http://www.salon.

com/2013/06/09/a_memoir_of_female_lust/ SUNDAY, JUN 9, 2013 12:00 AM UTC

A memoir of female lust

Katherine Angel bares all in a strikingly honest book about wom en's desire, and her own sex uality
B Y T RA CY CL A RK -FL O RY

When as a teenager Katherine Angel felt herself suddenly ov erflowing with lust, she began to wonder: Where are the similarly hungry women? In Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, she say s of her burgeoning erotic wanting, The words I would hav e put this into, had I felt the urge the words I still put this into are these: I feel like a man. This is a book for ev ery woman who has ev er felt like a man for being sex ual. It is largely a sex ual autobiography , but also selfconscious proof-positiv e that women are capable of being just as desirous as men. She writes poetically about hav ing Katherine Angel (Credit: Stacey Yates) her partner ejaculate on her: I lov e this. The sudden wet coolness on me. The smell: summer rain on cement. Fresh, open windows. Of her lov ers swollen member, she say s, It is beautiful. It unnerv es me, in its gorgeous attentiv eness. It would be a daringly personal work for any woman to write, but perhaps especially so for A ngel, a Cambridge-educated academic and feminist who has researched female sex ual dy sfunction. More than the personal risks, though, she ex plores the challenges and contradictions of being a sex ual woman in a culture that oh, y ou know fears, suppresses and dev alues female sex uality . A ngel connects the way women are generally socialized to be sy mpathetic, charming, unselfish to the way s in which they take on male wanting as their own or, as she puts it, the porousness, in intuiting the others desire, and conflating it with ones own. She beautifully details the Fun House mirror maze of desire. She writes of watching porn, I imagine sex with her or is it me? through his ey es. I see my self as he might. I allow my self desire for her through my desire for him. (That is an observ ation that completely jibes with sex research showing that female porn v iewers spend a lot of time looking at the womens bodies and the mens faces responding to them.) Not only does she find herself adopting her partners wants but also protecting him from his own masculine

insecurity : Y es, y ou are my big man, fucking me. Y es, y oure so big so hard. Y es, y ou are ev ery thing y ou feel under pressure to be. I am not disappointed! Y ou know that deep well of fear that flickers in y our ey es? I can see it, I can feel it, and I am telling y ou that it does not ex ist. I am pouring my self into that well; I block it up with my sy mpathy , my empathy , my acute feeling for y our anx iety . I am proof of y our masculinity , of y our endless potency . But this isnt pure self-sacrifice, as she later admits in a characteristically complicating conclusion: I lock him into his masculinity . I am anx ious to protect it, for it pains me, it pains my femininity , to see it fragmented. In A ngels v iew, shes as inv ested in her partners masculinity as he is in her femininity , and they limit each other because of it. I spoke to A ngel by phone about how feminism initially constrained her sex uality , what sex ual empowerment truly means and why she decided to include the story of her abortion in a book about female desire. It seem s that writing this book com es with its risks, giv en the personal nature of it, the subject m atter and y our work in academ ia. Why did y ou feel com pelled to take that risk? A t a v ery deep lev el there was a story I needed to tell as a writer, that was to do with understanding the way these v ery complicated questions about sex uality and feminism and power and gender kind of play themselv es out in my life. There was a story I needed to articulate, and I needed to do so in a v ery particular v oice. Part of that feeling was looking around and seeing how incredibly problematic we seem to find women, desire, womens ex perience of their bodies, all those kinds of issues. I struggled to not repeat a kind of endless gesture of judging and shaming, and also just a kind of v ery sort of polemical world of opinion where people close down v ery complex , difficult questions, and want to diagnose something, or make a kind of univ ersal statement about how women should act or what they should feel or how they should think about whatev er it is, whether its sex or pornography or abortion or whatev er. I find that kind of language v ery polarizing, this conclusiv e language that wants to tie ev ery thing up v ery neatly and reach a conclusion. I find that doesnt at all reflect my ex perience of what it means to be not just a woman or a sex ually activ e woman or a feminist but just of being a person. Its not how I ex perience my life. One of the questions y ou wrestle with in the book is what sex ual em powerm ent looks like for wom en. Do y ou hav e an answer for that? I suppose I feel that in a way , that question is impossible to answer, because I think sex ual empowerment or emancipation is so indiv idual. What I need in order to feel emancipated and free and powerful is probably quite different from what y ou need, or what ev ery one else indiv idually needs. I dont feel the urge to answer that question in a general sense, ex cept to say that I think one of the problems is the way we seem to require women to rationalize their desire. I think we demand slightly less of men, in that way . Were alway s ready to interrogate a womans particular sex uality and her choices whether its the lev el of what someone likes to do in bed, or how they dress or speak in public or how they behav e. A nother problem is this v iew we hav e that womens sex uality and desire is alway s the effect of something else, the effect of ex ternal forces acting on it from the outside. The desire of men, or the desires of an ex ploitativ e pornographic industry , or whatev er. I feel that questions about the effect of v ery powerful social norms on how we ex perience being women is something we need to be thinking about all the time, but at the same time I feel its equally damaging to women for us to be sitting around with our arms folded going, Why do y ou do what y ou do, and is it OK to want that, and is it OK to do that? I think ev ery one is try ing to whether they re aware of it or not ev ery one is try ing to grapple with formidable forces of sex ism and misogy ny and try ing to work out or negotiate those complex forces of power in their own indiv idual liv es, and ev ery body manifests itself differently .

