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

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.

Shows how far feminist theory has come and how far it has yet to go. . . . Avoiding simplistic dichotomies, Phillips eloquently negotiates the tricky terrain between female pleasure and male accountability. A brilliant demonstration of how social constructionist theory can serve as a framework for social activism. The first book to take seriously teenagers' sexual agency and desire in an era where sex has become synonymous with sexual victimization, and fear and anger have clouded over the possibility of delight and sensuality. Phillips leads the way among bright new theorists who work with Latina, African-American, and white voices together to bring to the fields of psychology and gender studies a fresh analysis that preserves the complexity of their hopes and realities surrounding sex. Flirting with Danger is well worth the read and is likely to stimulatel³#