"His hunger feeds me. We meet, and live that hunger — his, mine, ours — and afterward, we are ashes. We are the good Zen bonfire: we have left no traces.
"We have burnt ourselves completely."
Katherine Angel holds a research fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London. She received a Ph. D. from the University of Cambridge in 2008 and afterward held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Warwick. Her research explores the history of psychiatry and sexuality, and she has written for The Independent, Prospect, and the New Statesman.
Unmastered is a bold, erotic, and unabashed exploration of desire. The pages of this lyrical and paradoxical book serve as a floor for the images and ideas of this creative ballerina who whirls and twirls her dance of pleasure for our entertainment and edification.
We all are passionate creatures but we have been taught to hide away and keep under wraps our sexual urges and fantasies. Angel feels no such restraints.
"He is not afraid of my desire, of its depths, its lengths," she writes about her lover. So many men are frightened by the deep and inexplicable forces of female sexuality. But others rise to the occasion and plunge into the mysteries without fear.
"My head is on his thigh, his hand is on my belly. He strokes my hair and we admire each other in the darkening light, the soft, porous night." Can you feel the animal warmth here? The way two bodies fit together and create a refuge from the storms raging outside this intimacy. It doesn't get much better than this.
"Coming safely into port.
"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."
In sexual union there is surrender but also what Susan Sontag called "the compulsion to be what the other person wants." We swing between these two impulses and never quite get away from one or the other.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, behold: my own feminist erotics, my Russian doll of desire." Angel shares her feelings about pornography, dirty talk, and sadomasochism. There is no one size that fits all when it comes to human sexuality and its varied manifestations.
Unmastered pleads with us to honor sex as a force-field of yearning that has stirred the flesh of writers, poets, and mystics down through the ages. Angel has tried to reframe desire and bring us to a fresh appreciation of its power and its potency. We are convinced that the time is ripe for such a transformation. Margaret Silf, a prolific writer on religion, concurs:
"We tend to think that if we desire something, it is probably something we ought not to want or to have. But think about it: without desire we would never get up in the morning. We would never have ventured beyond the front door. We would never have read a book or learned something new. No desire means no life, no growth, no change. Desire is what makes two people create a third person. Desire is what makes crocuses push up through the late winter soil. Desire is energy, the energy of creativity, the energy of life itself. So let's not be too hard on desire."
