Phillips - Flirting with danger young womens reflections on sexuality and domination

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FLIRTING WITH DANGER

QUALITATIVE STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY

This series showcases the power and possibility of qualitative work in psychology. Books feature detailed and vivid accounts of qualitative psychology research using a variety of methods, including participant observation and field work, discursive and textual analyses, and critical cultural history. They probe vital issues of theory, implementation, representation, and ethics that qualitative workers confront. The mission of the series is to enlarge and refine the repertoire of qualitative approaches to psychology.

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Flirting with Danger:
Young Womens Reflections on Sexuality and Domination
by Lynn M. Phillips

Young Womens Reflections on Sexuality and Domination

LYNN M. PHILLIPS

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

2000 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Lynn M.
Flirting with danger : young womens reflections on sexuality and
domination / Lynn M. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8147-6657-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8147-6658-7 (pbk. : alk paper)
1. Young womenUnited StatesSexual behavior. 2. Young
womenUnited StatesInterviews. 3. Man-woman relationships
United States. 4. Sexual harassment of womenUnited States.
5. Discrimination against womenUnited States. I. Title.
HQ29 .P49 2000
306.7083520973dc21 00-009877

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my family, for giving me the support
and courage to wonder out loud.

I recently came upon a lapel button that said, What is it about no that confuses you? Having worked for many years on combating violence against women, I rushed to buy the pin, delighting in the question as I imagined it posed to men. With one simple rhetorical question, this pin seemed to capture the messages I had learned and tried so hard to communicate as a feminist researcher, teacher, and advocate. It pointed out that of course no means no and yes means yes. And it asked smugly, Why dont men understand this? Perfect, I thought, clear and to the point! But as I waited in line to make my purchase, the pins words began to take on other meanings. After I initially imagined a male audience, it occurred to me that this same question, when posed to women, is neither straightforward nor rhetorical. In fact, it is a central question that drives my work.

As my attraction to this button reveals, I often feel the impulse to make clear-cut statements about womens desires and their responses to male domination. Indeed, in a society where womens charges of rape and harassment are still frequently met with questions about what they did to lead men on, it has been critical to stress to lawmakers, employers, juries, and men in general that consent and coercion are inherently distinct. Yet at the same time, having listened for many years to young womens reflections on their own experiences, I am increasingly persuaded that, in fact, their own answers to the question, What is it about no that confuses you? are often multiple, murky, and dauntingly complex. I am further persuaded that greater understandings of the apparent contradictions and ambiguities in womens experiences are vital to a social analysis of sexuality and domination. Indeed, as I have found in my work with adolescents and young adults, even the notions of male domination and male aggression, which have long been central to feminist analyses (including my own), become problematized in light of young womens nuanced articulations of their own stories. Although it has been politically essential to assert, simply, that no means no and yes means yes, it is also important to explore what is not so clear in womens experiences of their relationships and sexualities if advocacy efforts are to effectively help young women prevent and make sense of the various manifestations of sexualized aggression in their lives. This book is intended as a step in that ongoing exploration.

Based on an in-depth, qualitative study with a diverse group of young women in the northeastern United States, this book probes womens complex understandings of sexuality and violence, as well as their development of what I call hetero-relational subjectivities, in a cultural context of gendered power asymmetries. By hetero-relations I mean the interactions, both sexual and seemingly nonsexual, that women have with men and masculinities. Hetero-relations may include serious love relationships, casual sexual encounters, nonsexual/nonromantic interactions across genders that involve elements of domination, exploitation, or coercion based on gender, and interactions that one person intends to be nonsexual/nonromantic but into which others introduce elements of uninvited sexuality or romance. Hetero-relations include interactions that are explicitly sexualized as well as those that are more ambiguous, such as interactions between women and men in which the goal is nonsexual, but in which participants call on dynamics such as flirting to facilitate the interaction. Such interactions may occur at work, at school, at home, or on the street. Hetero-relations may be wanted or unwanted, delightful or painful, consensual or forced. And, as we will see, they can be all these things at once.

My interest in the development of young womens hetero-relational subjectivities involves exploring the processes by which women construct understandings of their relationships to gendered power and domination, as well as agency, through their thinking about their various relationships I use the term hetero-relational rather than hetero-sexual because I believe that all women, regardless of sexual orientation or sexual identity, are engaged in hetero-relations of some sort. Certainly hetero-relationality may play a greater or lesser role in the construction of womens subjectivities, depending on the amount and kinds of time they spend with men. But since women in a male-centered society must spend enormous amounts of energy sifting through complex and pervasive messages about pleasure, danger, and entitlement regarding sexuality and male power, it follows that all women in Western culture (even if they express their sexualities exclusively with women) are involved to some extent with a process of constructing hetero-relational (as well as homo-relational) subjectivities. It is the dialectical relationship between young womens development of hetero-relational subjectivities and their experiences in their hetero-relations that this book explores.