Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacy [1st ed.] 978-3-030-15507-0;978-3-030-15508-7

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-vii
Introduction: Flirting, Scandal, Intimacy (Alison Bartlett, Kyra Clarke, Rob Cover)....Pages 1-21
#MeToo: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting (Alison Bartlett, Kyra Clarke, Rob Cover)....Pages 23-50
Playing with Scripts: Social Experiments and Reality Television (Alison Bartlett, Kyra Clarke, Rob Cover)....Pages 51-75
Flirting on Film: Boundaries and Consent, Visibility and Performance (Alison Bartlett, Kyra Clarke, Rob Cover)....Pages 77-103
Conclusion: Uncertain Times for Flirting (Alison Bartlett, Kyra Clarke, Rob Cover)....Pages 105-111
Back Matter ....Pages 113-116

Citation preview

Flirting in the Era of #MeToo Negotiating Intimacy

Alison Bartlett Kyra Clarke Rob Cover

Flirting in the Era of #MeToo

Alison Bartlett • Kyra Clarke • Rob Cover

Flirting in the Era of #MeToo Negotiating Intimacy

Alison Bartlett The University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia

Kyra Clarke Massey University Palmerston North, New Zealand

Rob Cover The University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-15507-0    ISBN 978-3-030-15508-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery for making possible a panel discussion on Flirting and Feminism which, held in May 2016, brought together the authors and colleagues to consider the issues addressed in this book. We are particularly grateful to Susan Takao for initiating this event and to Carla Adams and Susan Maushart for engaging us in these important debates. Finally, we are very much indebted to Chris Beasley who not only contributed to the original panel discussion but has subsequently guided us in the journey of debate, interrogation, and investigation of this topic.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Flirting, Scandal, Intimacy  1 2 #MeToo: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting 23 3 Playing with Scripts: Social Experiments and Reality Television 51 4 Flirting on Film: Boundaries and Consent, Visibility and Performance 77 5 Conclusion: Uncertain Times for Flirting105 Index113

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Flirting, Scandal, Intimacy

Abstract  Key issues around flirting, scandal, and intimacy that inform the structure and thinking of this book are introduced. We begin by investigating what feminism has to say about flirting, and its legacies for thinking through flirting in the context of the #MeToo movement. We trace the history of the term ‘flirting’ 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, and the ensuing structure of the book and its key arguments are described. Keywords  Feminism • Flirting • Seduction • Intimacy • #MeToo

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 © The Author(s) 2019 A. Bartlett et al., Flirting in the Era of #MeToo, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7_1

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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 book’s chapters. We begin by investigating what feminism has to say about flirting, and flirting’s 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 ‘flirting’, 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

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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 ‘protectionist’ and ‘expansionist’ (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; women’s 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 women’s liberation movement has identified its priorities in providing refuges for women fleeing violent marriage and emergency rape crisis centres, legitimising women’s 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 ‘A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation’. The event was chaired by Norman Mailer, the well-known American novelist who had just published an inflammatory essay in Harper’s Magazine denouncing women’s 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 ‘Saucy feminist that even men like’. This public positioning of women’s 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

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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 women’s 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 ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, experimental practices like free sex and swinging, polyamory, and sado/masochism entered mainstream discourse. For feminists, this meant a renewed emphasis on women’s agency as sexual subjects, with sex work being re-ascribed sex-positive meaning and women’s pleasure becoming a focus for new forms of bodily consciousness-­ raising and feminist erotica. The two positions of critiquing oppressive sexual structures and reclaiming women’s 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 ‘tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure’: 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 oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live.

Vance was introducing a volume of essays from the feminist conference on sexuality held at Barnard College in 1982, which famously sparked clashes between the sex-positive and -negative positions. While trenchant critics of pornography like Andrea Dworkin in the United States linked sexual intercourse with broader structures of men’s domination and violence against women  (1987), French feminists like Luce Irigaray were writing about the pleasures of women’s multiple libidinous bodies, using metaphors of lips to refer to women speaking and sexual pleasures (1985). This apparent dichotomy was evident again in the 1990s and 2000s in the

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public debates around raunch culture and the pornographication of everyday life versus the rise of women as producers and consumers of such cultures and their association with fitness, health, and equality. It was evident again in 2018 as #MeToo continued to release an onslaught of public declarations of paralysing sexual harassment and assault experiences, prompting a letter from 100 influential French women published in Le Monde on January 9, denouncing the puritanism of #MeToo and arguing for retaining the playfulness and pleasures of flirting. The #MeToo campaign then continues this historical tension between critiquing and championing sexual practices and intimacy. Originally started by African American activist Tarana Burke in 2006, #MeToo was intended ‘to “let other survivors know they are not alone” and create solidarity with … victims’ (Zarkov and Davis 2018, 3), as well as to recognise structural power and privilege (Rodino-Colocino 2018). After being shared by white actress Alyssa Milano in 2017, the hashtag and ensuing issues of sexual violence have been widely discussed with escalating public awareness. It is suggested that this has enabled a wide range of people ‘to participate in public debate on sexual harassment, sexism and rape culture’ (Gill and Orgad 2018, 1318) at the same time as it is recognised that many people are excluded from this discussion. Generally, public discussion related to #MeToo has focused on recognising and acknowledging sexual violence, harassment, power, and privilege. Indeed, within much academic literature #MeToo scandals have not yet been linked with discourses related to flirting. For example, Dubravka Zarkov and Kathy Davis note that ‘while earlier feminist critiques were primarily faced with the task of establishing it [sexual harassment] as a problem, the #MeToo movement is showing just how widespread sexual harassment is and how it affects countless women (and men) across the globe’ (2018, 8) recognising the ‘anachronistic and ever-present’ nature of sexual abuse (Hemmings 2018, 971). There is particular concern to recognise the structural and systemic basis of the issues raised by #MeToo, issues which have concerned feminism for generations. Media academic and columnist Janet Banet-Weiser considers these contemporary discussions as ‘feminist flashpoints’: moments that highlight critical feminist issues, and yet often ignore important histories with complexities pushed ‘into the shadows’ (2018). Similarly, feminist professor Clare Hemmings suggests ‘both sexual violence and feminism itself and those who celebrate its new openness, rewrite history in yet another way, by simplifying the complex debates over the nature of sexual violence, the significance of porn, or the c­ haracter

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of sex work, that have been central to feminism since its inception’ (2018, 971). Significant tensions between concepts of the individual and the collective are notable in public discussions of #MeToo. For some, the collective outcry of #MeToo has been hopeful with the sheer number of participants enabled by digital media highlighting its capacity for social change. At the same time, the visibility of celebrities and public figures tends to individualise these issues. Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad point out that the campaign often frames people as ‘“bad apples” and “monsters” who did horrible things’ rather than critiquing ‘the monstrous capitalist, patriarchal and sexist system that has produced, sustained and rewarded these “bad apples” over decades’ (2018, 1320). Indeed, for Zarkov and Davis there is a concern ‘that visibility and exposure will be taken as a solution to the problem of sexual violence’ (2018, 6, emphasis in original) rather than engagement with the broader issues. Overall then, academic feminist engagement with #MeToo is marked by ambivalence. In discussing the experience of digital feminist activists, Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller find a range of contradictions in the experiences of those using hashtags: ‘digital feminism can simultaneously be experienced as extremely positive in generating community, connection and support for feminist views … despite widespread fear of attack and experiences of trolling’ with potential for significant effects and yet difficulties in participation (2018, 244). Others are critical of the imperfect legal system and trial by media, with Zarkov and Davis commenting that ‘a moralizing discourse which evaluates, judges and sanctions, all in one go, may not be the best way to address the problem’ (2018, 8). Instead, Zarkov and Davis argue for ‘directing our attention to the murky and complicated ambivalences in which sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement itself are embedded’ (2018, 8).

