good research into our innermost wants and desires?

A discussion about sex and pleasure, feminism and consent. For readers of Susie Orbach, Vanessa Springora, Emilie Witt and Michel Foucault.

Presenters: Niki Seth-Smith and Samira Shackle

Producer: Alice Bloch

Music: Danosongs

Photo: Matthew Sperling

Podcast listeners can get a year's subscription to New Humanist magazine for just £13.50. Head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the code WITHREASON

Transcript

Niki Seth-Smith:

Hi there and welcome to Season Two of With Reason from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association with me, Niki Seth-Smith…

Samira Shackle:

… and me Samira Shackle. This is the podcast where you’ll find bright critical thinking to enlighten our sometimes murky times, a place where we meet new and established thinkers alike to talk about their work and explore matters of belief and disbelief, reason and unreason, dogma and debate. In this series we will bring you writers and academics who have explored things like immigration and empathy, mortality and care, science and mental health. And next week, we’ll explore the overlap of politics, religion and activism with the sociologist Rosie Hancock who will be joining us from Sydney.

But today, we’re hearing a conversation that you recorded Niki with Katherine Angel, all about sex, desire and consent. I’ll be back for a chat with you at the end of the show. But before I sit back and enjoy listening, tell us a bit about Katherine.

NSS:

So Katherine has a PhD in the history of psychiatry and sexuality. She's also the director of the MA in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck. And her first book Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell drew attention and praise for its sharp exploration of pleasure, grief and pain. Her next book, Daddy Issues, looked at the places of fathers in contemporary culture, and now her eagerly awaited latest book is out.

Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again: Women And Desire In The Age of Consent. It's a provocative exploration of women's pleasure, autonomy and imagination in the 21st century. And crucially, it's a nuanced investigation into the subject of consent. Consent came sharply into the spotlight around three years ago when the MeToo movement gained global momentum following allegations made against Harvey Weinstein.

So when I met up with Katherine, I started by asking how a book relates to that movement could have been written without me too.

Katherine Angel:

I think in a sense, it could have been written without MeToo, in the sense that lots of the elements of the book were in place in my mind before it. But MeToo was a kind of catalyst for the book, because I had a lot of mixed feelings about MeToo. On the one hand, I felt that it was a really important reckoning with abuses of power. But I felt ambivalent about it, because I felt that we were in danger of missing the opportunity that it might present. Partly because in the wake of it, I kept seeing lots of reiterations of the importance of consent – which, you know, is absolutely the case. But these reiterations, I felt were risking overlooking some really complex problems to do with sexuality and to do with personhood, that if we're going to stand a chance of improving sex between men and women, we need to address.

NSS:

Obviously, like you said – you felt ambivalent, in some ways towards the way the MeToo movement played out, but the book absolutely acknowledges the importance of building a culture of consent in order to reduce sexual violence. But it also interrogates the idea that it's simply a matter of yes or no. So why is it important to look at that complicated nature of consent and interrogate that yes or no binary?

KA:

The emphasis has often been placed on the idea that, you know, ‘Yes means yes’ and ‘No means no’. And, you know, lots of people have talked about how complicated that is precisely because of the double standard, right? So, first of all, it's difficult sometimes for women to say no, because they fear the aggression that might come their way from men who don't want to be refused sex. But it's also difficult for women to say yes, again, precisely because of what might come their way. So in these reiterations of consent (and you know, there's tremendous amounts of amazing consent education that happens, and that needs to keep on going and I'm fully supportive of that) but I was noticing a lot of statements in popular discourse, in journalism, about consent, that really placed the burden on women to be clear about their sexual desire, so to know their sexual desire, and then to be able to express it clearly and confidently. And this is often framed as one of the really important routes out of the possibility of coercion and the possibility of misunderstandings.

And my concern with that is twofold. The first is that it can be very difficult for women to say an enthusiastic yes to sex or to say ‘this is what I want’, or ‘yes, I do want sex’, because they know that those very statements of confidence and sexual desire can come back and be used against them in courts of law, and we see that all the time in rape trials. So being told to be assertive and enthusiastic, enthusiastically consent-giving, seems to deny something which we all know about what life is like for women. But secondly, it can be also difficult for women to know what it is that they want. Partly because we live in a sexual culture which punishes sexual desire.

