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

How young women make sense of, resist, and negotiate conflicting messages on female sexuality and sexual agency

InFlirting 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 Dangersheds 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.

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. A fascinating study of the ways young women of diverse backgrounds interpret heterosexual relations. Phillips, a feminist psychologist committed to research that reveals and resists domination, grapples here with the surprising paradoxes and contradictions expressed in young women's fears, fantasies, beliefs, and desires. Based on careful research and clear analytic argument, Flirting with Danger is a remarkably wise, compassionate, and useful book. Shows howl3