Histories and Handbooks In this book we understand flirting to be a social practice that is neither definable nor definite in its shape or meaning, but necessarily ambiguous, maybe awkward, and almost arbitrary in how it might be read and received. Given the current media coverage of flirting practices after #MeToo, however, it is useful to think about the historical shifts in its use as a term and its pedagogy as a form of instruction on social relations. While psychology scholar Susan A. Speer argues that ‘the practices of flirting are perhaps not

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as inexplicit or ambiguous to participants as we have ordinarily rushed to assume’ (2017, 147), a wide range of encounters might be considered and included here. In discussing his book Keywords, cultural theorist Raymond Williams outlines a cultural studies approach to considering definitions, noting the multiple meanings we might attach to ideas and words (1983, 16–17). He notes that this is not about finding the ‘proper’ dictionary meaning; while this can be interesting, it is the variations of meanings of words that provide greater interest. Williams instead sees his book as ‘the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions’ (1983, 15). Similarly, to consider the term ‘flirting’ is to recognise the multiple ways the word is understood and used. Barbara Vinken links the word to other languages and their effects, starting with ‘the onomatopoetic: Flit means to move erratically, to flit inconstantly from object to object’ (2015, 83). Vinken notes that within these words there is ‘a certain lack of goal-oriented direction’, a ‘lack of intention’, but also highlights other variations of the word: ‘According to the OED, flirt comes from a sixteenth-century expression, conter fleurette. It means “to try to seduce” by dropping flower petals: to speak sweet nothings, bagatelles’ (83). In this way, she suggests, The word itself seems strangely groundless and improper: an etymology guaranteed not in meaning but in sensuality … and in the translation of a foreign word that only indicates translation, out of nothing, said metaphorically. No semantic grounding, no proper meaning can be pinned down. Metaphor is at the heart of flirting: to express yourself ‘through the flower’, in another language, indirectly. (2015, 83)

This description of the term delights in its ineffability, which defies definition. In providing the historical provenance of words, the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary attributes the verb ‘flirt’ to a series of movements akin to flicks, flips, flits, and spurts, but also violent blows or raps when first used in texts in the mid-sixteenth century. It is not until the late eighteenth- and then nineteenth-century texts that flirt is used to mean ‘to play at courtship; to practise coquetry; to make love without serious intentions’. Similarly, flirtation is associated with motion until the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries when it becomes the action of ‘giddy behaviour, frivolity; the action of playing at courtship’. The link between movement and even unexpected jolts and blows with the momentum of flirting is

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evident here, as the later uses of the term are embedded with play and frivolity. Other adjectives associated with derivatives of the term include silliness, trifling, giddy, flighty, before flirting becomes associated with a loose woman. We can see here then how the Oxford English Dictionary is imbricated in the development of the term to apply to women and to ascribe moral values around their seriousness and sexuality. These entries were first written in 1897 and Victorian social practices were very different from now; but this demonstrates the point that social practices are continually shifting. As flirting suddenly becomes complicated and fraught in its association with abusive power through #MeToo, another cultural shift in understanding is evident in the history of the term. The gendering of flirting as feminine is an interesting historical turn given the current cultural debates. As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes, the feminisation of flirting is particularly clear in Georg Simmel’s writing (1984). For Simmel (a contemporary of Sigmund Freud), the figure of the flirt is a woman who flirts with men and it is the woman who is in the position of power to consent or refuse a man, but there her power ends (Phillips 1994). Cultural theorist Tania Modleski reminds us of the way feminisation works to devalue culture, however, and why we should be suspicious of such turns. In her essay ‘Femininity as Mas(s)querade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture’, Modleski notes that ‘our ways of thinking and feeling about mass culture are so intricately bound up with notions of the feminine’ (1986, 38). She notes that while discourses which suggest a perception of power within mass culture are ‘seductive’, they may merely ‘masquerade as theories of liberation’ (52). That is, while flirtation may be viewed as potentially powerful, there is reason to be wary. In any case, Emily Langan notes that the association of women with flirting is not universal, suggesting that, with the movement of courtship from the home to public spaces in the early twentieth century, power shifted towards men in the sense that ‘men are the aggressors in relationships and women the restrainers’ (2010, 23). While psychologists Narissra Punyanunt-Carter and Thomas Wagner report differing perceptions and motivations of flirting between male and female college students (2018), literary critic Lauren Stone optimistically argues that ‘for it to play out as a flirtation both players must be willing to be flirter and flirtee, thus avoiding the power differential’ (2015a, 63). Such differing viewpoints indicate the struggle to define flirting in terms of gender and power, as an ongoing preoccupation.

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If flirting seems like an individualised practice, it is a highly political form of play. Candida Yates’ research makes this explicit in her analysis of popular political culture when flirting is used by politicians ‘who foreground emotion as a means of conveying authenticity when trying to appeal to voters’ (2015, 65). Yates takes a psycho-social approach to suggest that ‘this development is symptomatic of the personalisation of politics more generally’ (2015, 65), and notes that whether real or not, political scenes of emotion touch deeply held cultural fantasies and the operations of the unconscious, including ‘fantasies of masculinity and sexual difference’ (2015, 23). Male and female politicians strategically adopt quite different positions in relation to wooing the electorate. Women, Yates argues, ‘have more to lose and ironically, cannot in the same way as men, afford to utilise the playful ambiguities of flirtatious communication often associated with femininity’ (2010, 292), without risking being seen as weak or as stereotyped (as exploiting their femininity, or else disavowing it). Flirting by men in politics, however, can work to signify a new, more enlightened form of masculinity: ‘a signifier of plurality and a refusal to accept the hegemonic certainties of patriarchal masculinity and the impulse for mastery’ (2010, 283), something we take up further in Chap. 2. As instrumental forms of communication, then, contemporary political bodies trade on the possibilities of flirting to court votes but also unravel its gendered relations. Instructions on how to flirt emerged into mass culture during the 1960s. Books like Helen Gurley Brown’s 1965 Sex and the Office followed up her ground-breaking Sex and the Single Girl (1962) which tackled not only the previously taboo topic of sex before marriage but also its relation to faith and religion in the United States. As part of the new sexual revolution and a period of radical social change, it is hardly surprising that the 1960s begin a publishing interest in flirting pedagogy and this is coupled with the use of science to bring respectability to the study of sexuality through the work of Masters and Johnson and the Kinsey Report beginning in the 1940s. This scientific approach is taken up by new disciplines in the 1980s when psychology and observational methods frame flirting as innate human behaviour, and book-length studies on flirting are published in relation to organisational behaviour and non-verbal communication practices. Perper’s 1985 Sex Signals: The Biology of Love is an example, as is Buss’s The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating in 1994. Writing for the Library Journal in 1997 to advise librarians on the full range of sex manuals available for their shelves (including gay and lesbian,

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ethnic, and feminist manuals), Martha Cornog and Timothy Perper note that sex manuals are now ‘a fit subject for libraries to collect’ and insist on the need to educate Americans in this field. Book publications in the form of advice manuals burgeon again from the late 1990s and early 2000s straddling serious and comic social instruction. These include titles like Rabin’s 1997 book 101 Ways to Flirt, and in the early 2000s Flirting 101 by Lewis and Bryant, Read My Hips: The Sexy Art of Flirtation by Marx, and Clark’s Flirting for Dummies, as well as Greene’s The Flirting Bible. Interestingly these manuals are all written by women, or female/male couples, in contrast to the earlier wave of handbooks that were mostly by men or female/male couples. In the apparently relentless market for flirting advice, books are now only a small part of flirting instruction. A 2018 book by social anthropologist Jean Smith, Flirtology, emerges as part of a suite of media including her website, TEDx talks, and tours with clients. Today, flirting advice can be found online in a range of articles, guides, and videos. A Google search for ‘how to flirt’ produces over 200 million results, with the phrase ‘how to flirt without being creepy’ particularly trending in December 2017 at the early stage of the #MeToo movement. Common searches prioritise the online dimensions of flirtation in the current moment, with questions such as ‘How do you flirt over text?’ and results on the first page of a Google search including traditional magazines, such as Seventeen, Marie Claire, GQ Magazine, Business Insider, and Cosmopolitan; dating sites such as eHarmony and Zoosk; and web-based advice/instructional sites such as Lifehacker and wikiHow. Indeed, a November 2018 Men’s Health article is titled ‘The New Rules of Flirting’ with the tagline ‘How to Know if She’s Interested … and When It’s Time to Pull Back’. Flirting instruction and advice then are clearly available, and targeted towards current discussion points. The articles themselves are often formed as a list, such as ‘The Only 8 Flirting Moves You’ll Ever Need’ with bolded tips, often supported by advice from a ‘dating and flirting coach’ or psychologist. While flirting is not tacitly associated with #MeToo, as a set of conventions that can be learned, such advice appears to take account of this public campaign in its recent manifestations, aware of the ramifications of flirting as a social practice in this cultural moment. Not all flirting pedagogy, however, is so accountable. In 2014, the Australian government cancelled the visa of US ‘dating coach’ Julien Blanc, who was conducting a speaking tour of the country helping instruct men on how to meet and seduce women. His classes and boot camps for men are designed to increase men’s confidence and courage to approach