So I feel very preoccupied by the kind of disjunction between on the one hand, this very sort of sex positive, you have to be a good, assertive, sexual subject in order to forestall the violence that might come your way; while on the other hand, knowing that that's exactly what you might be haunted by, in the future. And I'm very disturbed by this kind of split in our minds about that. And part of the argument of the book is that if we really want to take sexual violence seriously, and sexual pleasure, seriously, we have to really incorporate into our accounts of it, those dynamics, instead of just wishing them away.

NSS:

I just want to really kind of dig into this idea. You use the phrase, ‘the conceit of absolute clarity’, placing an unfair burden on women? Can you give examples of that? Are there particular, I don't know, examples in popular culture of where women are sort of asked to absolutely know their minds?

KA:

Sure. I mean, I've seen a lot and, you know, a lot of the kind of journalism after MeToo, or around MeToo. You know, phrases like ‘know your desire and know your partner's desire’, or ‘we have a duty to know what we want and be frank about it, if we want good sex’, you know, and in sort of sex education, some kind of rhetoric about that. And I have sympathy with that, because it is pragmatically true, perhaps, because, you know, we live in this very complicated sexual culture, that clarity is often really important. But why is it important? That's what I'm interested in thinking about. And one of the reasons it's important, is so that we make it harder for men to use uncertainty against us. I'm trying to kind of raise the bar on that conversation and say, wouldn't it be great if women didn't have to be really absolute about what they want, or whether they want sex, in order to expect not to be sexually assaulted or pushed or bullied or coerced?

NSS:

Yes. So this old slogan of ‘No means no’, it can be an overly simplistic one. And it also frames the woman as passive – consenting to or denying a proposition put forward by the man. But there is a new term, a new idea, around ‘enthusiastic consent’ that sort of seeks to get around some of these problems. Can you maybe talk about those two slogans or ways of addressing the problem?

KA:

Sure. So a lot of activism around sexual violence, especially in the 7’0s, really concentrated on the idea of ‘No means no’ – which is, of course, absolutely the case, you know, if somebody says ‘no’, you have to respect that ‘no’. But the move to affirmative consent was a move towards thinking about sex as more relational and more about a kind of mutual agreement to something. It was also part of changes in legal thinking around definitions of rape, consent, not just being about the absence of a ‘no’ but consent being about wanting something.

So affirmative consent, and this focus that resulted from it on women saying yes to sex, was about recognizing that you should be interested in the other person's desire and sex, which I think is obviously a good thing. And broadly speaking, I think affirmative consent has been a really, really important move. I think what has become problematic is that the notion of consent has become increasingly conflated with sexual desire itself. And you see this in the attempt to talk about consent as sexy or emphasizing enthusiastic consent. And the reason for that is, I think (again it’s understandable), it's about wanting to think about women not just as the people who weigh up sex and agree to it. So not just a vision of men as the ones who want sex and women as the ones who might yield up sex to them, but thinking about women as having sexual desire themselves, and perhaps wanting sex and actively enthusiastically pursuing it.

The problem with that is that the conflation of consent with enthusiasm and desire and sexual appetite is actually very tricky. And I think it works against women. First of all, because there needs to be a meaningful distinction between agreement to sex, and desire and pleasure and sex. Because there are lots of people who agree to sex, for example, for money and sex work, but also for all kinds of other reasons, who agree to sex because they feel they have no choice. And that has to be meaningfully distinguished from pleasure, because otherwise, women are in a worse position because then their sexual desire is read into their agreement. And as we know, sadly, that is often not the case. And we should In fact be not overloading our notions of consent and not putting all our hope and energy into a legal concept. It’s very important that we should be thinking about what makes sex pleasurable and good and safe for women. And how can we increase that?

NSS:

And that leads on to my next question, because I absolutely love the title of this book. It's just wonderfully sort of intriguing and provocative. And as you explained, that phrase actually comes from the 1967 book The Will to Knowledge by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. What did that phrase mean for Foucault? And what does it mean for your book?

KA:

For Foucault, I think it was a very wry phrase in this incredibly sardonic and playful book that he was writing, in kind of oblique opposition, I would say, to the countercultural movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, where there was a real faith being placed partly in psychoanalysis and also in Marxism as the roots out of sexual repression. So it was a reading of this kind of possible future with the tools to un-repress ourselves, and to emancipate ourselves from social oppression. And that these tools would finally kind of reveal this ‘better tomorrow’ where we would just be free from the shackles around sexuality.

