Flirting with Danger: Young Women's Reflections on Sexuality and Domination

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.

Author: Lynn Phillips
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 11/01/2000
Pages: 253
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.61d
ISBN: 9780814766583

Review Citation(s):
Women's Review of Books 03/01/2002 pg. 17

About the Author
Phillips, Lynn: - 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.