"In many... cases, students have felt deeply violated even when their partner followed affirmative-consent rules—asking for and receiving a 'yes'—because aspects of the situation made them feel that what occurred was not what they wanted...."

"Sometimes the explicit request for permission might have induced them to do something they were conflicted about. Some schools have trained students, as part of orientation, to seek and settle for nothing less than 'enthusiastic' agreement to sex. Even under an affirmative-consent regime’s valorization of clarity, 'yes' doesn’t always mean 'yes.' The jury is still out on whether our experiment with affirmative consent will reduce rape, prove useful for distinguishing sex from sexual assault, or lead to less experience of sexual violation. But what may well emerge is a recognition that the clearest practices of 'yes' and 'no' do little to untangle a deep difficulty that makes consent seem promising yet wide of the mark: the altogether human experience of not knowing in the first place what is wanted or unwanted, desired or undesired. In a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte, a French psychoanalyst who sought treatment for what she described as 'frigidity,' Sigmund Freud wrote, in the nineteen-twenties, 'The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"'"

That's from "The Politics of Bad Sex/A new book argues that current standards of affirmative consent place too much emphasis on knowing what we want" by Jeannie Suk Gersen (in The New Yorker). 

I was surprised to see the return of Sigmund Freud, but Suk Gersen perceives Freud's question — she calls it "Freud's aporia" — in the new book she's reviewing, Katherine Angel’s “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent.” 

Suk Gersen writes:

“Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge,” [Angel] writes in her new book. 

I would have found a way around quoting a sentence with a blatant grammar mistake like that... unless I wanted to nudge the reader to think I don't actually like this book.

[In] what Angel terms “confidence feminism”... self-respecting women are supposed to be outspoken and assertive, so as to claim their equality and empowerment. (Cue Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” or Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk on “power poses.”) In sex, this mode translates into the consent solution: a (strong) woman speaks to get the sex that she wants. If she doesn’t speak up, she risks assault, but there is also such a thing as bad sex, which we tend to see as an inevitable life experience, not rape....

Nobody talks about "Cat Person" anymore. Remember when that New Yorker story seemed to articulate exactly this problem, the one that has Suk Gersen going all the way back to Freud? That was back in 2017.

Angel's book seems like it might be more of a self-help happy talk. One of the things that women might want is hope. One of the things that women want — or think they might want in some complex way — is to be sex-positive. And this book gives us that:

[T]he final chapter... moves... into a surprisingly utopian self-help or how-to exposition on sexual fulfillment.

 I am not hearing respect in Suk Gersen's voice. 

[Angel] advises: “Pleasure involves risk, and that can never be foreclosed or avoided.” Leaning on the queer-theory classic by Leo Bersani “Is the Rectum a Grave?”...

 For your list of classics you haven't gotten around to reading yet. 

Angel writes, “We are all at someone else’s mercy in sex, and we all experience helplessness, that originary anguish and bliss; we all become infantile, dependent. . . . There is great joy, strength and transcendence to be found in the fracturing of the composed, adult self.” Sexual desire, she continues, “can take us by surprise; can creep up, unbidden, confounding our plans, and with it our beliefs about ourselves. But this giddiness is only possible if we are vulnerable to it. If asked, we might not say that what we want is sex in a hotel with a gruff stranger. It might be inaccurate to say either that we did, or that we didn’t. Desire isn’t always there to be known. Vulnerability is the state that makes its discovery possible."...

She urges “letting oneself go to places of intensity, to the hairsbreadth space between knowing and not knowing what you want, between controlling the action and letting the action take over—being spat out of the flume into this coursing water taking you God-knows-where.”

Speaking of giddiness... this writing. I wonder if Suk Gersen respects it. Suk Gersen is a Harvard law professor, and I'm looking for the law. It's fine to explore your own sexuality and the "hairsbreadth space between knowing and not knowing what you want," but plainly unethical to go to the authorities and seek real-world consequences against another person based on these internal subtleties of yours. That's why the law looks at the expression of consent.

Suk Gersen finally gets around to law:

If the parts of Angel’s book that read as “how to make sex good again” were followed... a lawyer would have to genuinely fear for people who tried this at home, because, in our current paradigm, such sexual surprise risks bringing on serious institutional penalties, not to mention profound feelings of harm.

 That's putting it mildly. 

It also may be naïve for oldsters to assume that young people’s risk-taking around current consent rules wouldn’t invite the vulnerability of being at another’s mercy—the ever-present risk that one or the other might be dramatically shamed as a sexual deviant and banished from the community, or worse.

That's the most twisted locution I've read all year. Diagram it, and you begin with the empty subject verb it | may be. Then Suk Gersen loads in the old-versus-young struggle for reasons that become hard to remember as you plunge headlong into the negative "wouldn't" and realize you have to connect it to the "may be" and the "assume" and whatever "risk-taking around" something is. And are we just trying not to be "naïve"?

If I move forward, I pair "wouldn't" with "invite," and I wonder what wouldn't invite? I'm not ready to move on to the question of what is invited, because I don't know who's extending this invitation. Or is it just the condition of naïve oldsters assuming something that does the inviting? No, I think it's that the naïve oldsters are assumed to assume that the behavior of youngsters is doing the inviting. 

Okay. Then, the thing that is invited is "vulnerability." To untwist the first half of the sentence: Maybe there are some oldsters and maybe they are assuming that young people are taking risks that invite vulnerability and maybe that assumption is naïve. As for the second half of the sentence, I think that shows what the naïve oldsters are worried about — horrible real-world consequences. 

But I have not frittered away my energy to the point where I don't stumble out of my sentence-reading task demanding to know why the "oldsters" have been impugned as naïve... or, excuse me, maybe naïve.