Help Thinking About Consent on a Nuanced, Meta-Level
An interview with Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Consent is a complicated topic, despite often being presented in black-and-white terms. This can be true not just of the sex itself, but also its emotional aftermath and consequences. For instance, how might we express our ambivalence about sexual experiences that we’re not sure constitute assault, but were harmful nonetheless? What are the pressures to come forward with your story in a “post-MeToo world” — to put a clear label on your experience, or to assign blame?
To delve into these and many other questions on my podcast Help Existing, I spoke with a writer and thinker I really admire: Katherine Angel, author of the fantastic book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent. Our conversation was wide-ranging, nuanced, and perhaps a bit controversial.
I use a scene for my memoir Open to talk about these themes with Katherine, so a warning that if you haven’t read the book yet, this interview will contain spoilers of a pretty pivotal scene. And of course, also a content warning that this episode discusses sexual assault, both in the abstract and in personal detail.
I know this conversation really helped me put some different lenses on what happened to me that night, and also around how I think about consent and telling my story moving forward. I hope it is useful to you in some way as well.(You can also find a print version of our interview here, on The Millions.)
