Flirting with Danger: Power & Choice in Heterosexual Relationships

Social and developmental psychologist and author Lynn Phillips explores the line between consent and coercion in this thought-provoking look at popular culture and the ways real girls and women navigate their heterosexual relationships and hookups.

Featuring dramatizations of interviews that Phillips conducted with hundreds of young women, the film examines how the wider culture's frequently contradictory messages about pleasure, danger, agency, and victimization enter into women's most intimate relationships with men. The result is a refreshingly candid, and nuanced, look at how young women are forced to grapple with deeply ambivalent cultural attitudes about female sexuality. Essential for courses that look at popular culture, gender norms, sexuality, and sexual violence.

Viewer Discretion Advised: Contains Sexual Imagery & Language & Explores Adult Themes

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.  TIX AVAILABLE AT THE BOX OFFICE

About Lynn Phillips

Lynn Phillips, Ph.D., has taught in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts since 2005 and is the 2012 recipient of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award. A social and developmental psychologist by training, she teaches courses in media and critical cultural studies, with a particular focus on issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality; media impacts on children's wellbeing; and the health and environmental implications of consumer culture. Her publications include Flirting with Danger: Young Women's Reflections on Sexuality and Domination, Unequal Partners: Power and Consent in Adult-Teen Relationships, and The Girls Report: What We Know and Need to Know about Adolescent Girls. Committed to participatory activist research, she has collaborated with such organizations as Planned Parenthood, battered women's shelters, sexual health and education programs, and grassroots programs and foundations supporting girls and youth development. She is currently working on a second documentary film with the Media Education Foundation, based on her research on "hooking up" on college campuses. She has appeared on National Public Radio, the CBC, CNN, ABC, Fox News, and other television and radio programs, and her research on adolescent girls' issues has received front-page attention in the Washington Post and several other national and international news publications. She received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Development from the University of Pennsylvania.