A free screening is slated for Sunday morning at Amherst Cinema.
Sex and violence: two acts that appear opposite, but as author and professor Lynn Phillips shows us, are often intertwined.
The film "Flirting with Danger: Power & Choice in Heterosexual Relationships," based on Phillips’ book and produced by the Northampton-based Media Education Foundation, will be showing for free at Amherst Cinema on Sunday, October 21, at 11am. The film takes a look at young women’s heterosexual relationships and hookups, and how they can often be laced with violence, yet many young women choose not to speak up about their experiences.
“I’ve listened to so many girls and young women tell me stories of physical and emotional pain in their relationships and hookups, and whenever I give talks about these issues, women come up to me or write later to tell me that they hear their own stories in the experiences of these women, but they’ve never told anyone,” said Phillips.
The film also touches on the dominating theme of sex and hyper-sexualized women shown in the media, and how young women are constantly receiving mixed messages about how they are supposed to feel and act.
“When there’s so much in the popular culture that eroticizes violence against women and that reduces girls and women to their ability to attract and please men, it makes sense that those messages would seep into people’s relationships and hookups,” said Phillips. “Young women have to straddle increasingly complicated lines between being sexually bold and ‘hot,’ and being seen as a ‘slut.’ The ‘good girl/bad girl’ dichotomy hasn’t really gone away—it’s just that now they’re somehow supposed to be both the good girl and the bad girl at the same time.”
The book, which was published in 2000, is not only aimed at informing young women, but society as a whole. Sut Jhally, Founder and Executive Director of the Media Education Foundation and Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, came across the book while browsing in an Amherst book store, and was moved by the stories told in the book.
“As soon as I picked it up and read just a few pages, I knew the significance of the research, as it gave nuance and contradiction to an area (sexual violence) that normally is thought of in quite black and white terms. The depth in the interviews that Lynn Phillips conducted reflected the very mixed reactions that women have to sexuality – on the one hand femininity is defined almost exclusively through it, on the other hand sexuality is deeply connected to shame,” said Jhally.
Lynn Phillips, also a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and social and developmental psychologist, interviewed 30 women while researching Flirting with Danger. 27 of these women described experiences which could be legally classified as sexual harassment, battering, or rape, according to Phillips.
The interviews conducted by Phillips are re-enacted in the film by actresses, mostly from Smith College in Northampton. The film also contains analysis of the media and the mixed messages it sends, and other analyses of cultural norms our society.
“Film is such a powerful vehicle for telling stories and for making ideas accessible to a wide audience, so I’m delighted to have the opportunity to communicate my research findings in this way,” said Phillips. “My hope is that this film will stimulate discussion about women’s experiences of the lines between consent and coercion, or agency and victimization—lines that too often get collapsed into simplistic either/or categories in research and popular culture.”
Jhally hopes the film will begin a greater cultural discussion as well. “I hope women will recognize themselves in the stories and be encouraged to share, and that men will recognize their own behavior and be motivated to reflect on it,” he said.
Phillips and Jhally will hold a Q&A session following the screening of the film.