One of m y fav orite passages from the book touches on the seem ing separation between brain and body , and how y ou can becom e phy sically turned on by m isogy nistic, coerciv e, tacky pornography that depicts, as y ou put it, dead-ey ed unions. What do y ou m ake of that disconnect between what the m ind thinks and the body feels? I guess, in a sense, its not quite clear to me what the mind and the body are. Its not clear to me where actually we draw that line. But I think in all these discussions about pornography and arousal and sex ual desire in women, one of the things that tends to get a bit relegated in the discussion is the powerful role of shame in how we ex perience our sex uality , giv en that at the v ery earliest points in our liv es were being told by the culture around us that there are things that arent the prov ince of women. Were not sex ually desirous in the way that men are, or were not into pornography or v isual in the same way , and what we want is emotional connection and somebody to raise our children. A ll those tropes are so powerful, and when were looking at questions of how women respond to pornography , I find it almost impossible to talk about in a way , because ones ex perience of ones own body and bodily responses isnt just a phy sical ex perience, its an ex perience thats filtered through y our own person, through ev ery single conv ersation y ouv e had about sex and relationships. Its filtered through the sex and relationships y ouv e had, all the messages y ou see in the media at ev ery moment in the day . So I think try ing to isolate these components of sex ual desire has been problematic. Y ou write, What is it to define, or ev en to know, our desires to identify which are our own, and which result from a kind of porousness? Id like to redirect that question to y ou now. Well, thats a piv otal moment, I think. Thats where I pose the question that frames the rest of the book, in a way . A nd what I find interesting in that question is that part of me has an urge to try and draw that boundary , to say , What do I really want? I think the book is about try ing to find y our own language, about try ing to work out what y ou want not just from sex , but also from y our life as a whole. One of the trajectories in the book is sort of indiv iduating and try ing to find out who y ou really are and what y ou want to, in my case, write. Its partly a book about coming to find y our v oice in a larger sense. But I think that its such an important feminist question: What do we indiv idually want as women regardless of what magazines are telling us we want, or adv ertisers are telling us we want, or men are telling us what we want, or whatev er? What I find worse is that theres a tendency to v iew women as more porous than men, if y ou like. So we tend to see male sex uality as a kind of simple, mechanistic giv en and that women are constantly prey to these cultural and social norms. The fact is, I think were all shaped by these cultural and social norms. Theres no such thing as an authentic sex uality that then gets encroached upon by powerful forces from the outside. Sex uality and our desires are things we kind of dev elop ov er time in response to this bewildering array of biological, indiv idual, social, cultural cues. The challenge, then, for us as indiv iduals, is to kind of work out what to do with that and what we want to resist and what we want to claim. Its a profoundly feminist question, but I think the way the debate tends to unfold is that we worry about women as these passiv e, empty v essels that receiv e the influence of culture, and I think thats something we need to make more subtle in the conv ersation. T here is a lot in the book about protecting y our partners m asculinity , inflating it, ev en. Y ou adm it that this is in fact not just in serv ice to him but also to y ourself. How so? Our sex ual desires are so shaped by ideas about gender. Whether we like it or not, or whether were conscious of it or not, and I think regardless of our sex ual orientation or identity , were alway s dealing with ideas about masculinity or femininity , because that is such a powerful structural concept of modern life. So I feel that first of all, as a whole, thats partly what sex is about. Its partly about grappling with gender and try ing to assert it or undermine it or play with it or fragment it or resist it. But its also, as I point out in the book, partly about my feelings that part of socialization and emergence of a woman or a girl is the deference to man make sure the male ego is protected and safe. I cant speak for