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women, principally with the view to increasing their capability of achieving gratification and self-fulfilment (https://julienhimself.com/). What this approach indicates is the way in which a certain strand of thinking on flirting is linked with seduction, albeit within a framework that considers seduction both a ‘natural’ attribute of men and, simultaneously, a right of men that has been apparently taken away or unfairly questioned by women, requiring restoration in order to revert to a previously desirable status quo. Blanc’s visa was cancelled as a result of widespread protests over the connection between his seduction training, his promotion of men’s sexual gratification, and rape culture. Indeed, the police commissioner of the Australian state of Victoria noted that Blanc’s training work was ‘deeply disturbing and offensive’ due to the way in which it actively labelled women as objects (Davey 2014). Media coverage of Blanc’s techniques refers to choking women, and ‘grabbing women by the neck and pushing their mouth towards his crotch’ (Stockwell 2016). Blanc’s framing of this as flirting and as goal-oriented is one which actively genders sexuality and relationality by promoting the objectification of desire. In his analysis of such popular male gurus, Rune Mølbak argues that flirting ‘is irreducible to a simple conscious act since it also involves moments of losing control and of being constituted in and through the actions of others as well as the circumstances of the situation’ (2010, 24). In this sense, such a framework might be considered to be anti-flirting: not only because it is less-than-­ ethical in terms of inequities of subject-object or genders, but because it obscures the liminality of flirting in favour of a goal-orientation writ as demand.

Flirting Theory The relationship between flirtation and seduction is an important part of the literature on flirting. In their book Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, literary critics Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone note the relationship flirting has had to seduction, suggesting that its perception as a ‘subgenre of seduction’ has led to its ‘undertheorization’ (2015, 1). What is particularly interesting about their analysis is that they only tentatively entertain the idea that power might be involved in flirtation (16); that is, they suggest that flirtation ‘is a game in which there is no winner and no participant surrenders’ (1). And yet, as recent media discourse suggests, flirting is generally perceived as beset by power. In her study analysing a range of

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‘flirting episodes’, for example, Speer suggests that a large part of what constitutes flirtation is how it engages with power. For example she notes that compliments may be perceived as flirtatious because ‘they are playfully sexualised’, but also ‘because they involve the flirting party claiming epistemic rights to assess the recipient in a way that indexes a greater level of familiarity or intimacy between them than the interactional context’ (2017, 132). In this way, these comments may be heard as ‘presumptuous’ or ‘incongruous’ and this is part of their design, to ‘playfully push the boundaries of intimacy’ (132). While not wanting to limit what might be perceived as flirtation, part of what Speer articulates is the presumptuousness of power: showing more familiarity than might otherwise be expected. This disjuncture between familiarity and professional relations for example was evident in the public outrage around cricketer Chris Gayle’s interaction with Australian sports journalist Mel McLaughlin in 2016. Callum Davis (2016) describes this encounter: Responding to McLaughlin’s questions on Gayle’s approach to the innings the batsman said: ‘I just wanted to have an interview with you as well, that’s why I batted so well.’ With McLaughlin visibly unsettled by Gayle’s comments, the big Jamaican added: ‘Your eyes are beautiful, hopefully we can win this game and then we can have a drink after as well. Don’t blush baby.’

Speer’s formulation is what makes flirting recognisable, but it is also what casts this particular encounter as problematic, with the comments made at an inappropriate moment: a professional televised interview about his game. One of the distinctions both Freud and his contemporary Simmel make between flirting and seduction is that in flirting, nothing actually happens (Fleming 2015). In his summary of these two key thinkers, Paul Fleming notes that ‘seduction wants something; it desires some thing—to have, to possess the other. Seduction has a vested interest, a telos, an end’ (2015, 21, emphasis in original). Flirting, on the other hand, ‘is pleasure that does not aspire to gratification; it is pleasurable approval without (seduction’s) aroused inclination’ (22). This formulation might be attributable to their early twentieth-century context; however, one of the significant effects of #MeToo is to articulate that things do happen: that a touch on the knee or sliding a hand under a skirt can make the recipient feel unwanted emotions (shame, embarrassment, vulnerability, paralysis, rage,

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disorientation) and that these continue to impact their lives through incorporation into their subjectivity. Flirting with a journalist on live television, for example, destabilises her professionalism and refocuses the public gaze on her as an object of sexual desire. These affective, emotional, and social impacts are often reinforced by structural disadvantage and repeated situations that suggest the normality of the ‘flirting’ behaviour and the abnormality of their reaction. In this sense, perhaps the behaviours being named by #MeToo should not be understood as flirting, as to do so can seem to validate harassing behaviour that has been perpetuated for years. This is perhaps key to our thinking in this book when we suggest ways in which flirting might be wrested from its association with scandal, harassment, and violence to a position of liminality, uncertainty, and playful unknowability that disrupt expectations and linear narratives of outcomes and endings. Psychoanalytic theory is often used as foundational literature in academic scholarship on flirting, and we do refer to it at various times throughout this book. Some commentators have related the impulse for flirting to the development of the child in managing the loss of love-­ objects. Freud’s observation of his grandson throwing a cotton reel from his cot when his mother is absent was understood to be a game of fort/da, gone/there. Freud postulated that this game of throwing a substitute thing away and then retrieving it earned a measure of control over the loss of the mother (Fleming 2015; Yates 2010, 2015). As Fleming describes it, ‘the joy resides not merely in the da, in the reappearance of the desired object, but also and especially in the fort as a mode of being da, a presence that appears only at a distance, in absence’ (5, emphasis in original). The game of fort/da might be considered a foundational theory and stage of child development that impacts how we manage desire and loss. As a critic of Freud’s thinking, however, feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray regards such explanations as limiting, in transferring value to objects and language rather than respecting the other, including other things, as separate from us but also mutually constitutive (2002, 7). Irigaray herself is often accused of flirting with philosophers in her writing, which is playful in its deviation from academic conventions and topics. It is worth keeping in mind however the slippage between people and/as things when thinking through theories of flirting relations. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ introductory essay to his volume On Flirtation is also cited as a key text in psychoanalytical thought on flirting (1994). This brief essay canvases the idea of our relation to time, and also

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our historical contingency as subjects, in relation to flirting as both a social practice and a psychic mechanism embedded in language and culture. He asks a series of important questions, like what does commitment leave out of the picture that we might want? If our descriptions of sexuality are tyrannized by various stories of committed purposes—sex as reproduction, sex as heterosexual intercourse, sex as intimacy—flirtation puts in disarray our sense of an ending. In flirtation you never know whether the beginning of the story—the story of the relationship—will be the end; flirtation, that is to say, exploits the idea of surprise. (Phillips 1994, xxviii–xix)

In this way, Phillips notes that flirtation may be seen as disruptive in relation to ‘progress narratives’. Sustained flirtation disrupts social scripts of relationships and potentially challenges the idea of commitment, a topic that we address in Chap. 3 and return to in Chap. 5. Another key idea we frequently refer to is the idea of intimacy. Discussing the origins and changes in understandings of intimacy over time, Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim, and Alison Winch note that generally intimacy has been deemed ‘unimportant within the wider scheme of political and public life’ (2017, 249), but suggest that more recent scholarship has expanded the possibilities of people and forms of intimacy. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner point out, while often linked in heterosexual culture to ‘personal life’ and the private, ‘intimacy is … publicly mediated’ (1998, 553). The stories we tell about intimacy—the ‘love plots’ and heteronormative romantic tales—have tended to limit how we understand intimacy and ignore the institutional and societal constraints that govern our understandings. Indeed, Berlant suggests, ‘To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living’ (1998, 286). While intimacy is often associated with individualism, Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey suggest it can also ‘promise to “liberate” intimate relationships from their “domestication” within the heterosexual nuclear family’ with an ‘openness to broader constituencies, different kinds of affective ties, and more diverse forms of sexual practice’ (2018, 3). In considering intimacies in this book, we are particularly focused on the possible connections between people as well as between people and social structures, considering how these might be constrained, explored, and negotiated through the possibilities of flirting.

