Description:
How young women make sense of, resist, and negotiate conflicting messages on female sexuality and sexual agency
In Flirting with Danger, Lynn M. Phillips explores how young women make sense of, resist, and negotiate conflicting cultural messages about sexual agency, responsibility, aggression, and desire. How do women develop their ideas about sex, love, and domination? Why do they express feminist views condemning male violence in the abstract, but often adamantly refuse to name their own violent and exploitive encounters as abuse, rape, or victimization? Based on in-depth individual and collective interviews with a racially and culturally diverse sample of college-aged women, Flirting with Danger sheds valuable light on the cultural lenses through which young women interpret their sexual encounters and their experiences of male aggression in heterosexual relationships. Phillips makes an important contribution to the fields of female and adolescent sexuality, feminist theory, and feminist method. The volume will also be of particular use to advocates seeking to design prevention and intervention programs which speak to the complex needs of women grappling with questions of sexuality and violence.Brief description: Lynn M. Phillips is the author of The Girls Report: What We Know and Need to Know about Growing Up Female, commissioned by the National Council for Research on Women, and Planned Parenthood's Unequal Partners: Exploring Power and Consent in Adult-Teen Relationships. She teaches media and gender studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Review Quotes: "Flirting with Danger is well worth the read and is likely to stimulate lively discussion in the classroom. Phillips has a good ear for narrative and a keen sense of the uncertainties and competing forces that shape heterosexual relationships for contemporary young women."-- "Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 26"