Celia WALDEN
Covid killed off your libido? A new book can help you rediscover desire, hears Celia Walden
As soon as lockdown lifts, I will be reading Katherine Angel’s new book in cafés and on park benches – if only to enjoy the look on people’s faces. Just imagine the curiosity that the title, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again – a sardonic quote borrowed from the French philosopher Michel Foucault – would prompt. When did sex stop being good and why? Was it when the pandemic-hit British libido fell off a cliff, plunging the country into what experts are now calling “a sex recession”? If so, how can we possibly hope to make it good again… by tomorrow?
Angel’s book wasn’t actually written in response to our virus-hit world, but the trio of forces that rocked female sexuality well before the pandemic: Metoo, fourth-wave feminism (which began around 2012) and the issue of consent. Her eloquent and lucid analysis of the bind women now find themselves in is thoughtprovoking, and a little depressing. Because once you add the devastation wreaked by Covid to the mix, the most basic and pleasurable act two human beings can perform suddenly seems unbearably fraught.
“Sex has always been complicated,” Angel assures me from the study at Birkbeck, University of London where the 44-year-old teaches critical and creative writing. “It’s not as though there was ever a sexual utopia. But it is inflected by far more variables now, and Covid has only intensified issues there already.
“Because whereas some have reacted with defiance to the challenges we are now facing, for many the virus has only intensified an existing anxiety around sexual risk. Had the pandemic already hit when I was writing the book, I would have focused more on that split.”
It’s a split that’s now starker than ever, says the Belgian-born specialist in female sexual dysfunction whose first book, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, detailed her own sexual life and tastes in a way one reviewer described as “painfully intimate”.
On the one hand, you have the monogamous women Angel sees as “struggling with desire, because we’re living this siphoned-off existence where we’re around each other too much”. Women so desperate to reignite their love lives that sales of a “female Viagra” named Elle Sera were recently revealed to have soared. And on the other, you have “the single women, who are under such pressure not to have any kind of physical intimacy, both in terms of health risks and the Government’s rules, which will have been unimaginably hard”.
The experts agree, with one human rights lawyer, Susie Alegre, urging the Government to insert a “casual sex clause” in the lockdown exit roadmap. “Because remember that casual sex never shed its ‘risky’ reputation for women, even before Covid,” Angel points out, “yet they have just as much of a right to it as men do.”
We’ve arguably been through a second sexual revolution since the author published Unmastered in 2012, yet Angel is as sceptical of the movements commonly cited as beneficial to women now as Foucault was in his 1976 The History of Sexuality, when the philosopher questioned whether the first sexual revolution really would melt away repression and liberate whole cultures.
She still has mixed feelings about Metoo, for one thing – “despite it undoubtedly being a hugely cathartic, affirmative moment for many women” – “because it relies on the idea that if women speak out about their sexual desire, trauma, shame or humiliation this will inevitably lead to progress, when we know it doesn’t work that way. Women have been telling their stories and displaying their most painful moments for years, but sexual violence has not decreased.”
Michaela Coel’s provocative BBC drama I May Destroy You was the perfect examination of that paradox, Angel says. “Because the weak and vulnerable female figure is really uncomfortable to us now, so there is a feeling of needing to triumph over sexual assault. But why should you have to become a hero just because a guy didn’t respect your body?” Although Angel understands why women are now “seeking redress” by telling their stories, “because they are not served well either by the law or the criminal justice system, and we do want to have our pain heard”, she asks us to question who this ultimately serves. “And I’m not sure it serves women as a whole.”
Far from being liberated by their honesty, the author writes about the additional “burden” Metoo and fourth-wave feminism has placed on women to be outspoken. She has the same issue with “consent”, the more communicative model of sexuality that has increasingly been touted as an answer to sexual assault and exploitation.
“People need to be taught about consent from a very young age, and I’m completely behind consent campaigns. But my worry is in the rhetoric around it, just as it is in the rhetoric around Metoo. Again, the burden is on women to always know what they want, and be able to vocalise it. As if that’s always possible in a culture that often makes us feel ashamed of sexual desire.”
In Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Angel quotes Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna Rotunno, who said in a 2020 interview: “Women need to be very clear about their intentions” and be “prepared for the circumstances they put themselves in”. And while many may see this as common-sensical, Angel is right to point out that “this puts the responsibility firmly on women to be clear and therefore pre-empt any later problems. But isn’t the answer to ‘Did you take enough precautions not to get raped?’ always going to be ‘No’? And, in any case, not every woman is confident enough to state things in such a clear way to be sexually safe. It’s not a fair bargain.”
The concept of “confidence feminism” is another misnomer Angel addresses. I’d never come across the term – coined by Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad in 2017 – but I know exactly to what it refers: the recent brand of Instagram-style feminism that suggests misogyny can be quashed by a Spice Girl snarl, a “you go, girl” stance (on every issue du jour), an ability always to “lean in” and a loud-and-proud sexuality.
The whole narrative, says Angel, is not only fundamentally dishonest, but narcissistic. “If the idea of individual confidence gets conflated with feminism as a movement, and to be a feminist has to mean being strong and powerful enough to overcome your sexist boss and the guy who groped you, then it means that you don’t have to think about the bigger female issues or the larger power structures or the women who live in countries where they don’t have any legal rights. It’s a form of feminism that relies on economic and social privilege.”
Angel has a Zoom tutorial to teach, but before I let her go, I’m curious to know one last thing. Has years of researching, writing and talking about sex killed the act itself for her? “No,” she says with a laugh. “Even after all this time, I still think sex is a really weird and mysterious force. If anything, I’m more fascinated by it than ever.”
A trio of forces have rocked female sexuality: Metoo, feminism and consent
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel (RRP £10.99). Buy now for £9.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514