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Recent scholarship addressing flirting in contemporary research takes up these key ideas around loss, control, and intimacy using media, literary, and cultural studies approaches. The unpredictability of flirting is sometimes approached as a dilemma between the serious and the playful or inauthentic. Vinken suggests that ‘serious people have always voiced an uneasiness with flirtation. Deceit, the possibility of not being taken seriously, lurks around every corner. The authenticity of our feelings is in danger’ (2015, 84). This slipperiness of intention and outcome destabilises the knowability of what is real or not, an issue we take up in Chap. 3 in regard to reality television. For Fleming it is this contingent engagement with reality that is significant: ‘a structural feature conditioning the pleasure of flirtation comes from flirting with reality and thus risking to put an end to the game’ (2015, 28), to play the game but not go too far, to ‘always play with its possibility’ (Fleming 2015, 29). Flirtation is often described as playful, but also indecisive and it is particularly interesting to note the way this links to deceit and unease. Indeed, Phillips suggests ‘flirtation … stops when you take it seriously’ (xxii). Further reinforcing its playful qualities, Stone suggests flirting lies at the intersection between sincerity and insincerity and it is this tension which is productive of ‘serious play or playful seriousness’: ‘to flirt effectively one has to mean it, but of course “to mean it” would mean to have unwittingly (or wittingly) shifted to the mode of seduction’ (2015b, 75). Literary academics Hoffman-Schwartz, Nagel, and Stone note in the introduction to their 2015 collection Flirtations that they ‘hope for a mode of encounter that succeeds in failing and fails in succeeding’ (3). This slipperiness and doubling of meaning frequently feature in current scholarship on flirting. The tendency to want to distinguish flirting from seduction is indicative of the equivocality of the term and the practice. Stone, for example, turns to the performative and metaphysical when she writes that ‘flirtation’s relation to seduction might be thought of as citational; it borrows the gesture, the performance, and the language, but it also retains a difference’ (2015a, 61). In the same volume about the relation of flirtation to seduction, Hoffman-Schwartz argues that ‘flirtation is structured by the possibility of the transgression of its own form and formality; flirtation would not be itself if it did not hold out the possibility, however distantly, of going beyond mere flirtation’ (2015, 15). Perhaps this recognises the queer potential of flirtation. Thinking about the terms of social success and failure, queer theorist Jack Halberstam suggests rather than aspiring to heteronormative capitalist forms of maturity and wealth accumulation,

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perhaps ‘under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’ (2011, 2–3). As a way of moving beyond conventional markers of success, Halberstam suggests that ‘queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life’ (2011, 186). While political scientist Chris Beasley warns against relegating everything queer as progressive and everything heteronormative as defective (2011), the desire here to disturb the conventional and predictable is something that is played out in flirting and its elusiveness. In summary, then, there is scholarly literature on flirting that draws on psychoanalytic theories and psychological studies, as well as media and social theories to think about ideas of love and loss, time and control, seduction and success, but also to position flirting within an indefinable and potent place of libidinal uncertainly. It is this messy and troubling manifestation of intimacy that we are most interested in exploring in the context of current sexual politics. The ways in which we understand flirting in this particular theoretical landscape is that flirting is performed through and made intelligible in the context of contemporary practices, discourses, and representations. In prising open some of those representations and discourses in contemporary culture, we aim to thoroughly investigate flirting in its epistemological structures and pedagogic potencies.

About the Book The remainder of this book investigates contemporary popular culture on flirting. In individual chapters we explore recent scandals and the #MeToo movement, reality television experiments with relationships and intimacy, and practices of ethical relationality in teen film. The book aims to intervene in public debates on flirting to offer some complexity, historical context, and a language for thinking through shifting social practices. Important here is that if flirting is a negotiated communicative act of relationality in the context of intimacy, it is always multiple, subjective, complicated, and the site of positive and productive anxieties. If intimacy is negotiated through scandal, through the representation of the real, and through the pedagogies of screen cultures and visuality, then how else might we want to think about flirting as a cultural practice? This book is deliberately focused on investigating a range of media forms not merely for how they represent flirting, but for what those media can be u ­ nderstood

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to be doing in upholding and destabilising contemporary norms of intimacy negotiation. We begin with the #MeToo movement that brings flirting to the table, and particularly through the idea of scandal and how the concept of flirting is imbricated. The #MeToo scandals of late 2017 and continuing through 2018—in which a number of high-profile Hollywood men were alleged to have engaged in a range of problematic sexual practices, assaults, harassment, and conflicts of interest—present an important field in which to engage critically with the concept of flirting. Some of the incidents involve criminal acts that are now under official investigation and others have raised very important issues related to how gender relations are performed in the context of an industry marked by sexuality and sexualised representation. There have also been other instances (and concerns expressed by those opposed to raising these issues in public) that ‘call out’ acts of flirting. All scandals open a space for public debate on the extents and limits of behaviour by particular groups of people in contemporary society. Many scandals, of course, also progress towards polarised views that make such public debate difficult. In the case of #MeToo, there has been a significant re-configuring of what it might mean to flirt in certain workplaces, an understanding of how flirting might be misinterpreted as expressing a right to sexual pleasure, a renewed engagement with the fact that some acts that are not flirting might be mis-read as flirting and, finally, a utilisation of flirting to excuse or justify problematic sexualised behaviour. Chapter 2 investigates the ways in which flirting has operated across a range of examples that have emerged in the #MeToo scandals, including some of the responses to the scandal that seek to foreclose on the acceptability of flirting of a form of human communication. The significant change over the past ten years in how scandal topics emerge and are discussed in digital culture is examined here for the role digital media and online ‘call-out’ culture has the capacity to both bring to light important behind-the-scenes problems and produce a field of engagement that might be described as sex-negative. Chapter 3 focuses on television, and in particular romance reality television, to think about the relation of scripts to both television and reality. The proliferation of reality television shows that contrive conflict in relationships can be understood as a form of social experimentation that examines the dynamics and organisation of relationships. The introduction of psychologists providing expert opinion and commentary in series like Married at First Sight might be read as a flirtation with science,

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whereby experts bring people together because people make a mess of it left to our own devices. While some series such as The Bachelor and The Bachelorette manipulate and ‘game’ the process and practice of flirting for maximum spectacle and viewing ratings, Married at First Sight has developed ways in which subjects are put under expert scrutiny and relationships are produced that skip a period of flirting. Flirting is absent in the production of a marriage in these settings, and then we watch while they struggle to establish personal relations after the wedding. This chapter will interrogate media theory on reality television, especially in the context of how reality television artificially recreates social realities or creates new scripts actively producing cultures of relating, amid a commercial desire for scandal and emotional excess. Hinging on the idea of scripts, it also draws attention to the language of flirting, romance, and desire. In Chap. 4 we subsequently turn our attention to how teen films model flirting practices to young people, examined through the idea of ethical practice. Responding to these ideas of scandal, it is suggested that flirting offers an opportunity to explore ethical practices of relating to others and one place we can explore the possibilities of this is teen film. In teen film flirting plays a crucial part in testing the waters and learning how to relate to others. In order to appeal to the largest possible audience, flirting, innuendo, touching, glancing, and talking often replace the representation of sex. In this way, film is a potent media through which to discuss aspects of relationships and relating that sometimes fall to the wayside. Teen film presents a variety of intimacies between characters—boys and girls, boys and boys, girls and girls, straight characters and gay characters, friends and lovers—sometimes in constructive ways, other times in ways that demonstrate a lack of care for the self or others. As these texts demonstrate, flirting can be playful, or uncertain, detached; it is not always good or pleasant; it can be unethical and lack mutuality. In all these circumstances, what flirting means or what it will lead to can be uncertain, and it is important to consider such uncertainty. We might identify with some moments more than others, but such moments can allow us to recognise that sexual intimacy is complex and sometimes confusing. Chapter 4 considers some such moments in teen films, and some of the ways we might start conversations or discussions around negotiating intimacy rather than resorting to scandal. We conclude in Chap. 5 by thinking through some of the implications of the book regarding possibilities for change in these uncertain times. Summarising some of the implications for thinking about flirting and

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scandal historically, theoretically, and in more complex frameworks, we argue that flirting in the media we examine has much potential for critical analysis as well as variations in personal practice and ethical relations. Paying particular attention to time, timing, and the times, we propose a politics of flirting that is playful and attentive to power, that is attentive to the personal and distinguishable from professional relations. These approaches, we argue, are timely in the fallout from #MeToo, and offer some ways in which discussion might be constructive and critical.