And Foucault was kind of very sceptical of that, partly because he didn't really believe that historical narrative of the past being full of repression, and the present being on the cusp of this fantasised free world. So it's a book that I find incredibly sort of provocative and fruitful, partly because it has this sceptical, playful relationship to optimism. And I think that part of what I was trying to do in my book was, you know, grapple with my own feelings of pessimism, competing with optimism about a better sexual world for women, because we absolutely do not live in a world of good sex for women. And I wanted to point out how we have to be very careful about investing certain concepts with such a weight of hope, which is what I think we do with consent. We also do that with sex research. So I wanted to use that phrase to say: let's be very careful about what we think are the roots out of our difficulties in sexual culture.

NSS:

And I guess one of the things he was doing was sort of mocking that countercultural idea that as long as we talk freely, we will automatically be liberated. And you discuss in the book the nervousness you felt personally, first on publishing your book Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult To Tell, which came out in 2012, and was quite intimate and personal drawing on your own desire and your own sex life. So did you feel that you were making yourself vulnerable in writing that book? And I guess, also: how does that apply or not apply to this latest work of yours?

KA:

Yeah, that was another aspect of Foucault's work that I find really provocative. And I reflect on it a bit in that first book, Unmastered, as well, because that was a book that was very self-consciously using a kind of personal voice, to grapple with these questions of power, and how you know what you want, and whether exploring your own sexual desire is inevitably to put you in danger. And I played around with other quotes of his in that book, too. And I think that, you know, I was also thinking about this question of speech, in relation to consent. And in relation to MeToo, because it seems to me that the burden of speech lies on women and the burden to resolve sexual violence lies on women. We have to speak out about things that are done to us in public forums, about sexual violence in order to solve this problem. And we have to then speak out about our own sexual desire very clearly. So that we can expect not to be sexually coerced. But that speech is dangerous. It does come back to haunt us, it gets read out in trials. And that, you know, that dynamic is one that really has preoccupied me throughout everything that I've written, and it was there in Unmastered. And it is there in this book, you know, in the content of the argument. But yes, I think it's always there as a question, you know, if any woman in the public realm says anything, it brings all kinds of hostility and aggression towards you.

NSS:

Well we're very thankful that this didn't deter you from continuing to write about sex and desire. We're going to take a short break, and we'll be back with you in a moment. You're listening to With Reason. We're hearing from Katherine Angel about her new book Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again, and what it means to write about sex and desire in the 21st century. With Reason is brought to you by New Humanist magazine where I'm deputy.

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SS:

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NSS:

Back now to today's conversation, where I'm talking to Katherine Angel, who is author of Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again. So far today, we've talked about the question of consent, and how the obligation to say exactly what we want puts an unfair burden on women to know our minds.

And Katherine, this leads on to a deeper question around desire and that tricky terrain of sex research. Sex research, as you've shown in your book, is a peculiar and quite controversial field. And there's something actually quite bizarre about sticking a woman in a lab in clinical test conditions and expecting that environment not to influence the results, isn't there?

KA:

Absolutely. It's a really kind of fascinating and sometimes quite surreal area where sex researchers are doing really interesting work in trying to understand, you know, mechanisms of arousal, for instance, in women's bodies, and trying to understand some of the mysteries and complexities of human sexuality. I'm sceptical about some of that work, or at least I'm sceptical about the uses to which it's put, because while I think a lot of these researchers are very mindful of the minefield, some of this research gets taken up in very kind of clunky ways.

NSS:

So lets’ now look at the findings. Recent research seems to associate women with what is called ‘responsive desire’, while men are associated with ‘spontaneous desire’. Can you explain the difference between those two terms?

KA:

So the research I talked about in the book is focused around a psychologist called Rosemary Basson, who's done this very interesting work, and it's sort of its clinical work with patients. And that led her to kind of elaborate a model of sexual desire that she calls responsive. And she started kind of publishing around this stuff around 2000, the early 2000s. And a lot of it, I think, was in relation to Viagra. And the attempts to find a drug for women that was equivalent to Viagra, and the classifications of sexual dysfunctions in the kind of psychiatric manuals in the US.

And a lot of psychologists, a lot of them women, were arguing that the way in which sexual function and sexual desire was understood in these manuals, and that was being picked up by pharmaceutical companies for research, assumes this really linear model of sexuality, where you feel desire, you know, desire is just the thing that spontaneously arises, you then become aroused, and then ultimately, you reach orgasm. And a lot of these women were arguing that this just doesn't really fit how women experience their own sexual desire. For women, it seems to be more of the case that they might not experience this kind of urgent sense of sexual desire and the kind of fantasies about wanting sex now that we associate very much with men, but that women might instead be interested in sex. And this is my phrase, this isn't Rosemary Basson’s phrase, but sort of come around to sex. So they might not feel desperately in want of sex. But if their partner approaches them, and the conditions feel right, then they might start to feel sexually aroused. And it's the arousal that then builds desire. So she actually talks about sexual desire being ‘arousal in context’.

