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    Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
    Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
    Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
    Ebook380 pages1 hour

    Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell

    By Katherine Angel

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook


    One of O Magazine's Must-Read Books for June 2013

    A provocative and personal meditation on sex, power, and female desire

    Today's women, we're told, have more options in exercising their desire than ever before in history. And yet the way we talk about desire is virtually as constrained as it was for the Victorians. There's an essential paradox at the heart of female sexuality: What we demand in our public lives is often in direct contrast to what we crave in our intimate lives.
    In the tradition of Susan Sontag and Virginia Woolf, Katherine Angel has forged a path through cliché, convention, and secrecy, and the result is Unmastered, a searching and idiosyncratic account of her studies in sex as an academic and of her experiences of sex as a woman.
    Unmastered isn't merely personal confession; it is also a powerful reckoning with our contradictory and deeply entrenched notions of sexuality. Angel embraces the highly charged oppositions—dominance versus submission, liberation versus dependence—and probes the porousness between masculine and feminine, thought and sensation, self and culture, power and pliancy, always reveling in the elusiveness of easy answers.
    With remarkable candor, Angel reflects on the history of her encounters and beliefs, and shows how our lives are shaped by the words we use and the stories we tell. The result is a revelatory book that examines and then explodes our most deeply rooted assumptions. Lyrical, brave, and sometimes disarmingly funny, Unmastered will start a thousand debates.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 4, 2013
    ISBN9780374709884
    Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell
    Author

    Katherine Angel

    Katherine Angel, the author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (FSG), is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University. She has written on sexuality, pornography, and the relationship between culture and desire for The Independent, Prospect, and The Observer, among others. She lives in London.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      AN EXCURSION1. Years ago when Hannah and I moved house, we decided to throw out all our porn. There was a remarkable quantity of it, considering how often we talked about how unsatisfactory it was. We piled it all in a big bin-bag and took it, with a whole carload of other rubbish, to the local dump. Hannah's parents came with us to help unload the bags. Luckily you couldn't see anything through the black bin-bags.2. At the dump, as we were unloading old furniture and other detritus, we realised that the men who worked there were routinely opening every bag that was given to them, and going through the contents in case there was anything that should be put into the recycling areas.3. Hannah panicked. She left the porn bag till last, threw it at the guy in his fluorescent jacket, and sprinted back to our Nissan Micra yelling, ‘Start the car! Start the car!’ Her parents, in the back seat, looked alarmed. ‘We're not in a hurry,’ her mum said. ‘Oh no!’ Hannah kept saying. ‘Drive!’4. I drove off. In the rear-view mirror, I could see the man from the council pulling a fistful of Rocco Siffredi DVDs out of the bag, open-mouthed.5. I like how honest and even-handed Katherine Angel is about porn (and about everything else in this rather remarkable essay).But misogynistic, coercive, tacky porn isn't necessarily unerotic – it just depends what you mean by erotic. These butch, taciturn men and shiny tottering women, in their bleakly naff trysts – they make me uncomfortable. They make me squirm with laughter, they make me cover my eyes, sometimes they offend me. There is something deathly, joyless in their performances. They leave me feeling vaguely deflated, slightly melancholic – a feeling akin, perhaps, to the desolation, the intense pang of aloneness, that male friends and lovers have sometimes described experiencing after orgasm alone or with someone they do not love.And yet these trysts, these dead-eyed unions – they make me wet. They irritate me, if rather joylessly, into action. The lubricious body has run ahead, has jumped through the hoops, and got what it wanted.It looks back over its shoulder and laughs.6. I wonder if this disassociation, this feeling that the body will react how it likes regardless of what you think, is something men are more used to than women.YOUR LAWS DO NOT APPLY TO ME1. What turns you on is out of your hands. Sex is not politically correct. Your libido does not give a fuck about your social convictions.2. The problem is that this means you may be sharing a bed – metaphorically, that is – with people who are stupid, or even dangerous. But what are women supposed to do, then? Shut up about it? Only admit to enjoying things that further the feminist project? Some people think so. I think Paul Bryant has suggested as much in a couple of reviews, if I'm not misinterpreting him.3. There's a somewhat notorious sex blog on tumblr by a woman who calls herself ‘feminist-rapebait’. The title is not even the most problematic thing about her blog, which features the extremer end of BDSM gifs and images along with occasional captions explaining her responses to them. Recently she posted, and replied to, a message that someone called ‘fucknodoms’ had written about her:“Truthfully, I think everything that feminist-rapebait posts, has posted, and will ever post is harmful. She has a rape kink and encourages violence and misogyny. Many of her posts encourage women to believe that they are beneath men and should be degraded, raped, abused, and used, and that they should enjoy it. I have multiple examples after I came across her blog, here, here, here, and here.[links removed…sorry] She literally calls herself a rapedoll and spouts about how women are only good to be used for men’s pleasure…The posts are damaging…she posts a lot of gross stuff and has obviously internalized a lot of misogyny.”how low is your opinion of women that you believe my blog encourages women who choose to read this blog to do anything, besides finding an outlet for their sexuality that has been shamed and persecuted and condescended to by alarmists like you.I especially like that enjoy it highlight. The outrage that I want people to consent to the sexual activities they involve themselves in!! God forbid women enjoy the choices they make with their body. How dare they engage in sex that you, fucknodoms, have not personally approved of. How dare women be multifaceted human beings with complexity, and contradictions. How dare women dare to be anything that makes fucknodoms uncomfortable.4. I have not the slightest idea how this argument should be settled. In fact I get a bit annoyed with people who think this is a simple question.5. Katherine Angel worries about this a lot. She is very aware that women are often socialised to want what other people want them to want. ‘I should be accommodating. I should be good. I should not leave the party when I want to.’ Nevertheless; wherever it comes from, we do want what we want. Whatever that is.What I remember is that an image inserts itself, suddenly, of him hitting me. Of him, yes, hitting me. It remains unclear; what do I mean? Being slapped? I don't think so. Punched? Surely not. Somewhere between the two, perhaps. The content has blurred edges, but the feeling is precise.I want him to do something like hitting. Something – something – that would stop me in my tracks.I want to say crazy stuff, I whisper. He says, Tell me.But I don't; I hold back.6. She and her boyfriend are worried about the same thing – finding themselves sharing some opinion, some spark of arousal, with the sort of people who do this in seriousness. People for whom it reflects deeply-held beliefs about men and women and their relative worth. ‘He too knows the fears, the risks; the symbol that becomes real, the real that becomes symbol. The metaphors we love by.’7. I keep thinking of a moment in Alan Moore's Lost Girls, where a woman in the middle of an orgy finds herself disturbed by the content of the Victorian incest erotica she's been looking at. ‘It's an…unngh…exciting story, but the children, doing things with…ungh…with their own Mother! I mean, I have…unngh…a son myself, and I'd never dream…unngh…never dream of—’‘But of course you would not, dear Madam,’ interrupts her partner. ‘Your child is real.’TO THE WHOREHOUSE1. The moving spirits behind this book are Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. They are quoted often to great effect. Foucault, inevitably, is there as well, in mercifully small doses.2. What Angel is looking for, I think, is some feminist theory of sexual desire that does not leave people feeling guilty.Well…join the queue.We are all in the same lulling, lurching boat, fashioning our beliefs to resolve our feelings.3. There is something essentialist about desire. I am someone who likes fruity cocktails, cries at adverts, does yoga. I have always disliked set gender roles and I usually feel comfortably fluid about them. But when I'm with Hannah, I feel completely polarised into masculinity. She kisses me and my hands go to her wrists, her hair, her neck. Almost this gender polarisation has started to be what desire means, to me.4. Not everyone is like this. I have friends who feel exactly the opposite: they like the fact that their partner makes them feel (in the words of one friend) ‘genderqueer’. So I guess everyone's different. ‘It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple,’ Angel says.5. This book is a shortish essay that has been spread out over a 350-page paperback using the expedient of a large font and a lot of white space. It can be read in a couple of hours. This didn't bother me, but it has bothered some people. The writing sometimes teeters on the edge of pretentiousness, but Angel's Englishness reassured me (unreasonably) that she was just about staying grounded.6. I loved it. I love that people are writing seriously and intelligently about this, and that the debate is not being abandoned to the margins of Fifty Shades of Grey. It's a little sui-generis gem that deserves a lot more readers than it will get.

