Flirting with Danger

Young Women's Reflections on Sexuality and Domination

Lynn Phillips

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814768747
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Menschliche Sexualität in der Psychologie

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.

1
Introduction

DURING THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS I have listened with increasing concern and attention to young women’s struggles to make sense of their relationships and sexualities. I have seen how an awareness of male aggression filters through young women’s experiences and understandings of their own hetero-relational lives. Scenes such as the following have been common in my experience:

Scene 1

The classroom is buzzing with animated conversation about women’s experience of street harassment. I am teaching an introductory course in Psychology and Women, and the students, almost all undergraduate women, are discussing the objectification and anxiety they feel when men make comments about their body, their attire, or their mood. Without exception, the comments are about how terrible that feels. After extended discussion, a male student comments that he too has been whistled at by females on the street, and he, for one, has always taken it as a compliment. “Don’t women really see it that way too?” Discomfort fills the room—women students squirm, some nod their heads with embarrassment. Yes, some women acknowledge reluctantly, even if they’re not proud of it, sometimes it does feel good. Finally a woman names an important distinction: “It may feel good for both of us. I can even find it a turn-on. But as a man, you never have to wonder if that ‘compliment’ is going to lead to you getting into trouble. As a man, you can play up the compliment or reject their attention. But you don’t have the anxiety of making sure you don’t either lead them on, getting you into trouble, or get them pissed off, getting you into trouble. Women always have to straddle that fine line. … Still, though, I guess I’d have to admit … there is something exciting about flirting with danger—and about straddling those fine lines.”

Scene 2

I am in a battered women’s shelter, interviewing a battered woman who has left her abusive husband. She is responding to my question of when and how her husband first began to be violent: “You know, they say hindsight is 20/20, and that’s the truth. They [the shelter] have these posters hanging on the walls here that say the warning signs, you know, of if a man may be somebody who’s going to be a batterer. Don’t you know, my man had all of the symptoms—all of the warning signs were right there. But I didn’t see them as that. When he was always in control, control over me, it just looked pretty normal, like what do you expect? It’s not to say I liked it. In fact if you had asked me, I would have said with a straight face that I would never put up with being dominated or abused by a man. But I would never have considered what I got as abuse or as even leading up to abuse. Looking back on it now, I can see where he was going over the lines, but at the time, all I can tell you is that it didn’t look that way. What I can see now as me being set up to be victimized, at the time just looked like normal marriage.”

Scene 3

I am walking through an urban park with two undergraduate women. We have just left a workshop on sexism in which they voiced both their anger about men’s objectification of women and their constant fear, as women, of male aggression. A man, whom none of us knows, walks toward us. As his eyes scan us in an exaggerated way from head to toe and back again, he says, “Well hello there girls, you sure are looking fine tonight—my, my, my.” I say to my companions, “I can’t believe he just said that” (read: I’m annoyed by the intrusion, by his presumption that his assessment of our appearance has value for us, by his calling us girls, etc.). The woman next to me replies, “I know, me either. I wasn’t thinking I looked that good.” I suddenly realize that we are having two different conversations, based on two very different experiences of the interaction. Both women tell me that they find such attention affirming and exciting, and that they sometimes consciously solicit it. Asked if they ever worry that a man’s attention could “go too far,” the second woman replies, “I guess so, but it’s playing around where those lines are that’s all the fun. It makes me feel really desirable and kind of powerful to know that I’ve got what a man wants really badly—to sort of play around the edge.”

I have listened to such reflections across many settings—in the classes I teach, in battered women’s shelters, while playing and studying with adolescent girls in my urban community, in discussion groups with teens, and in streets, subways, and restaurants, as I eavesdrop on women’s “private” conversations. I have found myself nagged by a growing realization that the stories I hear do not mesh with the dominant themes in the mainstream social science literature and, surprisingly, even much of the feminist research literature on women’s sexualities, relationships, and experience of male aggression. And they certainly do not mesh with current popular portrayals of rape, battering, and harassment. These literatures generally portray women’s perception of male aggression as relatively straightforward and unidimensional—either exclusively erotic and sought after, or exclusively demeaning and terrifying. Yet women’s own accounts are often much more textured and complex, filled with apparent internal contradictions that have not yet been sufficiently explored in the social science or popular literature.