NSS:

That’s a fascinating model, I think, and it seems like a useful concept and a useful different framework to look at sex with. But it does also seem to make quite a huge distinction between average male desire and average female desire. I mean, do you think there's something maybe a bit problematic about that?

KA:

Yeah, absolutely. That's where my kind of concern comes in. Really, the worry is that this distinction ends up reifying this notion of a quite essential differences between male and female sexuality where women are understood as kind of evaluating and responding to their context. Whereas men just have a have deep biological drive. And I'm not saying that that's exactly what Rosemary Basson would say, because I think her own work is kind of a bit equivocal on that question. But some of the language around this, especially in the sort of classifications of sexual dysfunctions now, in the psychiatric manuals, the language around male and female desire is now very different. So men have disorders of sexual desire, whereas women have disorders of interest and arousal.

And I'm very interested in this language and how it reinscribes, actually, a very kind of long held and popular idea of men as having sex drives, and women as weighing up that interest in sex. And also, you know, their sort of pragmatic interest in sex. So there's a lot of writing about how women will kind of be interested in sex because they want to feel close to someone, or they want to, you know, get other kinds of goods or aims out of sex. So it's a kind of more rational, weighing up of other desires that they have. And that may be true, you know, I think empirically, there is something to this model. So in terms of, you know, just the vagaries of individual lives. And you know, Cynthia Graham has done some interesting research about how women identify with different models of sexuality at different points in their life, depending on what's going on. And there's a lot of psychologists who, you know, really emphasize the fact that the context for sexual desire is political, it's about how much housework you do, it’s about whether you're subject to domestic violence, it's about whether you've experienced sexual trauma in the past.

So there's a way of thinking about this stuff that I think is very rich, my worry is, when it kind of gets boiled down to this idea of a really primal difference between male and female sexuality that ends up again, you know, legitimating coercion, because people have written, for instance, about the notion of kind of heterosexual labour that women do to preserve their relationship: they weigh up sex, and they maybe give up sex, because they want to keep the relationship going. And we have to be very careful not to reinscribe those different notions of kind of work within relationship and where they might open the door to coercion.

NSS:

Absolutely. And we've been talking about the male, female, binary more broadly, but there's also queer desire. And I wonder how that maps into everything that we've been talking about?

KA:

Well, a lot of the sex research that I was looking at, and that is published, is very heterosexual in its focus – partly, I think, because some of it is really motivated by these questions of difference between men and women, you know. There is research into queer desire, and you know, gay women's relationships to arousal and to pornography. And some of that is very, very interesting. And, you know, a lot of the research on gay women is that they experience a lot more sexual pleasure than straight women. And that, you know, that really is a constant issue in the research that is obviously really kind of sobering for straight women. But I do think that some of the focus of that research, whether it knows it or not, is preoccupied with the question of how do women desire if they don't desire like men? And sometimes the cultural response to that question is to try to get women to be more like men or, you know, we tend to think that to be emancipated as women, must necessarily be to have sexual desire in the same way as men, so to have lust and to go out and pursue sex actively.

And this is where it links up with the consent conversation, because we think that if we're going to be sexually free, and also sexually safe and get pleasure, we somehow need to embody this very kind of, you know, thrusting, confident, sexual ideal. And I think that sets us up to fail. And, you know, analogously, in relation to the question of these models of sexual desire, I have real worries about some of this reification of women as kind of essentially responsive. But I also think that they're onto something, because we are all responsive creatures. We never desire in relation to nothing. Men don't desire totally spontaneously, they grow up in a sexual culture, which elicits their sexual desire. And that's why thinking about the context is really valuable. Because if you look at the context of women's sexual lives and men's sexual lives, they are very different. So no wonder their sexuality is expressed differently.

NSS:

We’ve talked about how the lab conditions might skew the data. But there's also the problem that when people self-report, say in studies or sexual attitudes surveys, that we know that they often fudge the truth, whether that's subconsciously or explicitly, and that social stigma seems to play a big part. For example, women seem to underreport or have historically underreported the number of sexual encounters they've had. And so I guess the question is: if both of those methods are flawed, both the lab study method and the self-reportage, then what do we do?

