In the wake of #MeToo, flirting has become entangled with stories of harassment and abuse that generate both outrage and confusion. Embedded in historical critiques of sexual/gender relations and related to the ways current popular culture narrates these relations, flirting is in need of some critical analysis. This book aims to provide a contemporary review of social practices and representations of flirting and its cultural politics. We understand flirting to be an ambiguous and potentially pleasurable social practice that is also risky and fraught, and we are interested in how this is constructed in contemporary cultural media. Our book therefore analyses contemporary flirting practices as they emerge across a range of media forms like public scandal, reality television, and teen film, with reference to digital media spaces. These media events are read as complex intersections and negotiations of commerce, spectacle, media practice, shifting social relations and negotiations of gender and sexuality including romance and marriage, heightened technological immersion and local impact. The book interrogates the relation between flirting and scandal, the scripts available in popular culture, changes in social practice, and relations to feminism and other current social theories around gender and sexuality. We consider the ways in which desire can be declared, how playfulness might now be understood, and the kinds of language available to speak about these complexities. This book will argue that contemporary flirting is both provocative and conservative in its negotiation of an assemblage of shifting values associated with gender, class, race, generation, technology, and media. Possibilities for social innovation and change are considered in the light of these competing tensions.
In the introduction, we introduce some key issues around flirting, scandal, and intimacy that inform the remainder of the bookâs chapters. We begin by investigating what feminism has to say about flirting, and flirtingâs foregrounding within the #MeToo movement, including the inherent tensions that emerge from such forms of social change campaigns. By providing an intellectual feminist history, we are able to draw upon the legacy of thinking about gender and sexuality to reflect on representations and practices of flirting as always mediated by social values and codifications. We trace the history of the term âflirtingâ, linguistically and through the pedagogy provided by handbooks, both historically in print and in contemporary online forms, to demonstrate how ideas and language change over time and are gendered in their use and function. Ideas around desire, seduction, power, play, and indeterminacy are introduced drawing on contemporary critical and social theories.
Feminism and Flirting
It is valuable to begin this interrogation of flirting by considering some of the ways in which feminist thinking can play a role in making sense of what flirting is, what it might be, and in what ways certain aspects might be considered desirable or undesirable. The relation of feminism to flirting is complex and shifting. Reflecting on feminist thinking about sexuality in the late 1990s, Susan Sheridan notes two competing positions in regard to feminist thinking about sexuality: what she terms âprotectionistâ and âexpansionistâ (1998), or what we might now term sex-negative and sex-positive approaches. Protectionist thinking can be traced (at least) to the late nineteenth century, when women were without reproductive control and marriage was an economic arrangement as much as a legal and moral relation that supported the idea of family; womenâs personal relations were therefore structured through dependence on men to provide for them, a relation that was mirrored through institutional structures of law, medicine, citizenship, and governance. Since the 1960s, second-wave feminism beginning in the womenâs liberation movement has identified its priorities in providing refuges for women fleeing violent marriage and emergency rape crisis centres, legitimising womenâs health care as well as legislative and policy work to protect women as citizens, with rights not to be abused or harassed, to dress however they liked, and to withhold consent. The feminist critique of structural and practical inequalities focused on the way women are objectified by the male gaze for a particular masculinised sexual pleasure which was linked to the pornography industry. Facing this task of enormous structural disadvantage, there is little evidence of thinking about flirting in early second-wave feminist writing when it was focused on the big picture of social change.
There is one famous event in which feminism itself is associated with flirting, in what became known as the Town Hall Debate in 1971 in New York, a sell-out public panel titled âA Dialogue on Womenâs Liberationâ. The event was chaired by Norman Mailer, the well-known American novelist who had just published an inflammatory essay in Harperâs Magazine denouncing womenâs liberation. He was set to debate literary critic Diana Trilling, feminist author Germaine Greer, lesbian poet Jill Johnston, and activist Jacqueline Ceballos. The event was provocative from the start and loaded with sexual tension and ideological frisson, with enduring remembered moments including Greer and Mailer flirting, and a woman from the audience jumping onto the stage to kiss Johnston. Following this event Life magazine put Greer on the front cover with the headline âSaucy feminist that even men likeâ. This public positioning of womenâs liberation against the older white male vanguard was made into a documentary in 1979, Town Bloody Hall, and has recently been re-made into a performance by Wooster Group theatre company as The Town Hall Affair appearing at major festivals in 2018. This iconic event and its recent recall and remediation suggest, perhaps, that flirting is something of an underlying flashpoint for feminism. At the same time, however, this also highlights the ongoing prevalence of social structures of sexuality and gender in contemporary debates and everyday practices, both of which form objects of investigation for contemporary feminist thinking.
Situated against protectionist work, the womenâs liberation movement also engaged in radically reassessing sexuality through pleasure outside of procreation and monogamy, coinciding with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. With new contraceptive techniques like the pill widely available, and revolutionary sexology studies that articulated the much wider range of ânormalâ sexual behaviour, experimental practices like free sex and swinging, polyamory, and sado/masochism entered mainstream discourse. For feminists, this meant a renewed emphasis on womenâs agency as sexual subjects, with sex work being re-ascribed sex-positive meaning and womenâs pleasure becoming a focus for new forms of bodily consciousness-raising and feminist erotica. The two positions of critiquing oppressive sexual structures and reclaiming womenâs sexual agency were both necessary to shift dominant cultural values. While they might be difficult to reconcile, and mitigate against a consistent or coherent feminism, they can be understood as a set of analytical tools to make sense of the range of cultural experiences and their meanings. In 1984 Carol Vance (1) sums up the âtension between sexual danger and sexual pleasureâ:
Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency. To focus only on pleasure and gratification ignores the patriarchal structure in which women act, yet to speak only of sexual violence and o...