    Book preview

    Unmastered - Katherine Angel

    TO SPEND ONESELF, TO GAMBLE ONESELF

    I

    1.

    Nearly ten years ago, in that sweltering summer, that heat wave summer, when to walk just half a mile meant a sticky sheen of sweat, I developed a phobia of moths.

    *   *   *

    I had never liked them, my nervousness shaped no doubt by my mother’s fear of the things. Her brother used to breed huge African specimens in their East Anglia home; they would fly up at her, startled, out of her shoes, her bedclothes. And then there was a teenage summer spent in a Gothic pile in France, where hordes of angry bees rattled behind the chimney, and disconcerting noises-off unsettled the most rational of family and guests. Fat armies of sated flies and flotillas of dark, wide moths appeared every night in a bedroom in which my sister eventually refused to sleep.

    *   *   *

    When the stay was over—but only then—we speculated giddily about dead bodies under floorboards.

    *   *   *

    So far, so manageable. But when that heat wave brought fatter, more alien moths to a tiny university town where I was deeply in love, and caught in the headlights of a Ph.D., dislike burgeoned into something else: an all-consuming terror whenever one would flap and flutter into view. Its blurry agitation would have me darting across a room before I knew what I was doing. Once, I leapt out of a shower in panic as one frantically ricocheted around the folds of a curtain. Out like a shot, I stood dripping shampoo on the hall carpet. The worst prospect: a moth sticking itself to my wet skin. It might disintegrate. A wing would be detached from a body; several different bits of moth might be stuck to me.

    *   *   *

    Dead, dismembered moth.

    *   *   *

    I went to a friend’s next door to rinse my hair.

    *   *   *

    There was a phase of nervously checking, at arm’s length, the curtains in my bedroom before sleep, poised to sprint from the scene should one rise from the lurid floral pattern. The pleasure of open windows on summer evenings was fraught with danger: those awful things, drawn to the light. Static, embracing a wall, they were almost worse, for they would inevitably move, taking disorganized, fitful flight. And when they were immobile one could see, if one dared look, their dreadful texture, their vile components.

    *   *   *

    I dreamt, once, of one pinning me down on the stone slabs of a suburban garden. It settled softly on me, trapping me under its insect blanket.

    *   *   *

    The wings—warm and dark, flimsy but strong. The furry texture of the body.

    *   *   *

    Those fucking moths.

    II

    1.

    Good loving can be fortuitous, partly a question of timing. A few years ago, emerging from a subterranean place—the lifting away of unhappiness—up, up, away!—a balloon released—I unfurled myself, out of a paralysis of thought, feeling, memory.

    *   *   *

    I was purring.

    *   *   *

    And so I met him. That first night: me climbing onto the back of his Vespa, he leaning back to grab my bare, uncertain legs, placing them on the rests. On his sofa, we unwrapped each other, and then he stood up, lifting me with him, carried me next door, and flung me onto the

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