KA:

Yeah, I think that's the question, isn't it? I mean, part of the argument in the book is that we need to be really sceptical about approaches to sexuality that buy into the body as the truth teller. So, you know, the idea that we can sort of examine physiological processes and draw conclusions based on that, I think is really, really dangerous, partly because that is to overlook an individual woman's subjectivity. And when it comes to sex, we really have to listen to what women say, you know. They may be physically aroused, but women experience physical arousal in sexual assault. So what do we really want to read from sexual, you know, from physical arousal? We have to be really careful about that.

You know, one step from that scepticism is to say that women themselves have the authority on their sexual desire. And there's part of me that wants to endorse that because, I mean, no one else is the authority on an individual’s sexual desire. But I also really want to open up the possibility that none of us are authorities on our sexual desire. And that to ask women to hold to that standard, in order to be safe from sexual violence, is to base our sexual ethics on a lie. And that lie will always come back against women. So you know, sexuality is something that we discover, we are sometimes surprised by our own desire. Sometimes we don't know that we want something, sometimes we think we want something and then we don't. It's a constant process of unfolding. Of course, the million dollar question is: how can we create a sexual culture where that exploration isn't a source of danger for us? But I don't think the answer to that is to ask women to be some kind of fully self-knowing subject.

NSS:

And talking about how to change society's attitudes to desire, I mean, one of the big issues with that is sex education. And we wondered if we could discuss this piece from the New Humanist archive that we've sent you to have a read, that resonates with what we've been discussing here. And it's quite a frank and thought provoking piece from back in 2004. So it's by Sally Feldman, former editor at BBC Radio 4’s woman's hour. She's now a senior fellow at Westminster University. And she also happens to be an associate editor at New Humanist.

So Sally's piece is titled ‘Why I'm Glad My Daughter Had Under-age Sex’. And in it, she writes that I don't want my children to regard sex merely as a jungle full of deadly dangers, mind with disease and punishment. But I wondered what you made of Feldman's reflections specifically regarding girls and young teenagers.

KA:

I really liked this piece. I thought it was, it was really interesting, partly because she allows herself ambivalence, I suppose about sexual politics, and also about being a mother of a daughter. So she, at one point, I think she talks about having sort of campaigned for various progressive causes around sex, but also being, you know, very sobered by her own anxiety as her daughter was growing up. And I think that's such a powerful dynamic, whether you're a parent or not. I think that in a way that is the dynamic isn't it, we want people to experience sexual pleasure and joy and you know, the adventure of those experiences, but we know that women and girls – and not just women and girls, men are subject to sexual violence too – we live in a culture that is full of sexual disrespect and displeasure, you know, that putting sexual violence aside, even just the lack of pleasure that women experience from sex, their low expectations, their rates of pain, and lack of orgasm (not that orgasm is the be all and end all but you know, as part of sexual pleasure) it's really, really sobering. And so I liked a lot her acknowledgement of that kind of tension. But I also really liked the way she was committed to the idea of, you know ….. teenage sexuality is something that, it can be very easy given the risks that are out there, it can be very easy to want to resolve that by closing sexuality down and by endorsing a form of protection that is also a way of, you know, caging people in.

NSS:

It was written some time ago and it talks about teen girl magazines – obviously they still exists and teenagers still read them. But we're also in a different era where social media and influencers play a bigger part. Do you have any kind of thoughts on the sort of current culture around how young girls and teenagers today learn about sex? Or, you know, what's good? What's bad, what could be better?

KA:

I think it's really, really difficult. She talks in the piece, at one point, about a magazine that was giving quite sort of detailed advice about a particular sexual practice. I think it was a guide to oral sex. And it reminded me of recent kind of furores around, was it Teen Vogue? That had guidance on anal sex? And, you know, I think it's true that the sexual culture has changed in recent decades, and the internet has changed everything. And, and it's foolish to deny that. And it's also changed sexual lives, I mean, Natsal - the big [sexual attitudes] study - has shown a real increase, for instance, in anal sex among younger age groups. And, you know, there have been complicated questions about the relationship to pornography. And you know, how young people are encountering sex primarily through pornography, and mostly having totally inadequate sex education.

