Tomorrow sex will be good again

Megan Hustad: I’ll start with an overtly dumb or naive question: Why is knowing what we want important? Can we be mistaken about what we want and still live a beautiful life?

Katherine Angel: Knowing what we want is in one sense crucial—because it allows us to pursue something, and to express ourselves through that pursuit, if all goes well. Knowing what we want can also be crucial because it can protect us from other people imposing their desires on us.

However, we shouldn’t fetishize our self-knowledge about our own desires. Often, we want something, and then when we get it, we are disappointed, or we realize that striving after what we want didn’t ultimately fulfill us. Sometimes we pursue one desire, only to accidentally stumble upon something else that we had no idea we wanted, and that brings us tremendous joy. It’s vital that we don’t shut down that possibility—in sex and in life; knowing exactly what you want isn’t always a recipe for happiness, and not knowing can be an important step on the path to fulfillment and joy. That is not, of course, a reason for anyone to bully or coerce someone who may be vacillating in their desires.

One of your criticisms is that “consent culture” places the expectation on women (and especially young women) to know exactly what they want and to be able to articulate it confidently. Is this an unreasonable expectation? What damage does it do?

One of the arguments in my book is that, while consent is absolutely crucial, the rhetoric around it sometimes ends up placing the burden on women to know and articulate clearly their desires—as a way of protecting themselves from coercion, and of trying to keep themselves safe. I find this troubling for two reasons. The first is that asking women to confidently express their desires about sex asks them to do exactly what can make them vulnerable—given that women are slut-shamed for sexual enthusiasm, and given that their sexual desire is so often what gets invoked as evidence against women, and in favor of a man, in rape trials. So women are being asked to do precisely the thing that they know may endanger them further down the line.

The second reason is that it repeats what is such a deeply ingrained, yet iniquitous, pattern in our thinking about risk and pleasure: that it is women’s responsibility to keep themselves safe from violence by adopting particular behaviours or subjectivities. If a confident expression of sexual desire becomes something that we see as necessary for women to be safe, where does that leave the many women who are not able to take up this position? Are they not deserving of safety and respect too?

My feeling is that a lot of this rhetoric about having to know your desire and articulate it clearly comes primarily from a risk-management approach to sex, and from a desire to provide a form of insurance for men: she consented! But people, whatever their gender, do not necessarily know what they want from sex; we don’t always know what we want (and in fact part of the excitement and joy of sex, in the right conditions, is precisely this; the unpredictable unfolding of our desires and excitements). This needs to be a fact from which we start when we think about sexual ethics, rather than an inconvenient fact we brush under the carpet with a rhetoric of easy self-knowledge and confident speech.

What does changing one’s desires look like? Is it a matter of experimentation, of trying different things? Or is there no discernable pattern?

I don’t know that one can change one’s desires; but one’s desires can change. And perhaps that is only possible if we are open to it—and being open to it may require a certain modicum of safety; a place from which one can afford to take risks and open up to unpredictable desires. For many people, because of violence and inequality, that is a rare luxury.

One thing I’ve noticed in the online discussions about second-wave feminism, which spoke more to the dangers and injustices surrounding sex, and third-wave feminism, which tended toward sex-positivity, is that it’s hard for any commenter to avoid “should” territory—in essence saying prescribing certain paths forward, or even prescribing ideals for our private desires, both on an individual level and broader social, political level. But “should” is uncomfortable for lots of people. Our idealism and judgmentalism (of behavior or perspectives that don’t conform to the predominant ideals of our culture, our peers) get tangled up, and the rhetoric alienating for all parties. This is all supposed to be (there’s “should” again) deeply personal! What do you see as the most constructive way forward?

I feel very committed to the idea of individual privacy; of personal freedom; of the freedom to explore and express sexuality in the inevitably idiosyncratic ways in which it unfolds. But I also am very committed to the safety of women, and not just women, in those possibilities. The sad truth is that sexual culture does not make the exploration of individual desires equal; women bear the brunt of male violence and fear of that violence, with women of color, women with disabilities, trans women, women in precarious economic situations, disproportionately subject to violence. That can be very inhibiting to sexual flourishing. The most I could say is that we should strive—socially, politically, economically—to make life safer for vulnerable and marginalized people, so that individual flourishing and expansiveness could be more likely.

What do you make of the reports of Gen Z’s growing (we’re told) inclination to avoid sex altogether? As an American, I tend to think of my compatriots as chronic over-correctors—we swing from one “solution” to its near opposite, with equal enthusiasm. But this seems to be a global phenomenon.

It’s very interesting; I think that younger generations have a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety on their shoulders: a shaken global economy, the climate crisis, precarious work, and the all-consuming yet alienating world of social media. I don’t find the research that suggests a decline in sexual activity surprising; but I do think that sexuality manifests itself in myriad ways, and always finds a way through the cracks.

What’s more, notions of what counts as sex change; what some may not recognize as sex may amount to sex for others (what is sexting? co-watching pornography and masturbating?) Partly these are definitional matters. In a world that is moving ever further online, and younger generations more comfortable with mediated interactions (messaging rather than phone calls or in-person meetings, for instance), it’s no surprise that sex should change too.

