Consent is sexy. To know yourself is to empower yourself. Women want sex as much as men. These mantras proliferate in the post-2017, #MeToo moment of feminism in which we live. But they hardly help us when we simply do not know what we like, or don’t want much sex. Self-knowledge is the buzzword of the post-feminist, power-posing, GirlBoss era.
If a person does not know their desires, as though they were some fixed, unchanging content, ready to be discerned and extracted, Angel asks, are they guilty of their own repression? And does this oblique view of desire really cohere with the real, lived texture of human sexuality?
