The declared aim of this book is a worthy one, yet the author’s political constraint upon the interpretation of testimony largely frustrates that aim. Throughout, the author’s two purposes compete. The first is to find an understanding of how young women in contemporary (American) culture perceive and analyze their own experience of hetero-relations. The second is to locate all such perceptions and analyses within an orthodox feminist politics.

The analytical framework within which the subjects of Lynn Phillips’ book are presented as flirting with the dangerous imbalances of power in the “sexualized aggression” of hetero-relations (a term which encompasses all heterosexual relations and also homosexual relations conducted under the influence of androcentric social discourses) are described  in the language of “male-centered” society and “male domination” and this lends the book a painfully old-fashioned 1980’s flavor and, indeed, very many of the references in the book are to feminist texts written in the 1980’s.

On the other hand, the motivation for this study is to explore the subtle complexities and nuances of young women’s subjective experience following the author’s surprise in finding that so many young women’s self-disclosures are contrary to established feminist literature. Phillips acknowledges this and seeks an understanding of their plural and diverse views of hetero-relations from the women themselves by means of interviews with a sample study of 30 women from varied ethnic and class backgrounds.

To attempt this, Phillips offers an interpretative method that employs a model of the self as a construction of social relations interacting with, and embedded in, cultural contexts which shape self-interpretation and condition agency. This model of the self is intended to be sufficiently person-specific to accommodate the subjectivity of individual experience, allowing each woman’s personal testimony to be given in her own words, and Phillips quotes them quite extensively.
Yet all this is kept consistent with second wave feminism by applying it only to her female subjects. Whilst the complexity of female subjectivities is emphasized, the other human beings involved in most of the encounters in the study are simply that: male otherness. The plural and diverse subjectivity of the males mentioned in the case-studies is dismissed almost entirely in favor of generalizations of socially normalized “male aggression” (a phrase which peppers the book and one which jars violently with Phillips request to the reader that we should suspend preconceived notions of victimization) and the greatest weakness of the work is the absence of any attempt to give a voice to any of the males mentioned who are, by this neglect, reduced to stereotypical guilt objects. In this way the author’s intention to respect the subjectivity of personal experience is thwarted by the rigor of her preconceptions of gender. This is unfortunate because later sections of the book reveal just how interesting a study this might otherwise have been.

Phillips highlights the mixed and severally contradictory cultural messages young women receive about who they can or should be, and what they can or should expect from their hetero-relations. These are classified under titles such as the ‘pleasing woman discourse’, the ‘together woman discourse’, and the ‘(hetero)sex as female victimization discourse’, etc. The reader may endorse much of this, but will find little or nothing that is not very familiar. However, the book improves considerably as it moves on to speculate on the conflicted identities which result from the pressure to conform to these multiple and contradictory discourses, and the psychological and cognitive strategies these young women employ to personally reconcile identification with these conflicting discourses in their sexual encounters with men.

In the chapter “Managing Contradictions” the women are allowed to speak with fewer ideological intrusions from the author and the material becomes more easily disencumbered from its restraining framework, allowing issues to arise of how cultural discourses can themselves be incorporated into the erotic and how a simplistic bifurcation of consent/coercion is inadequate, etc. Phillips does manage to establish some plausible links between the women’s rationales of their own behavior and the discourses mentioned and, insofar as these links can be divested of the misandrist attribution of blame which pervades the book, this is of genuine interest.

Overall, the book is a missed opportunity, for something very worthwhile could have emerged from this study by addressing the compounded complexity of the interaction of the psychological strategies employed by both women and men in their respective efforts to reconcile their identifications with the plurality of gendered discourses which beset both sexes.


James Tate has degrees from four universities in the United Kingdom, including a Ph.D. from Keele University, all in philosophy. His philosophical interests focus on personal freedom, self-realization, and sexuality. He is currently working as part of a large collaborative project in widening participation in higher education in the South of England intended to make university level education more accessible for social groups who traditionally have been denied this opportunity.

Categories: General