Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine AngelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 (Originally Allen Lane, 2012)

The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn’t to say this book is bad, just that it didn’t hit me quite like Nelson’s did. Unmastered was a quick read for me (there’s a lot of white space) and I read it twice over the course of a week, finding myself struck by different bits each time.

The book is, as the subtitle says, about desire: about Angel’s own desires and experiences with desire, and also about sexual desire more generally, women’s and also men’s. Though Angel quotes Virginia Woolf on the androgynous mind— “‘It is fatal,’ wrote Woolf, ‘to be a man or woman pure and simple’” (95)—this book looks at and thinks about desire in very gendered terms. “I am proof of your masculinity,” Angel writes (30). And “I lock him into his masculinity. I am anxious to protect it, for it pains me, it pains my femininity, to see it fragmented” (109). And “he puts down anchor in me, and finds his masculinity there. I put down anchor in him, in his masculinity, and find my femininity there” (112). All of which is interesting to me, but feels very removed from my own experiences. (My gender identity is basically “tomboy,” and I’ve dated both men and women, and I’m more comfortable with the idea of gender as a spectrum than a binary thing.) When Angel writes about things like pornography, or domination and submission, it’s mostly in a gendered way—even when she flips things and talks about a woman being dominant, it’s still in relation to the idea of a dominant man and a submissive woman, which isn’t really how I think about these things. Angel writes about women’s experiences in contrast to men’s experiences: she writes about the entitlement men may have, while women may find it harder to know/voice/own desire. She writes about the way society, women included, can work to contain women’s sexuality, to contain women’s bodies and wants. She writes about the “unruly, lustful body,” and how we react to things like unplanned pregnancy and abortion (264).

I think I like this book best not when Angel is quoting Virginia Woolf or Susan Sontag (this book’s other guiding spirit, in a way), but when she’s writing about her own experiences, in and out of the bedroom. “I have become a body,” she writes, and “I have sounds, but I have fewer words” (42). “When he grabs my hair, when he presses my throat, when he holds my hands down, I know—because I feel—that this is pitch-perfect” (90). I like writing that captures the experience of feeling open, feeling awake to the possibilities of pleasure, and when Angel does this, she does it really well, as in this, one of my favorite passages in the book:

Crossing Waterloo Bridge, that spritely spring, that razor-sharp spring, looking over at St. Paul’s, I sniffed pleasure—openness—light—in the air.

I could feel it in my hips. (332)


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