Flirting with Danger [Chapter 7 and Afterword]

Psychology of Women

When women take personal responsibility for their abuse, they are also condoning that abuse. Like spoiled children who are not taught right from wrong, without confrontation there can be no change, and the behavior goes unchecked – mutating itself into “normalcy”. As it stands, this is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario; women who don’t speak up hold onto a false sense of self but don’t have to face unsympathetic criticism, while women who do must somehow prove their victim status to a deaf jury and possibly lose who their identity.  In a culture that encourages us to care how others view us, particularly women are aware and sensitive to that and their identity is established by people outside of themselves. If only the secure and empowered women are the ones to speak up about abuse, imagine the countless number who can’t muster the courage or ability to do so.

Phillip’s study shows that women don’t want to be victims – they don’t want to speak up or define their experiences as abuse. The idea of “crying wolf” is utter bullshit being used to destroy hope for change. No one wants to be abused. As human beings, men and women alike don’t want pain. We all want to have an identity – to be respected – to be happy. You shouldn’t need a study to tell you that – but it helps support what should be common sense. Not to over generalize, but it’s little wonder to me that the “right” also tends to be so religious – one would need that kind of blind leaping faith to even consider the stuff they come up with.

Personally, I loved her idea to incorporate social deconstruction into sex education. To teach boys and girls not just about body parts and STDs but about the current order of the world and how it might be different. It reminded me of the previous book and the section about 80s feminism having lost the groundings of its predecessors. The confusion of sexual revolution as power, when really it just made the discourses of what a woman can be all that more complicated and set the stage to further men’s pleasure. We know so much more about sex than our parents even did at our age, but we need to take it a step further.

Phillips also calls for changes at the institutional and government levels. Directly, I think she’s talking about issues we hear in the new today: abortion and the right over one’s own body (which I believe extends to medicinal drug use, but that’s another topic). She’s talking about changes in the way we deal with sexual criminals. When a woman reports a rape – which (as it usually does) means reporting her husband, boyfriend, co-worker to police – how is the process carried out? If someone came in reporting a child missing, or a murder, wouldn’t authorities have a constant update and close relationship with the victims and their family? Why should the complete violation of another person’s body be seen so differently than the violation of their life? Isn’t that the same thing, really? You could almost even say that the homicides are luckier – they don’t have to live to see people shit all over the most inexplicably horrible times of their lives.

When I read the part about safe spaces I thought, of course, about those little notes on doors all over campus – the ones that proclaim a literal safe space. Then I started thinking how awesome it would be if we had a “Church of Sex” – sex of course meaning gender and social discourse, not physical (though discussion would be a main factor). I started thinking how if you look over the past 100 years alone, we’ve grown explicitly sexual as a culture. Images of innuendo and also blatant sexual reference are in everything from advertising billboards to just about every song in the top 40. It’s not that sex is some newly discovered part of life, it’s just made so much more obvious now. I think the topic has been broached in open discussion in every single college course I’ve taken no matter the subject. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m saying that it’s still being treated by everyone like it’s a risky topic – sex still holds a tantalizing mysterious taboo despite its recent and rampant exposure – and having focused community sized efforts to discuss sex might help disillusion people and help them understand what sex can be by what it really is instead of what it’s been represented as. To understand that sex does not equal violence is one big step to helping women and men both see that violence is not a normal part of love.

As you’ve said in class – the personal is political – and I think that’s just another way of explaining Phillip’s final points about seeing abuse on an individual basis. With something so intensely personal, it’s hard to see how the violation of a person’s body can somehow relate to the violation of an entire gender – but it does. Numbers matter, and so does voice. Someone like Glenn Beck can become a raging celebrity whose opinion is being sold to people whether they agree with him or not. He’s one little man on TV, and yet he has a large area of reverberation. What women need to change the social hierarchy is what any aspect of popular culture needs: exposure. If woman by woman, each case is slowly recorded and filed away then no connection is made to the greater system that actually supports the abuse they’ve suffered. Only through group documentation, group analysis, can patterns be connected and can an army form – and the very agency and identity they thought they’d lose be reestablished and redefined.