Katherine Angel - Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent

Tomorrow Sex Will
Be Good Again

Tomorrow Sex Will
Be Good Again

Women and Desire in
the Age of Consent

Katherine Angel

First published by Verso 2021

Katherine Angel 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-916-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-918-4 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-919-1 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020948729

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

For Allie, Cassie, Mitzi, and Sasha

I do not find it helpful to present her or indeed any woman as either on top of or succumbing to her demons, as though her only options were triumph or defeat (a military vocabulary which could not be further from her own).

Jacqueline Rose, Respect: Marilyn
Monroe, Women in Dark Times

Contents

Sometime in the early 2010s, the porn actor James Deen made a film with a fan whom he called Girl X. He would do this now and then; fans would write to him, wanting to have sex with him, or he would put out a call to Do a Scene with James Deen, and the results would go up on his website. In an interview in April 2017, only a few months before the media would be overwhelmed with discussions of assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein and others and only two years after Deen himself was accused of (but not charged with) multiple assaults he said:

I have a Do a Scene with James Deen contest, where women can submit an application, and then, after a very long talk and months of me saying, you know, Everyones going to find out, its going to affect your future, and basically trying to talk them out of it kind of, then we shoot a scene.

Little of the Girl X video in fact involves sex. It is mostly a long, flirtatious, fraught conversation, which circles repeatedly back to whether or not they are going to do this: have sex, film it, and put it online. Girl X hesitates; she moves between playfulness and retreat; she is game, then agonized; she lurches ahead, then stalls. She is torn, reflective and self-questioning. She thinks her dilemmas out loud, and Deen tries to follow along.

She presumably wants to do a scene with James Deen, but when he opens the door to her, she appears to lose some nerve. She walks into the apartment, dressed in PVC leggings, a buttoned-up silk cream blouse with black detail our gaze is behind the camera, with Deen, filming her and paces around in agitation, laughing a high-pitched, nervous laugh, saying Oh my God, oh my God. We catch glimpses of the space its generically anonymous: sparkling surfaces, lots of pale wood and then glimpses of him as he puts the camera down: distressed jeans, big white trainers. He occasionally brings the camera up to her face; she turns away. He teases her youre a college girl, youre smart and shit as they move back and forth in the kitchen, with its gleaming central island, in the corridor with its bright white dado rails and deep red walls. He asks what she wants to be called; she doesnt answer. Well, he says, Im going to call you Girl X, until you decide what your name is.

Shes skittish, nervous I cant even look at you moving away, moving in. She sits down at a shiny chrome table, on a white bench. They discuss a contract; the footage fades out we are not privy to the details. It fades back in, and she takes a selfie. Shes about to sign, but then she stops and says, What am I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life? She can back out at any stage, he says; they can rip the contract up. More fading in and out; we see her sign. We can figure out a stage name later, he says, unless you just want to be Girl X? I dont know, she says in a reluctant drawl, I have no idea, Ive never done this.

Girl Xs nervousness works to flatter Deen its a sign of her awe at meeting this huge, improbable star. But it also works to preempt any repercussions she may be fearing; to undermine what might be taken by Deen, by others, as exhibitionism as asking, perhaps, for trouble. She is readying herself for exposure.

Girl X is doing something geared towards the hungry gaze of others, something she imagines will excite and satisfy a spectator including, perhaps, the one inside herself, the one who wants to watch herself having sex with Deen. But when she asks What am I doing with my life? What the fuck am I doing with my life? I feel her imagining, too, the gaze of another kind of spectator, a sterner one, a censorious one. Both these spectators the one egging her on, and the one admonishing her are most likely internalized within Girl X, as they are within many women: the spectator we are primed to satisfy, and the spectator whose disapproval and reprisal we are afraid to provoke. Girl X is reckoning with the spectators inside her head, and with the power of spectacle itself.

She is the impulsive seeker after pleasure; she is also alienated, self-conscious, and inhibited. She veers between being unabashed, and then wildly aware of the power imbalance between her and Deen. The stakes for her are high, and they make the decision to pursue her own desires immensely difficult to see through. These dissociative flickers, these changes of gear and register they come precisely from the power of punitive ideas about womens sexuality and personhood. Girl X is grappling with questions that many women may ask themselves, that I have certainly asked myself, the first time they sleep with a man or the moment they reveal their desire: Will I be in danger? In revealing myself, have I foregone privacy and dignity? Will I be pursued, haunted by my own actions? Will I be able to resist the unwanted desires of others? Has saying yes precluded my ability to say no?

When Girl X expresses her ambivalence I want to have sex with you, she says, but I dont know if I want to show the world he is receptive: you dont want to be slut-shamed, he says. She carries on: Like, she says, adopting a blokey voice, I saw you fuck him, why dont you fuck me? This is not an entirely paranoid thought. One of the accused in the 2018 rugby rape trial in Northern Ireland, on entering the room where two other men were performing sex acts on her, and when she said no, allegedly replied: You fucked the others, why cant you fuck me? A womans (presumed) desire even just once, for one man makes her vulnerable. Her desire disqualifies her from protection, and from justice. Once a woman is thought to have said yes to something, she can say no to nothing.

In the film, there are many moments of laughter, joy, and pleasure; it can be quite charming to watch. Theres humour, and playfulness, and teasing. Girl X and Deen seem genuinely to like each other; theres chemistry. And she punctures him; no longer awed, she is sarcastic, cutting. But there is awkwardness, too, and there are mistimed movements; her ambivalence, his uncertainty as to whether to push or hold back.