Scenes such as those above offer glimpses of the variability and murkiness of the boundaries, or “edges” and “fine lines”—between seduction and domination, pleasure and danger, responsibility and exploitation, agency and objectification, consent and coercion—that women interpret and negotiate as part of the “normal” experience of their daily hetero-relational lives. In these scenes we see women, enmeshed in the ever present context of male power and their own potential violation, constructing multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings of pleasure, choice, and objectification in their experiences of relationships and senses of their hetero-relational selves. The tensions in the above scenes suggest that women may perceive the same sets of interactions as simultaneously annoying and complimentary, unfair and normal, dangerous and enticing.

Intrigued by the gap between what I thought I knew as a feminist social and developmental psychologist and what I was hearing from the women and teens around me, I set out to learn more about the textures and contradictions in hetero-relational experiences from young women themselves. I had previously interviewed battered women and rape survivors quite extensively and written about the lack of resources, constrained options, and victim-blaming attitudes that often prevented them from escaping abuse. In an effort to combat popular assumptions that women who do not “just leave” must either enjoy abuse or not know any better, much of my research focused on the failure of social systems to protect women and on identifying external material and social conditions that compelled women to endure male aggression (Phillips, 1989). While I continue to believe that such a research focus is critical to counter woman-blaming societal attitudes and is relevant to many women’s experiences, I began to realize that the external forces I was stressing did not apply to many of the young women I encountered in my everyday life—particularly those in the classes I taught—who shared stories of their experiences of male aggression. Indeed, many of these women did possess the material resources to leave abusive relationships, and many of them voiced a political and psychological sense of entitlement to be treated well and taken seriously. Yet they spoke of domineering boyfriends, coercion and force in their sexual encounters, harassment by their male professors, employers, and doctors. They spoke of being pushed, hit, and verbally abused in their intimate relationships. Of course, I was troubled (although, unfortunately, not altogether surprised) that young women still experienced such abuses. But I was equally troubled by their insistence that theirs were basically “good” relationships and that the men who treated them this way should not be confused with “real” batterers, harassers, or rapists. Despite the availability of material resources and social supports that could help them find alternatives to these relationships, these women chose to stay in them and found ways to make their mistreatment seem tolerable.

Clearly, the materialist analysis I had relied on previously could not explain these young women’s perspectives or decisions. And so I became concerned with understanding the more subjective factors that inform women’s hetero-relational decision making. I wanted to know more about how young women conceptualize the distinctions between good relationships and bad ones, between consent and coercion, and between agency and victimization. I wanted to understand how young women make sense of the violence and manipulation that all too often invade their hetero-relationships. And I wanted to learn what they tolerate, what they resist, and what they perceive as “normal” or inevitable in their own and other women’s hetero-relational encounters. As I turned to the literature for insights, I found that some feminist theorists (see, for instance, Bartky, 1990; Benjamin, 1988; Butler, 1990; Collins, 1991; Espin, 1984; hooks, 1984; 1990; Kitzinger and Thomas, 1995; Kitzinger, Wilkinson, and Perkins, 1993; Mohanty, 1992; Sawicki, 1991; Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson, 1983; Valverde, 1987; Vance, 1984; Weeks, 1985) had grappled admirably with complex questions about sexuality, power, and paradox in women’s subjective experiences. Yet the voices of young women themselves were generally absent from this literature. Looking for research studies on the complexities of young women’s experiences, I found that social scientists had explored women’s responses to “clear-cut” instances of rape, battering, and harassment. Yet these studies generally did not explore the paradoxical nature of young women’s perspectives or incorporate the textured understandings generated by feminist theorists (see Brodkey and Fine, 1988; Hollway, 1984; 1995; Kahn and Mathie, 1999; Fine, 1983; Halson, 1990; Stanko, 1985; 1990; Thompson, 1995; and Tolman, 1996, for some notable exceptions). Inspired by my reading, but not entirely satisfied, I decided that I needed to interview young women to bring together the insights and questions I was developing from reading social research and feminist theory and from listening to the thoughts and concerns of young women themselves. I wanted to ground feminist theoretical insights by developing research that went directly to the source and asked young women themselves to explore the wrinkles and contradictions in their lived experiences. I also wanted to situate my research design and analysis within a feminist theoretical framework that honors complexity and paradox, rather than reducing young women’s perspectives to mere variables or trying to find one, coherent explanation for their discrepant experiences.

