Masterfully done! A book about trying to master desire, sex and what it means to be a sexual woman

Vivid. Honest. Joyful. Sexy. Potent. Wanton. Risky. Courageous.

(3 min read)

If only we women could be this honest – with ourselves, all the time. At least when it comes to our sexuality.

“One of those totally out-of-the blue, impossible-to-classify, weird and new and wonderful fiction-ish nonfiction books, which happily come along every so often and make you go, ‘Whoa: this is what we need now.'” – Stuart Hammond

Katherine Angel (photo: Stacey Yates)

Who better to get inside women’s most intimate thoughts and feelings about sexuality than an honest woman who has a PhD, is a sex researcher and has so much in common with all of us.

Katherine Angel has delivered a masterpiece. She “unwraps the question of what it means to be a woman, both object and subject of desire,” and shares what it’s like, in real-life, in private detail, to learn, understand and define a woman’s struggles with desires. She knows, these are hers. She reveals inner thoughts and conflicts and exposes the contradictions and denials we women live with every day. This is part confession, part diary, part criticism, and all-in vulnerability. She challenges everything from submissiveness and dominance to dependency and freedom and lays bare her very personal and honest thinking – and acts.

Don’t just take our word for it

Here’s what others have said:

“I am completely, utterly, overwhelmingly in love with Unmastered . . . Beautiful, ferocious, acute, exceptional.” – Olivia Laing, author of To the River

“Unmastered is written with an honesty so defiantly pure it amounts to an act of cultural resistance.” – Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze

“Political and poetical . . . In a series of statements, comments, stories and scenes from life and literature, she explores sensual life.” – Iain Finlayson, The Times

This is one time when ‘the honesty is not too much’ and the best way to whet your appetite is to provide a glimpse inside the first 25 pages – succinct, perspicacious and … dare we repeat, ‘honest.’ Here are a few snippets.

“Fucking moths.” [upfront she admits a phobia]

“We unwrapped each other … he flung me on the bed … I was awash with pleasure … I was a wisp, and I was free.”

One night, as early morning light grew outside and we lay entangled, a blur of skin and limbs and mouths, I spoke dreamily of how I loved his big frame towering over me during sex; how much I loved his powerful arms around my neck while he came into me from behind; how I loved feeling the strength of him as he fucked me—yes, as he fucked me, because—let’s not be coy, or disingenuous—that’s definitely what was happening.

I like to look at pornography. Well, certain kinds of pornography. It probably doesn’t count as pornography for many people. Much of it is quiet, hushed—often photographs.

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, a little 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 gotten what it wanted. It looks back over its shoulder and laughs.

I like something to be suggested to me, and then to run with it myself, in the wide, open spaces of my mind, my body.

He is not afraid of my desire, of its depths, its lengths.

He doesn’t know of his orchestrating role, of his regular outings in my head, when I am alone, when he is not in my bed. There is much I do not say.

This porousness: Susan Sontag grappled with it in her diaries; the “compulsion to be what the other person wants.” She called it X, being Xy. “The scourge”: not knowing what your feelings are, and “liking being agreeable.” A deference to the other, to the point of not knowing that you have incorporated the other, in your very vacillation, your charm, your pliability, your politeness.

And that’s just the first 25 pages. This last one is near the end of the book.

Year by year, I undid myself, answering to some deity frowning at me, just out of sight.  That deity: What was it? A mixture of things: a cultural soup of religions I never shared but was, of course, born into. A discomfort with the body, my unruly, lustful body—on it had galloped, joyous, transported, intent on its desire—its unbridled, guilty febrility. And a profound shame about my terrible mistake: my utter failure of reason.

‘For the rest of the story’ – fascinating confessions we are all too familiar with – you will just have to buy the book. Needless to say, it’s a must-read!

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