References Attwood, Feona, Jamie Hakim, and Alison Winch. 2017. Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Technologies and Relationships. Journal of Gender Studies 26 (3): 249–253. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Popular Feminism: Feminist Flashpoints. LA Review of Books, October 5, 2018. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/popular-feminism-feminist-flashpoints/. Barker, Meg-John, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey. 2018. Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture. Newark: Polity Press. Beasley, Chris. 2011. Libidinous Politics: Heterosex, ‘Transgression’ and Social Change. Australian Feminist Studies 26 (67): 25–40. Berlant, Lauren. 1998. Intimacy: A Special Issue. Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 281–288. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. 1998. Sex in Public. Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 547–566. Cornog, Martha, and Timothy Perper. 1997. Sex Texts Come Out of the Closet. Library Journal 122 (16): 53–56. Davey, Melissa. 2014. US ‘Pick-up Artist’ Julien Blanc Forced to Leave Australia after Visa Cancelled. The Guardian, November 7, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/nov/07/protesters-force-us-pick-up-artist-julien-blanc-to-quit-australian-tour. Davis, Callum. 2016. Chris Gayle Accused of Sexism after Asking Female Cricket Presenter Out on a Date. The Telegraph, January 4, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/12080309/Chris-Gayle-accused-of-sexism-afterasking-female-cricket-presenter-out-on-a-date.html. Dworkin, Andrea. 1987. Intercourse. New York: Free Press. Fleming, Paul. 2015. The Art of Flirtation: Simmel’s Coquetry Without End. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-­ Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 19–30. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. 2018. The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo. Sexualities 21 (8): 1313–1324.

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Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hemmings, Clare. 2018. Resisting Popular Feminisms: Gender, Sexuality and the Lure of the Modern. Gender, Place & Culture 25 (7): 963–977. Hoffman-Schwartz, Daniel. 2015. Barely Covered Banter: Flirtation in Double Indemnity. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 13–18. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Hoffman-Schwartz, Daniel, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone. 2015. ‘Almost Nothing; Almost Everything’: An Introduction to the Discourse of Flirtation. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 1–10. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. New York: Cornell University Press. ———. 2002. The Way of Love. Translated by Heidi Bostik and Stephen Pluhacek. London: Continuum. Langan, Emily. 2010. Good Girls Don’t, But Boys Don’t Either: Toward a Conservative Position on Male Flirting. In Dating Philosophy for Everyone: Flirting with Big Ideas, ed. Kristie Miller and Marlene Clark, 19–36. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalyn Keller. 2018. #MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture through Digital Feminist Activism. European Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (2): 236–246. Modleski, Tania. 1986. Femininity as Mas(s)querade: A Feminist Approach to Mass Culture. In High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, ed. Colin MacCabe, 37–52. Oxford: Alden Press. Mølbak, Rune. 2010. Flirting as a Liminal Experience: A Dialogue Between a Philosophical-Phenomenological Understanding of Liminality and an Empirical-Existential Study of Flirting. PhD diss., Duquesne University. Phillips, Adam. 1994. On Flirtation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Punyanunt-Carter, Narissra M., and Thomas R.  Wagner. 2018. Interpersonal Communication Motives for Flirting Face to Face and Through Texting. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 21 (4): 229–233. Rodino-Colocino, Michelle. 2018. Me Too, #MeToo: Countering Cruelty with Empathy. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15 (1): 96–100. Sheridan, Susan. 1998. Sexuality and Representation. In Australian Feminism: A Companion, ed. Barbara Caine, 286–295. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1984. Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality and Love. Translated by Guy Oakes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Speer, Susan A. 2017. Flirting: A Designedly Ambiguous Action? Research on Language and Social Interaction 50 (2): 128–150.

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Stockwell, Stephen. 2016. Real Social Dynamics ‘Dating Coaches’ Cancel Australian Tour. TripleJ Hack (Australian Broadcasting Commission), January 18, 2016. https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/australian-pickup-seminars-cancelled/7096234. Stone, Lauren Shizuko. 2015a. Staging Appeal, Performing Ambivalence. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-­ Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 61–63. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. ———. 2015b. The ‘Irreducibly Doubled Stroke’: Flirtation, Felicity, and Sincerity. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 74–81. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Vance, Carole. 1984. Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality. In Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance, 1–27. London: Pandora. Vinken, Barbara. 2015. Frill and Flirtation: Femininity in the Public Space. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-­ Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 82–91. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. Hammersmith, London: Fontana Press. Yates, Candida. 2010. Spinning, Spooning and the Seductions of Flirtatious Masculinity in Contemporary Politics. Subjectivity 3 (3): 282–302. Yates, Candida. 2015. The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. 2018. Ambiguities and Dilemmas Around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo? European Journal of Women’s Studies 25 (1): 3–9.

CHAPTER 2

#MeToo: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting

Abstract  This chapter investigates some of the ways in which the contemporary #MeToo movement and related debates have an impact on concepts related to flirting. We discuss flirting in relation to #MeToo as an interpersonal communication form occurring in workplaces such as film studios and business, as well as in the context of flirting as a cultural object itself. Analysing some examples of writing that worries about the possibility of #MeToo preventing workplace and public flirting, we look at how affective engagement with discomfort and vulnerability is implicated in flirting, and how it operates as a liminal activity built on unknowability of its communicative outcomes. Exploring some of the causes and origins of #MeToo in anger about the failure of ‘new masculinity’ and its claims to gender equity and corporate social responsibility, we show how flirting has been used sometimes either to initiate sexual harassment or to excuse it after the fact. Looking at #MeToo as a form of populism that, on the one hand, critiques gender relationality but, on the other, does not offer solutions, we end the chapter by considering how ethics grounded in vulnerability might simultaneously maintain flirting’s uncertainties while seeking non-violent forms of negotiated intimacy. Keywords  #MeToo • Scandal • Masculinity • Liminality • Populism

© The Author(s) 2019 A. Bartlett et al., Flirting in the Era of #MeToo, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7_2

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Introduction: Flirting and Scandal Scandals related to sex, sexuality, relationships, and interpersonal interactions in the workplace are very often about acts that we consider flirting. These might be cases where flirting between two persons in a workplace may be considered by one party to have been inappropriate, where a failure to return sexualised attention has been implicated in a conflict of interest, or where flirting has led to a relationship or sexual activity that is deemed by others to have been ‘inappropriate’. Scandals are a useful way of making sense of contemporary cultural behaviours and the complex manner in which social relationality sits unevenly alongside cultural expectations, norms, legislative restrictions on behaviour, and ‘moral’ codes, not to mention the difficult terrain of what might constitute ethical engagement and caring relationships between people and subjects. Scandals are an element of contemporary news and journalistic reporting in which a question of a line crossed by, usually, a celebrity or public figure results in the encouragement of a performance of public outrage. Over the course of a few days or weeks, media commentary focuses on the extent to which that line or rule is knowable, the circumstances of crossing it, its allowability, and whether there is a need for a stricter line or an acceptance of the liminalities of human behaviour (Cover 2015). Although scandals are a media event, they have also become one of the ways in which we make sense of legitimate and illegitimate behaviour in our everyday lives, and how we respond to the occasional unintelligibilities, inconsistencies, and incoherences. In other words, scandal has been adopted culturally as a framework for engagement on sensitive topics. Unsurprisingly, the complex, difficult distinction between flirting and harassment and the complications that arise when one attempts to assert the clarity of a rule or norm are often at the core of scandals related to relationships, sex, and bodies, both in reportage about celebrities and high-profile public figures and in the framework of everyday ways of relating. The #MeToo scandals of late 2017 and 2018—in which a number of high-profile Hollywood men were alleged to have engaged in a range of problematic sexual practices, assaults, harassment, and conflicts of interest—present an important example in which to engage critically with the concept of flirting. Unpacking a range of aspects of the #MeToo scandals provides us with an opportunity to make sense of flirting as a form of negotiated intimacy—on the one hand regularly discussed and, on the other, judiciously and sometimes rightly lacking a clear normative