In order to move past a materialist analysis and into an exploration of women’s subjective experiences, I needed to speak with young women whose decisions were not necessarily constrained by a lack of resources, social supports, or senses of possibility for equality in relationships. I was also interested in speaking with young women outside contexts such as shelters or rape crisis centers where they would already have been labeled (by themselves and/or others) battered women or rape survivors. I wanted to hear women describe themselves and their experiences in their own terms in a context that did not already suggest that they were victims of abuse.

With these concerns in mind, I decided to interview undergraduate women in a large city in the northeastern United States. Since a quarter to a third of all women experience sexual abuse by the time they are eighteen years old (Benson, 1990; Finkelhor and Dziuba-Leatherman, 1994), I expected that an undergraduate sample would include both women who had encountered male aggression and those who had not. I located a small, progressive, liberal arts college that has a reputation for providing a non-traditional, profeminist, politically and intellectually challenging learning environment. Seventy percent of the students are female, and the student body is more diverse than most private colleges in terms of race and social class. Consistent with the emphasis on feminism at the college, students have access to considerable resources to help them find their way out of and seek redress for violent or exploitive circumstances they may encounter. Discussions of gendered power and male violence flourish in classrooms and student groups, and the intimate setting and small teacher-to-student ratio insure that students can find help in working through personal problems and finding solutions.

With the permission of school administrators, I placed letters in the campus mailboxes of all female students, inviting them to be interviewed about “power and intimacy in various relationships.” Throughout the course of a spring semester, thirty women spoke with me in great depth about their relationships, their expectations, and their thoughts about the distinctions between “normal” hetero-relations and those that are “over the line.” In a private lounge on campus, in students’ off-campus apartments, and in their dorm rooms, the women spoke of romance, passion, pain, and possibility. They shared stories, punctuated by both laughter and tears, that many said they had never uttered before. Some in hushed tones, others with bold animation, the women spoke at great length about the intimate details of their hetero-relationships and the strategies they developed for managing them. They recalled how they approached their relationships and sexual encounters, how they negotiated power and voice once inside those encounters, and how they managed to get out when things ran amok. While I had expected the interviews to last about an hour and a half, most lasted from three to five hours. In some cases, we became so engrossed that it was not until we finally turned off the tape recorder that we realized it had become dark outside and our afternoon appointment had run well into the evening.

To my surprise, although I had carefully steered away from any mention of violence or victimization in my description of the study, twenty-seven of the thirty women (90 percent) described at least one encounter that fit legal definitions of rape, battering, or harassment.¹ Yet also to my surprise, only two women ever used such terms to describe a personal experience, and both of these women went on to describe other violent or coercive personal experiences that they did not consider rape or abuse. The young women were eager to talk about the pain and mistreatment they had endured, and they were quite willing to use words like “rape,” “battering,” “victimization,” and “abuse” to describe other women’s experiences. These women expressed great concern about violence against women in general. Indeed, several offered rather eloquent analyses of gender and victimization. But when it came to naming what they had gone through personally, women tended to say things like “let’s just call it a bad night” or “things just went really badly.” Furthermore, their explanations for why things “went badly” involved a great deal of self-criticism: “I should have known better,” “Why did I go with him?” or “What was I thinking?” While many expressed anger at the men involved, their attributions for their painful experiences focused primarily on their own behavior. And even as they recounted stories through teary eyes and clenched teeth, they were quick to remind me that what they experienced was not so bad—not really abuse.

As I listened to women’s experiences and their strategies for managing them, I struggled to make sense of what I was hearing. Everything I knew as a social psychologist seemed turned on its head. I had studied attribution theory and learned that people tend to attribute other people’s negative experiences to personal flaws or poor behavior, but that they attribute their own negative experiences to forces outside themselves (Ross, 1977). I had learned that naming an injustice is an important step in coming to terms with it (Kidder and Fine, 1986). I had learned that self-blame interfered with one’s ability to cope (Peterson, Schwartz, and Seligman, 1981). And from feminist activism, I had learned that women see the lines between pleasure and danger, between “yes” and “no,” very clearly. Yet here were young women who were active agents in their own lives, expressing a general sense of entitlement, but also blaming themselves, blurring the lines, and seeming to dilute the severity of their own experiences. Throughout their interviews, women spoke of confusion, of contradictory emotions, of not knowing what to think.