any one else, but I certainly know in my own life the way s that I do that unconsciously , as a kind of habit and I wanted to be honest about that. I suppose I also wanted to point out that its a mutual thing. In the book I touch on how its a mutually calibrating process. I think my ex perience of heterosex ual sex is that partly what y oure doing is taking pleasure in that. Y oure taking pleasure in taking roles and enacting them. Whatev er we might think about that, its a powerful aspect of sex uality . Y ou write that guilty ex cited lonely y ou fashioned a fem inism that contained m y desire. Can y ou talk about that? Thats the part of the book where I talk about growing up and feeling unsafe and harassed [as a y oung girl]. It made me feel that I had to be v ery , v ery careful in how I negotiated my own desire and how I manifested it and how I ex pressed it. What Im try ing to do in the book is look back at how my feminism and sex uality emerged in a v ery complex , sy mbiotic relationship, and I do think that the feminism I was adhering to reinforced this feeling that to use y our sex uality or enjoy y our sex uality or to display it, to v oice y our desire, is v ery problematic, because y ou could be potentially play ing into the hands of the aggressiv e misogy ny that was out there. It took me some time to realize, That is not the feminism I want. I refuse to take a position which endorses any kind of silencing of womens sex uality . One way to respond to misogy ny and v iolence is to feel y ou hav e to adapt y our sex uality to it, and I think thats such a flawed road to go down, and a lot of people hav e gone down that road, feminists included, and I think its dangerous. Y ou include y our story of getting an abortion. Why was that im portant to a book about fem ale desire? What I wanted to do with the book is paint a portrait of how sex uality can operate in a particular life. Just my life, obv iously . Its just my ex perience, but I wanted to show that a life can be full of intense pleasure and ex citement and joy , but can also be full of pain and episodes of suffering. So I wanted to include the light and the dark, because I feel people tend to push away one side of that equation, in a way . I wanted the book to be kind of a complex , spacious object that could contain these different aspects, just because that has been my ex perience of sex uality . Oftentimes with the specific issue of abortion, again I felt that women around the controv ersial question of abortion, women are asked to take v ery stark positions about what the ex perience is. And Im completely pro-choice. I will fight to the last about reproductiv e freedom and rights. But its a v ery complex phy sical ex perience to go through for most people. Not for ev ery one, some people go through it without difficulty , but for me I ex perienced it with a surprising amount of distress, and I wanted to reflect on why that was. It was partly that because I was pro-choice, I didnt allow my self to feel that this could be an ex perience I would find distressing, and then deny ing that distress about it made me more distressed. But it was also that I felt I couldnt be honest about how I felt about it, because if I was honest and said, This was kind of a shitty ex perience for me, that would be betray ing my feminist roots, that Id be play ing into the hands of antiabortion rhetoric. This sense that y ou hav e to take a v ery simple line, that y oure asked to basically betray the truth of how complex reality is what it is to hav e a body and hav e desires and be a person basically , I feel like that kind of insistence is a form of v iolence toward womens ex perience.

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff w riter at Salon. Follow @tracy clarkflory on Tw itter and Facebook.

Copyright 2011 Salon.com. All rights reserved.