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a­ rticulation. While some of the incidents involve criminal acts that are now under official investigation and others have raised very important issues related to how gender relations are performed in the context of an industry marked by sexuality and sexualised representation, there have been other instances that ‘call out’ acts that in other circumstances would be described as flirting. All scandals open a space for public debate on the extents and limits of behaviour of particular groups of people in contemporary society. Many scandals, of course, also progress towards polarised views that make such public debate difficult. In the case of #MeToo, there has been a significant re-configuring of what it might mean to flirt in certain workplaces, an understanding of how flirting might be misinterpreted as expressing a right to sexual pleasure, a renewed engagement with the fact that some acts that are not flirting might be mis-read as flirting, and, finally, a utilisation of flirting to excuse or justify problematic sexualised behaviour. A sizeable number of public statements attempting to make sense of the implications of #MeToo have argued that it risks ruining flirting as a form of communication, including in both public settings and workplaces. For example, an article in online fashion magazine Grazia argues that while we must do more to end harassment and sexual assault, flirting must be protected and, indeed, promoted in workplaces because it is an important part of office banter grounded in ‘[j]oyful coexistence with another human being’ (Walden 2018). Seeking to differentiate flirting from harassment, the author concludes that the #MeToo movement has accidentally conflated the two in a way which is problematic in an era in which more than a third of people date workplace colleagues. Similarly, actor Henry Cavill made statements in GQ Australia magazine arguing that the outcome of #MeToo creates fears for men, suggesting that the current culture of anxiety over flirting prevents men from pursuing a possible relationship and picking up through flirting: There’s something wonderful about a man chasing a woman. There’s a traditional approach to that, which is nice. I think a woman should be wooed and chased, but maybe I’m old-fashioned for thinking that. … It’s very difficult to do that if there are certain rules in place. Because then it’s like: ‘Well, I don’t want to go up and talk to her, because I’m going to be called a rapist or something’. … Now you really can’t pursue someone further than, ‘No’. It’s like, ‘OK, cool’. But then there’s the, ‘Oh why’d you give up?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, because I didn’t want to go to jail?’ (Baidawi 2018)

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Extending into the public and semi-private settings of the workplace, this is very much about a fear that flirting requires both a permission to flirt first, and an foreknowledge as to whether the flirt will end up in a ‘yes, I accept’ or ‘no, I am not interested’. Here, then, the anxiety over the relationship between flirting and harassment is built on whether or not flirting as a complex ‘grey area’ event can be undertaken if clear boundaries, categories, responses, and clarity on ‘consent to seek consent’ are possible. What these statements point to is the deeply felt attachment to flirting as a form of communication and as a cultural object: problematic but exciting, difficult to make sense of but erotic, both risky and desirable. Flirting, in this sense, is something which involves negotiation. What is at stake in contemporary culture in the #MeToo era is the extent to which such negotiation needs to be clearer without destabilising the non-clarity that is part of flirting as a form of communicative engagement. This chapter investigates the ways in which flirting has operated across a range of examples that emerged in the #MeToo scandals, including some of the responses to the scandal that seek to foreclose on the acceptability of flirting as a form of human communication. It explores some of the ways in which the #MeToo phenomenon can be understood in terms of public discourses relating to its impact on flirting, as well as how #MeToo arises as a form of ‘anger’ or ‘disappointment’ in the failure of new masculinities to provide settings that ensure that flirting takes the form of play rather than obscuring acts of vulnerabilisation, assault, violence, or which lack an ethical responsibility of care of the other. Here we refer primarily to those masculinities operating outside the more traditional hypermasculine settings of sports, military, and fraternities. We begin with a brief assessment of some examples of writing that ‘worry’ about flirting’s future in a #MeToo era. In the sections that follow this, we work through some of the ways in which flirting is dependent on the kinds of uncertainties, liminalities, and play as a form of communication that has unwittingly opened the field for its abuse. We then discuss some of the ways in which #MeToo has importantly and powerfully critiqued the problem of contemporary masculinity in which certain subjects are positioned to be able to complicate flirting and harassment through the performance of a certain kind of broad, cultural sensitivity while taking advantage of flirting’s liminality. We follow this with a discussion of the problem of #MeToo addressing sexual harassment through arguing for clearer lines of communication that effectively undo flirting’s liminal potency. Finally, we explore some sex-positive approaches to #MeToo’s field of address that might

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provide more useful critical engagement with harassment without the eradication of flirting as a cultural form of relationality.

#MeToo Contra Flirting? Affective Engagements The #MeToo movement is a phenomenon made up of multiple causes, discourses, articulations, and ways of responding to contemporary social conditions related to gender, sexuality, vulnerability, and workplace and interpersonal relations and articulations of need. In its earliest form, a movement was begun by Tarana Burke on Myspace in 2006, intending to use the solidarity signifier of #MeToo ‘to “let other survivors know they are not alone” and create solidarity with … victims’ (Zarkov and Davis 2018, 3). Subsequently and broadly, the #MeToo signifier has been about recognising and acknowledging sexual violence, harassment, power, and privilege. In its 2017–2018 mode, however, what became the #MeToo movement emerges within the growth of a particular kind of populism that disavows the role of older institutions such as courts and policing to ‘decide’ on what constitutes a violation of gender and sexual relationality. At the same time, this can be perceived as a critique of institutions that have failed to address or account for acts of harassment and abuse occurring in a range of spaces over many years. It can also be seen as an emergence of digital media’s fostering of a ‘call-out’ culture in which interactive engagement on sites such as Twitter enables actors to articulate their grievances without recourse to the gatekeeping of more traditional media forms such as print newspapers. And it is a re-configuring of older assumptions about the culture of North American film production, shifting the idea of the Hollywood ‘casting couch’ from a topic of mirth to one of scandal by openly and directly communicating real-life experiences to a popular audience. It is then also an extension of that emergent Hollywood critique into the culture of other performing arts, particularly theatre which has long been assumed to be a space of liberal and libertine camp, mutual care, and alternative masculinities. In both ‘celebrity’ settings, it has been revealed that these spaces (supposedly made ‘safe’ by the exclusion of traditional hypermasculine dominance) are indeed marked by experiences in which senior male figures have articulated a sense of sexual ownership over women, junior co-stars and crew (Ford 2018, 51). The #MeToo movement rightly and respectfully raises a number of very important questions about the ways in which the cliché of workplace flirting too often results in sexual harassment, sexual assault, coercion, or

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sexual activities that operate in a space outside of clear consent frameworks operating as a critical condition of sexual engagement (Albury and Crawford 2012, 464). However, a number of public commentaries have also raised concerns that the longer-term effect of #MeToo will be to curtail the everyday human communicative form of flirting, particularly in workplaces. Writing for the Irish Times, Jennifer O’Connell (2017) questions whether #MeToo goes too far in creating a culture that polices flirting. She asks if ‘every clumsy come-on’ and every male politician asking a woman out on a date will be reclassified as harassment. However, she asserts that the line between flirting and harassment is clearer than her initial questions invoke: ‘Flirting is a bit of fun. Harassment is behaviour likely to make the person on the receiving end feel harassed.’ O’Connell suggests that while there are indeed grey areas, these are knowable through the extent to which we navigate them by investigating the roles of ‘power, pattern and persistence’ as well as the discomfort the recipient of flirtatious attention might feel (2017). Such a conclusion might be described as an overly optimistic one in asserting the simplicity of being able to differentiate flirting and harassment on basis that it is the latter if it causes discomfort. Indeed, one might ask if the very point of flirting in its liminal, will-we-won’t-we, vagueness is precisely about the conjoint pleasures of discomfort and erotic interest. Liminal, unknowable expressions can be both discomforting and, in the Foucauldian sense, productive of relational articulations precisely because they are the outcome of power (Foucault 1990). Bodies in various states of erotic representation in relation to each other, whether gazed upon, touched, or otherwise engaged with, are always in a state marked by the mixed expression of arousal and discomfort (Lunceford 2012, 143), as is the manner of all face-to-face interaction and communication (Creed 2003, 117) which produces, in the encounter, vulnerability and makes the subject vulnerable. Discomfort, indeed, is an aspect of flirting precisely because being vulnerable is discomforting and becoming vulnerable is the communicative kernel in the relational act of flirting (Gilson 2011, 319), and that vulnerability is affectively felt through cultural frameworks of both shame and excitement (Munt 2007, 203). In that context, it is perhaps not only problematic but highly dangerous to attempt to separate flirting and harassment by assigning discomfort only to the latter concept, for the very idea of flirting is one that cannot be produced in the context of a genuinely ‘safe space’: flirting has ambiguous effects. It is thus not surprising that a discourse seeking to reduce instances

