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After the revolution

Feminist challenges to contemporary sexual politics
by
June 2021, no. 432

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent by Katherine Angel

Verso, $29.99 hb, 147 pp

Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600)

Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual freedom in the #MeToo era by Lorna Bracewell

University of Minnesota Press US$25.95 pb, 277 pp

After the revolution

Feminist challenges to contemporary sexual politics
by
June 2021, no. 432

Among historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’.

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