What role does regret play in our personal development as adults? It’s often said that we tend to regret things not done, or paths not taken, more than actions we actually took. Do you think that’s true for sex as well? Or does the pain of bad sex, however anyone defines it, change the calculus?

Women suffer disproportionately from negative experiences of sex—sex that leaves them shaken, hurt, angry, upset. They also suffer far more with experiences of physical pain in sex. The bar is low in terms of what women expect from sex, and we have all, collectively, been far too indifferent or resigned to this (we assume first sex should be painful; we shrug our shoulders about humiliating experiences, dismissing them as “life”). Life is bumpy, yes, sex will not always be wonderful; but the rates of sexual dissatisfaction and unhappiness in women speaks to a serious problem; heterosexual men are raised to feel that sexual fulfillment is an entitlement, while women are expected to be resigned to bad sex. That is an injustice, and one which is self-fulfilling. Bad sex is a political problem that we should aiming, utopianly and seriously and joyfully, to eradicate!

After the great resignation, get into the mood for intimacy

You might be one of them: Nearly two-thirds of American workers are on the hunt for a new job—according to a new survey by PwC, nearly nine out of 10 company executives are seeing higher-than-normal turnover at their organizations. This “great resignation” is only one result of a global loneliness crisis that has now pushed burnout up to a systemic level, and reveals (some) organizations as ever more cold, “Dementor”-like places. No one—or certainly relatively few of us—wants to go back to work.

But for those of you still on the job, you’re not alone. And the task is loud and clear: get into the mood for intimacy. This goes beyond the mere ask for transparency and vulnerability, which usually doesn’t go further than a few “fuckup nights” and digital dashboards that promise transparency without context, and thus, don’t deliver much at all. But leaders who create, allow, and hold space for intimacy are poised to overcome the current sweeping people away from their workplaces—at least emotionally—and usher their organizations into the new pandemic world.

Here are three ideas on how to start:

Make the farewell as warm as the welcome

While “first days” are usually filled with much excitement and confetti, last days of working are usually awkward, either ending with a half-hearted speech and similarly half-hearted cake, or—even worse—with nothing but a black blinking computer screen and Google’s message that you no longer have access to your work email. Natasha Bernal writes in WIRED UK about a worker who waited for a going-away Zoom call that never came. “It made it very evident when you weren’t one of the people with the social weight to have credibility. And those two things should not be linked in a tech company. The sad leaving didn’t give me closure, but it gave me the anger I needed to put the nails in the coffin myself.” A farewell as warm as a welcome need not be a jubilant goodbye party, but simply a moment that acknowledges leave-taking as a real transition in someone’s life. Sincere expressions of gratitude can resonate for a long time afterward.

Have uncomfortably “irrelevant” conversations

Avoiding “uncomfortable conversations” can do a lot of harm. As Erin Overbey, the archives editor of the New Yorker, recently revealed—after years of exactly those kinds of conversations with her colleagues—the magazine has a history of “passive racism.” It’s not only overwhelmingly white, both in its editorial staff and among the leagues of writers who’ve contributed to the publication since its debut in 1925, but it’s also become less diverse in the past 30 years than it was in the past.

Overbey’s willingness to invite other people at the magazine to gossip about what was going on with race led her to discover some eye-opening statistics—and her posts on diversity have elicited many supportive comments from current and former colleagues.

Making space for conversations that range beyond business-as-usual can take you somewhere much deeper than you’d expect. Saying something uncomfortable out loud might not sound like something that creates more intimacy in organizations, but it can be a powerful, and more meaningful, force.

Talk about desires

Obvious, but often unpracticed in organizations. An obsession with customer profiles and needs does not necessarily create space for employees’ expressing and exploring their own desires. And yet, as author and Concrete Love contributor Luke Burgis suggests, this hesitation can profoundly foul up a practice organizations are typically far more at ease with, which is setting goals:

We hear a lot about goal-setting, but hardly anything about why we are so obsessed with goal-setting in the first place. Many of us relentlessly pursue goals—which we take for granted as good—without pausing to ask ourselves whether we should.​

There’s a meta dimension to goal-setting. What are the circumstances and environments out of which certain kinds of goals emerge? Where, or who, do we adopt our goals from in the first place? It turns out that there are systems of desire behind nearly every goal—from education to investing to social media—which generate and shape the goals of the people within the systems.

So it’s worth gently interrogating those desires before skipping ahead to the goals based upon them: What do we want for this organization? As a team, what are our shared desires, and how will we know when we’ve fulfilled them? What are some unfulfilled desires and perhaps taboo topics that we don’t talk about?

15 questions

1. What impact, if any, does your intimate life have on your work life?
2. What changes in your intimate life would make your career easier? harder?
3. Are you in love?
4. If not, when was the last time you were in love?
5. Do you expect to fall in love again?
6. Do you expect to fall in lust again?
7. If not, is that an absence that brings joy or sadness?
8. Is singleness undervalued?
9. Is celibacy underrated?
10. What is unrequited love good for?
11. Would it be odd, in your workplace, for someone to say, “I love you”?
12. How can you communicate you care for someone without telling them directly that you care for them?
13. Do you know any of your coworkers’ love languages?
14. How often do you compliment your coworkers?
15. Would any more than that feel awkward or liberating?