I became consumed with a need to know more. How can we understand young women’s struggles to negotiate gendered power, and to what can we attribute their reluctance to label their experiences abuse?² Why did they seem to apply different standards when evaluating their own experiences compared to those of others? And why did they seem to hold themselves accountable for their own victimization, even as they spoke sympathetically about other women who had experienced abuse? As I have pored over young women’s stories and grappled with their nuances, I have become convinced that there are no straightforward answers to such questions. But I am also convinced that deepened understandings may be gleaned from an examination of the complex weave of cultural messages young women have encountered throughout their development, as well as through an analysis of the gendered power asymmetries that contextualize their hetero-relational experiences. Young women’s stories can teach us much about the multiple meanings of such concepts as power, domination, intimacy, danger, seduction, responsibility, victimization, and desire in their hetero-relational experiences. And an exploration of young women’s cultural and developmental contexts can help us situate our understandings in a framework that embraces contradiction and acknowledges the culturally constructed nature of their experiences. This book represents my own attempt to seek out and honor the complexities of young women’s lived hetero-relational experiences, and to develop deeper understandings of the strategies they use to negotiate and make sense of gender, power, and sexuality in those experiences.

The search for greater understandings of these complexities has several important implications. Theoretically, such an exploration may deepen insights into cultural constructions of hetero-sexuality, male entitlement, male aggression, femininity, and the objectification of women within these constructions. While much of the existing literature presumes women’s hetero-sexuality or explores hetero-sexual relationships, too little work has been done with women that interrogates and unpacks the multiple meanings of power and danger within, and the contours of, hetero-relationality as an element of their own subjectivities. Further, while feminist social research has addressed women’s experiences on either side of the presumed lines between “normal” hetero-relationships/encounters and those that are “dangerous,” “exploitive,” or “objectifying,” we have insufficient knowledge about how women conceptualize these lines for themselves. Thus, the women’s stories recounted in this book can push forward our theoretical understandings of women’s sexualities and gender development.

Clearly, though, this exploration does not speak simply to abstract, theoretical concerns. While many women, like those in the opening vignettes, may sense something deliciously empowering about “flirting with danger,” the danger in such “flirting” is entirely too real. Indeed, in the midst of multiple and contradictory cultural messages about hetero-sexual intimacy and male aggression, girls and women are daily exploited, harassed, raped, battered, and killed at the hands of both men they encounter casually and men they know very well. Seduced by the excitement of “straddling those fine lines” and “playing around the edge,” young women may enter into situations that put them at risk, thinking, erroneously, that they have the ultimate power over men.

Moreover, when women are violated, be it through rape, harassment, or battering, the popular culture typically blames them for their own victimization. Women are asked what they did to bring it on themselves, or why they didn’t “just leave”; society (including women) presumes clear lines and stands ready to hold women responsible as gatekeepers for men’s actions (White and Niles, 1990). During the years that I have been studying hetero-relationality, there has emerged a raging public debate about the nature of women’s victimization and sexual agency, and about women’s responsibility to name, leave, and seek redress for supposedly clear-cut crimes involving sexuality and abuse. Beginning in the early 1980s with academic debates about political correctness and the so-called thought police, fueled by the unprecedented public attention to Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and catapulted to new levels by the investigations of President Clinton’s sexual “misconduct,” questions of men’s and women’s responsibility in hetero-relations have soared into public consciousness.

While such public attention is potentially helpful, a troubling consequence has been that important discussions about complexities in women’s experience are too often shut down before they begin, collapsed under the weight of what Michelle Fine (1990) terms “a context of zero-sum guilt”—the idea that if women’s victimization is acknowledged as at all related to their own behavior, they are vulnerable to being assigned full responsibility, while the men who hurt them are exonerated. This notion, embraced by the very woman-blaming, and unfortunately quite popular, positions of some contemporary women authors,³ speaks loudly to the need to carve out spaces in which w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Contextualizing the Study: Establishing an Interpretive Framework
• 3. What’s a Young Woman (Not) to Think? Sifting through Early Messages about Hetero-Relations
• 4. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Deciding How/Who to Be in Hetero-Relationships
• 5. Managing Contradictions: Getting in, out, and around Hetero-Relations
• 6. Controlling the Damage: Making Meaning When “Things Go Badly”
• 7. Conclusion
• Afterword: Lingering Dilemmas: How Much Do We Want to Know?
• Appendix A: Individual Interview Guide
• Appendix B: Group Interview Discussion Topics
• Appendix C: Analysis: Working with the Data
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author