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of harassment should simultaneously have an effect on revising the role of flirting, whether deliberately or unwittingly. Other commentary has taken #MeToo to task for its impact on flirting not through attempting to deploy differential experiences of discomfort, but through a claim that #MeToo creates a ‘culture of fear in the dating scene’ that is making flirting confusing and difficult. For example, a guideline called ‘How to date during the #MeToo era’ published by the Independent in the United Kingdom points to data from a January 2018 survey conducted by MTV that found one in three men aged 18–25 were worried that flirting activities might be perceived as sexual harassment, and pointed to various celebrity statements that claimed ‘courtship’ was being ‘criminalised’ by this culture of fear (Petter 2018). As with discomfort, it is perhaps problematic to understand fear as being something that has been done unto flirting by the #MeToo movement—while #MeToo changes the cultural forms of relationality through which flirting is positioned as an everyday activity, assuming that it has become a fearful activity wrongly ‘forgets’ that fear has always been part of the liminal framework through which flirting occurs. Fear, as Sara Ahmed has argued, ‘shapes the surfaces of bodies in relation to objects’ (2004, 8), effectively restricting the mobility and freedom of some, and extending that for others (15). Fear, indeed, is about the lack of a clear object of which to be afraid—that which is fearsome is the unknowable outcome (65). While flirting has always been marked by expressions of uncertainty and perhaps worry, fear is arguably a new element in the practice of flirting in the current era in relation to the uneasiness of dealing with uncertain boundaries. In flirting, fear and playfulness co-exist, although it may be without confidence and knowability, clear bounds, and transparent rules of engagement. In this way, flirting’s unknowability, uncertainty, and lack of assured outcome that are produced by its very liminal ‘will-we-won’t-we?’ are indelibly linked with not only vulnerability, but an affective sense of fear which, again, is productive rather than restrictive. To argue that #MeToo has stymied the potentialities of flirting through a culture of fear is, then, not quite correct. Rather, what has happened is that the fear and vulnerability connected with flirting as a communicative form have experienced a shift in valency, such that we might argue that #MeToo has produced a culture not of fear but of risk aversity, such that flirting’s unknowabilities are treated as problematic rather than productive. A third example of discourse on the relationship between #MeToo and flirting focuses on the idea #MeToo has created additional ‘labour’

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i­mplications for flirting. For example, the online magazine Flare ran a February 2018 run-down of the views of eight people ‘on dating in the #MeToo era’ (Ansari 2018). For many of the men and women involved, there is either an aversion to talking about #MeToo implications for the act of flirting, or the need to work through explanations and personal histories prior to flirting, such as presenting narratives that demonstrate a person is ‘safe’ or does not have a track-record of taking advantage of a flirtatious workplace relationship. What this, of course, undoes is the immediacy and a-temporality of flirting, although it also ignores the possibility that flirting might encompass activities such as talking about past sexual and romantic experiences (both desired and unwanted). Across all of these, emotive engagement in relational communication is made complex by #MeToo, and these add to the genre of discussion that disavows #MeToo by referring to it as something which has had a negative impact on flirting. What this does, broadly speaking, is position flirting as a form of communication that is seen to be expressed through a freedom to express. In its complexity as a form of relating between people, it is depicted as if it has been without rules, codes, and recognised practices. This is contrary to the idea of flirting as we raise it throughout this book as that which is, in fact, practiced through a range of codes, rules, cultural regulations, and the regimentation of communication in ways which change, but also in ways which are focused upon intently and discussed regularly across an array of texts. Rather than understanding #MeToo as that which regulates an under-regulated communicative phenomenon, we argue that there may be greater value in considering how #MeToo might operate as an instance of both recognition and critique of the complexity of flirting. This leads to three key, critical questions: firstly, in what ways is flirting a communicative form that appears under-regulated and what role does the very liminality of its communication play here? Secondly, how does #MeToo address the figure of ‘new masculinity’ which has arguably taken advantage of flirting’s liminality through a particular performance of sensitivity in order to create uncertainties around what constitutes harassment rather than what constitutes flirting? Finally, have aspects of #MeToo’s approach to ‘calling out’ instances of flirting as assault arisen through a kind of populism that risks producing narrow definitions of flirting? We will address these three areas in turn, before considering alternative ways of figuring flirting that avoid sex-negative approaches in a #MeToo era.

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Flirting’s Liminality: Play, Potency, and Uncertainty Although #MeToo does not rally against flirting itself, we have noted it is sometimes perceived to be an attempt to regulate the complex unknowability and blurred edges of flirting—a perception which points to flirting’s inherent liminality. Throughout much of Western European history, erotic engagement between bodies has had what Jeffrey Weeks describes as a ‘special relationship’ with the nature of virtue of truth (2017, 5). That is, flirting is not just a form of relational communication but a cultural object that people have discussed, been amused by, critiqued, criticised, and taken advantage of its nuanced, grey, complex unknowabilities, both embracing that unknowability and seeking ways to find the truth behind flirting: Is it a real expression of desire, or mere play? Will we act on the hint of desire or stop it here? Is there pleasure in the flirt or do we flirt prior to pleasure? Flirting is, in this sense, deliberately and undeniably liminal. Liminality— defined as the quality of ambiguity of being located physically, emotionally, culturally, or in terms of identity in a space of threshold—is a useful concept for making sense of the contemporary situation of flirting as both cultural object and that which is defended in the critique of #MeToo. Victor Turner’s anthropological work on liminality provides a useful understanding for making sense of flirting as a cultural object. In Turner’s conceptualisation, liminality is a point of being between phases—the term is derived literally from the Latin referring to a threshold or a doorway. To be in a liminal position, then, one is neither on one side nor on another: ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’ (1969, 95). Flirting, likewise, is betwixt and between different possibilities: that this communication ends in a sexual or romantic liaison, or that it simply ends; that the flirt leads somewhere or it does not; that we will get together or we will not. Its very excitement is in the discomfort of not knowing whether a door has been stepped through or not, or if both parties wish to step through that door or not. The lack of clarity of the intentions of the other party is what allows the flirt to be interesting, engaging, and erotic. Turner did not view the discomfort of the threshold as the limit of liminality, or considered liminality to be a negative or problematic state. Rather, he viewed it as productive in the sense that it held possibilities for change (1982, 45), always having the potential for creating a shift in the

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possibilities of social organisations. Indeed, each flirtation does so within the context of the micro-power relations at play—the possibility of a relationship, an encounter, a non-encounter, a shift in the relationship itself. When two friends ‘flirt meaninglessly’ as we put it, the liminal nature of the possibilities for that relationship to move from friendship to something other is invoked, recognised mutually as a latent shifted state. Conversely, when a film director (e.g.) and a young actor (e.g.) flirt in the context of an interview or a screen test, what is produced is a threshold site, at which point the flirting invokes the possibility of a change of state in the relationship. In this case, it might be a shift from producer-actor to sexual partners. Or it might involve a certain kind of knowability or knowledge framework that suggests to the young actor a failure to reciprocate could end badly in career terms. #MeToo, of course, turns this on its head to point out to all parties that the older director might find his career ending badly too. Nevertheless, in the context of such a power relationship in which flirting is improper and contra policy, it is not just the imbalance but the unknowability where excitement, discomfort, vulnerability, and eros are collectively located, forcing blurred lines. We will come back to the question of how particular relationships take advantage of this blurredness in ways which are rightly addressed by #MeToo in the next section, although it is significant to note here that identifying flirting as the conjoined threshold state that invokes both excitement and discomfort is not to give either a positive or a negative moral valuation to flirting regardless of the context, place, space, actors, and subjects. One of the reasons why flirting becomes a focal point of defence against #MeToo in some instances is because of the way in which its liminality operates in certain temporal contexts. By this, we are referring to flirting’s temporal location as a liminal activity within the cultural articulation of carnivale. Usually represented by the figure of the mediaeval feast, carnivale in its folkloric mode has usually been associated with the crossing of boundaries: human beings dressing as animals, men and women swapping traditional roles, the emanation of unbridled sexual licence, and the overturning of normative legal and social hierarchies (Agamben 2005, 71). What is significant in carnivale is that it is a temporary play with normative boundaries that permits a release in order to re-establish and sustain normativity (Bakhtin 1984). Carnivale opens the possibility for particular kinds of flirting, flirting that both upsets norms and—simultaneously— does not upset them, sometimes even reinforces them, because the temporal frame of the carnival allows what is not allowed outside of it.

