In her timely and genuinely refreshing new book, Katherine Angel’s title, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent, nods to Foucault with good reason. Angel writes in her powerful opening chapter that the promise of good sex looms – if we get consent right. And it is women and girls who bear the burden of what Foucault called the ‘incitement to discourse’. Under the terms of what Angel labels ‘consent culture’, ‘women’s speech about their desire is both demanded and idealised, touted as a marker of progressive politics’.

When it comes to good sex, women must know and say what they do or don’t want. The 1970s feminist mantra ‘No Means No’ has given way to ‘enthusiastic consent’ – a fine idea in theory – but as Angel points out, it is not always easy for women to work out what they want sexually, and even if they do ‘enthusiastically consent’, they can be punished for it, and often are, one way or another. For instance, the emphasis in rape and sexual assault trials on ‘whether a victim consented to sexual activity’, rather than ‘whether the act took place’, often works against women who exhibit in any way ‘a confident desire for sex’. From another direction, the woman who is uncertain about her sexual desires is pathologised, and it is up to her to fix it – otherwise she remains doomed to ‘bad sex’.

Angel’s concern is not with disavowing consent, which is, after all, a ‘bare minimum’. Instead, she interrogates consent and its limits in the interests of advancing sexual ethics beyond their current impasse. In doing so, she joins others on similar quests, including Michaela Coel, creator and star of the British television series I May Destroy You (2020), a polyphonic examination of all kinds of sex not always easily reducible to consenting or not, and gender and sexuality scholar Joseph J. Fischel, author of Screw Consent: A better politics of sexual justice (2019). Angel cites both approvingly, while staking out her own specific terrain. She questions what it means to consent to sex, and to express desire, in a sexual culture so infinitely loaded against female sexuality. From this starting point, Angel considers the proximity of sex to violence and questions the ‘truths’ of sex research, including the enduring maxim that if women just got in touch with their bodies, sexual pleasure would be theirs. Within the limits she sets herself – or perhaps more accurately, the limits of contemporary sexual knowledge about heterosexuality and binary male and female sexuality – Angel does much more than merely refresh what has become a tired conversation about consent.

In the final chapter, Angel flips the scripts of consent culture, ‘confidence feminism’, and the edicts of sex research. Against these forces, she acknowledges the vulnerability of all people when it comes to sex. Her ‘utopian horizon’ is the surrender of the ‘illusion that any of us have real, or total, power when it comes to pleasure and sex’. Apart from an occasional misstep – in an uncharacteristically narrow interpretation, Angel says that masturbation is clearly ‘not sex’, a suggestion that would outrage feminist sex educator Betty Dodson if she were still alive – her conclusions, and the many insights and well executed arguments throughout, are welcome interventions, especially given how low the bar can still be for public discussion about consent and sex.

Like Angel, Lorna Bracewell, author of Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual freedom in the #MeToo era, is an academic committed to bringing a feminist perspective to contemporary sexual politics, including via the entry point of #MeToo. She also references Foucault, in Bracewell’s case in a methodological sense as well as a political one: her aim is to provide what Foucault calls a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’, or a history of the present. However, while the two books make for fine companion pieces, they demonstrate different routes by which feminist academics communicate their work. Angel’s is a slim, potent, elegantly argued polemic aimed at a wide audience, while Bracewell’s book is a thorough, scholarly account of the so-called feminist sex wars, published by an academic press, which includes chapters previously published in journal article format. It is to be hoped that her book – or at least, her arguments – find some traction beyond those parameters, for Bracewell makes several important challenges to what she calls the ‘catfight narrative’ of the sex wars, all of which have wider significance.

Bracewell defines the sex wars as a ‘series of conflicts over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that embroiled the feminist movement primarily in the United States, but also, to a lesser extent, Australia, Canada, and England, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s’. (Interestingly, it is from this point that Angel traces ‘confidence feminism’, a mash-up of third-wave and post-feminist sensibilities.) Major fault-lines were pornography and commercial sex, but also sadomasochism and butch/femme roles. The origins of these conflicts are typically dated to a 1982 feminist conference on sexuality at Barnard College, convened by Carol Vance and attended by eight hundred or so scholars, activists, artists, and students, including Judith Butler, a graduate student at the time, and anthropologist and sex radical Gayle Rubin, who presented the first iteration of what would become the incredibly influential essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’. Outside, feminists from the then-ascendent anti-pornography movement picketed, wearing T-shirts that read ‘For a Feminist Sexuality’ on one side and ‘Against S&M’ on the other.

Bracewell vividly narrates these internecine conflicts. Even more crucially, she expands and complicates them, drawing attention to what the ‘catfight narrative’ has hitherto obscured, beginning with the chronology. She is not the first to do this – many participants rejected the terms of a ‘sex war’ – but Bracewell does offer fresh analysis. She highlights, for example, how lesbian feminism seeded both anti-porn activism and sex radicalism, and how both ‘sides’, to begin with at least, challenged key tenets of US liberalism, including the public/private distinction. The ‘we’ in the title refers to how all feminists involved in the sex wars ‘lost’ as liberalism gradually infected or co-opted both the anti-pornography movement and feminist sex radicalism, culminating in what Bracewell convincingly argues in the final chapter is the carceral feminism evident in SlutWalk and #MeToo. This ‘alternative genealogy’ upends the hitherto dominant explanation that carceral feminism ‘is primarily a product of the confluence of feminist and conservative energies’.

Bracewell, a political scientist, brings serious rigour to her ‘counternarrative’ of the eventual ‘convergence of antipornography feminism, sex-radical feminism, and liberalism’, though curiously the wider political context sometimes slips from view. Of even greater interest and import, however, is how she brings Black and Third World feminists to the fore, not just as critics of the sex wars but as participants and theorists. Again, Bracewell is hardly the first to do this – a recent standout example is the work of leading Black feminist scholar Jennifer C. Nash, who is not cited – but she does it well, elucidating both intersectional anti-porn feminism and intersectional sex-radicalism, and by extension revealing blind spots in the theorising of key figures such as Andrea Dworkin, Patrick Califia, and Rubin when it came to race. Bracewell’s wide-ranging account of the diverse sexual politics of feminists of colour recuperates a third way, encapsulated in the experiences and critiques of queer Third World feminists Mirtha Quintanales and Cherríe Moraga. Both attended the conference where they each ‘resisted the compulsion to choose sides in a sex war oriented around the experiences of white women’.

As should be obvious by now, Lorna Bracewell identifies significant and enduring problems with the sex wars and their legacies, including the ‘catfight narrative’, which has filtered down into popular consciousness as two designated feminist camps: pro-sex on one side, and anti-sex or sex negative on the other. Along with Katherine Angel, she is well aware of the limitations of this binary for contemporary feminist sexual politics, including how it marginalises or doesn’t speak to the experiences of Black women and women of colour. Ultimately, however, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and Why We Lost the Sex Wars are optimistic books that bring feminist analysis to the centre of contemporary sexual politics in generative ways. Together, they have much to offer any reader – regardless of their sexuality or gender – who has found themselves uneasy about the valorisation of consent, the categories ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-sex’, or the endless cycle of sex research that creates as many sexual problems as it purports to resolve.