And my feeling is that sex education needs to start very early, it needs to be really thorough, and people need information, because the fact is, people have sex, that's not going to change, and they have bad and good experiences, and we need to give them information. But I think the really tricky thing is – and it's also related to why I think especially in the US, the burden has fallen so heavily on the notion of consent – is that people are very, very anxious about talking about pleasure, especially in relation to children. And for obvious reasons, because we don't want children to be exploited. And we don't want children to be pushed into things when they're not ready. But not talking to children, and especially not talking to women about pleasure, does no-one any favours, because if you raise women with very, very little expectation of pleasure, then what other expectations do they have. And if you're raising men to not care about women's pleasure, women are not going to get any pleasure, and they're much more likely to also internalise and be resigned to coercive, painful experiences. So I think it's absolutely important that you know, sex education, but also the culture, addresses women's pleasure and addresses young women's pleasure. But obviously, that's very scary for us. And I understand that fear.

NSS:

Oh that has been such a thought-provoking conversation. Thank you so much. That was Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow, Sex Will Be Good Again. Thank you so much again.

KA:

Thank you, I really enjoyed talking.

NSS:

So Samira, you've been quietly listening along, and I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts for us to discuss. So what did you find particularly interesting about that conversation?

SS:

I think the thing that really jumped out at me, something I kind of thought about before and not maybe been able to put into words in that way, was about this idea, the idea of consent. And the difficulty being that we don't always necessarily know what we want, and what we want might evolve and change. And, you know, while it's a very sort of appealing and positive sounding idea, this idea of enthusiastic consent, and the idea that we would be sort of very confident, or knowing sexual beings, that just often really isn't the case. Any kind of interpersonal interaction is often riven with doubt, and insecurity, and lack of certainty and changes. And particularly in the case of women, I think we're often socialised to not really engage very directly with our own desire. So it's quite difficult to jump from that to sort of immediately being able to state very confidently what you want, in all situations, say, I thought that was very well put.

NSS:

It reminded me of this meme that goes round about having the cup of tea. It's like, you know, you can't sort of offer someone a cup of tea, and then they say, yes, and then when they don't want that cup of tea, you sort of pour it on their head. Which is funny, and it kind of makes that point of, you know, that consent is a continual process: it's not just ‘Yes’, and then, you know, we're all ‘Go’ and there's no problems. But it's also like, sex isn't a cup of tea, you know? Sort of making everything out to be incredibly simple when it's not. And I think that that the book does that really well, and Katherine does that really well, showing the nuance of it.

SS:

It’s interesting, you started the conversation talking about the MeToo movement, which was obviously incredibly significant and powerful and lots of really brave women speaking about difficult experiences, but I thought that it was good that she spoke about her sort of complicated feelings about that, which I think lots of people probably shared, and I certainly did. And I thought, I was interested to hear her talking about rape trials and cases and the way in which a woman's words can be used against her and I thought it was it was great that she was marrying those two things together: the more positive side of it and making sex enjoyable and safe, and also the kind of often more negative, grim, legal side and criminal side.

I've been really disturbed in the last couple of years reading about the way that rape cases are often handled in the legal system. I think the Victim Commissioner last year said that rape has effectively been decriminalized in the UK, because just so few cases make it to trial or get prosecutions. Then you see all sorts of things like taking victims phones and combing through their text messages, and their words being used against them, and similarly with therapy sessions and transcripts and notes being used to get the cases thrown out. So that is a very explicit way in which women's words are used against them. And something they've expressed in a private correspondence is sort of used to prevent them being seen as a victim or to sort of take away their ability to say no as it were, in the eyes of the law.

NSS:

Yeah, it's really shocking how those incredibly personal intimate expressions are used against people. And I guess yeah, that's why I thanked Katherine, for being – I mean, obviously, this is a different case – but as she said, it feels dangerous, and it feels uncomfortable to talk about sex as women, so that was just fantastic to have such a frank and honest conversation.

So next week, we'll be talking to the Sydney-based sociologist Rosie Hancock about religion and politics. That's a conversation about where faith and activism blur, and it's also about environmentalism in the context of religion and humanist belief.

SS:

Remember, you can find reading lists and transcripts for all episodes of With Reason on the New Humanist website. And if you head to newhumanist.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code With Reason you can get yourself a whole year's subscription to the magazine for just £13.50 – that means four beautiful print magazines delivered straight to your door.

NSS:

This podcast was presented by me, Niki Seth-Smith, with Samira Shackle. The executive producer was Alice Bloch and the sound engineer was David Crackles. See you back here soon. Goodbye.

Desire in the age of consent w/Katherine Angel

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