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Within contemporary Western bourgeois culture, however, that which appears carnivalesque is often demonised with a view to its exclusion under a tacit discourse that presumes its absence will sustain rather than undo normativity (Stallybrass and White 1993). In several ways, the #MeToo movement can be understood to be underwritten by an anti-carnivale perspective that, at times, shifts its target from the vulnerabilities that might arise from certain kinds of flirting to arguing against the legitimacy of flirting as a liminal practice in itself. Yet carnivale itself becomes an interesting way of making sense of some of the genuine perpetrations that have come under the #MeToo banner, particularly those that occur in Hollywood settings. Hollywood is, in a sense, a site of permanent carnivale—separate not from ordinary days by a feast day or festival, but separated from its spatial surrounds by the particular kind of spectacle and hyperreality in which its workers work. Hollywood is in a state of continuous carnivale, and that is perhaps one of the reasons why both the cliché of the flirtatious casting couch and the persistent revelations of sexual assault and harassment are most readily focused on that particular site of workplace engagement. Carnivale’s productiveness in the play of flirting is, then, contextualised by the different spaces that govern its temporality (a feast day, an everyday). As a form of play, flirting is contained into the space of play of the non-serious. For theorist Jurgen Huizinga (1949) play is defined as a free activity with agreed rules and bounded to specific time and place—that is, no one mistakes monopoly money for real money and the adversarial oppositionality of two teams playing football is never properly regarded as appropriate if adversity spills out into the post-match time. Flirting is play, and so it is bounded into a kind of rule-based harmlessness such that we assume it will be recognised for what it is. However, at the same time, because it is liminal, in occurs not in the space and time of play, but always at its thresholds, promising to spill out into serious repercussions, wavering between the contained and the uncontrolled. So in this context, flirting is always both play and beyond play. Important in Huizinga’s definition of play, however, is the fact that it is ‘an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it’ (1949, 13), giving it then a form of non-seriousness that differentiates it from other playful activities such as gambling. Despite flirting’s liminality, this is one aspect of the cultural phenomenon of flirting: that it may be productive, but there is a reciprocal democratisation of its productivity for all parties rather than one party making use of another for

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personal gain, which can include sexual gratification. All play is governed by rules whether explicit or tacit (11), and so too is flirting. To break the rule of reciprocity and seek to gain from flirting is an instance in which flirting has gone wrong. However, as we will discuss in the next section, the occasions of flirting to which #MeToo has objected include those instances in which a gender power imbalance has resulted in one member of a flirting party seeking to gain something (such as gratification or other material gain) in ways that are exploitative. In this sense, rather than relying on some of those public attempts to differentiate flirting from harassment by virtue of assigning discomfort, fear, or vulnerability only to the latter, it is when the codes of reciprocal play are broken—even in the context of flirting’s endless liminality—that harassment is signified.

Masculinity, Flirting, and #MeToo: From Hypermasculine Problematics to New Hegemonies In this part of the chapter, we work through some of the ways in which hypermasculinity had, until recently, become the ‘recognised norm’ of sexual assault stories producing a binary arrangement in which all other masculinities had been deemed ‘good’ or ‘non-violent’. We can separate these in terms of older hypermasculinities that are associated with the kinds of representations of assault and rape that do not involve flirting and newer, albeit increasingly hegemonic, softer, gentler, empowered, and self-assured white-collar masculinities that undertake what we might consider ‘sophisticated’ flirting but in ways which operate external to play and seek personal gratification as their sole aim. Unfortunately, the public focus on hypermasculinities as ‘risk’ has, for the greater part of the twenty-­ first century, obscured or offset the risk of public scrutiny over sexual harassment and assault that may occur in other non-hypermasculine spaces, such as the worlds of film-making, acting, theatre, and television. #MeToo, then, can be understood as an outrage over the failure of new masculinities’ spectacle ‘front’ of appearing to approach gender equity in the acts of flirtation but failing to recognise women and younger men as worthy of liveable respect. The #MeToo phenomenon is problematic in that its proponents have, at times, oversimplified and de-historicised masculinity by collapsing all forms of masculinity into a single ‘patriarchy’ (Ford 2018, 44) while articulating at times a moral code that depicts men

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flirting as risky. However #MeToo does have significant value by drawing attention away from older hypermasculinities and towards the perpetrations of contemporary ‘new masculinities’ at play in celebrity workplaces. One way of making sense of the #MeToo movement as a form of cultural change involves recognising the shift in the public understanding of what kinds of behaviours, identities, gender performances, and normative expectations are implicated in sexual harassment, assault, and violence. Connected with these other aspects driving #MeToo, this is a shift that involves a loss of faith not in only liberal institutions or contemporary legal approaches to preventing sexual violence, but in the value and veracity of ‘new masculinities’. These ‘new masculinities’ can be perceived as liberal, gender-equitable, ‘softer’, elite, transnational, aware of and opposed to power imbalances, ‘safe’, and ‘careful’ to ensure flirting is undertaken in ways which are not mistaken for harassment in workplaces, among celebrities or in settings where a hierarchical power imbalance can be inferred. That is, the #MeToo movement is an expression of outrage that such new masculinities are not necessarily good at dealing with gender relationality or responsibly respecting the rights and equities of women and other minorities, but prove often to be no better than the kinds of hypermasculinities represented typically—albeit not necessarily correctly—in lower-­ class performativities of masculine gender or in highly homosocial institutional settings of hypermasculinity such as sporting teams (Waterhouse-Watson 2011; Cover 2015), the military (Flood 2007), and fraternities (Anderson 2008; Martin and Hummer 1989). It is a misapprehension to assume masculinity represents a singularity rather than a multiplicity of performativities, expectations, practices, and ways of being (Connell 2005, 106–108), and types of masculinities that assert dominance or sexual rights over women and minors result automatically in scandal rather than acceptance (Cover 2015). Patriarchal hypermasculinity is an outdated ‘model’ of masculinity that no longer presents itself as masculinity’s norm in everyday settings. Hypermasculinity persists in certain institutional settings such as elite sporting teams which have been regularly implicated in sexual scandals, particularly group sexual assault and gang rape (Cover 2013). Hypermasculine machismo is a particular framework of the performativity of gender relations (Buchbinder 1994, 1). It is best understood to be symbolically represented and fetishised through attempts at dominance via competitiveness and heroism (Mohr 1992, 163–164), muscled bodies, roughness and ruggedness (Clarkson 2006, 187), and testosterone-driven

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sexuality (Cover 2004, 87), potentially (but not always) lacking in sexual self-control and capable of becoming violent (Lunny 2003, 316). These are no longer the visual, performative, or intelligible markers of the kind of masculinity that is at stake in the #MeToo sexual assault and harassment articulations. Hypermasculinity serves as a ‘lightning rod’ to distract from the potentialities of new masculinities as based on gender dominance in public discourse, resulting in a form of ‘forgetting’ and hence surprise, anger, and scandal when they are indeed revealed as problematic. Both anti-feminist and #MeToo claims assume that highly patriarchal forms of masculine identity are timeless and ahistorical—the former seeing them as ‘right’ and the latter as problematic (Buchbinder 1997, 30, 46)— rather than one formation of masculinity among many kinds. This includes new masculinities which, although they participate in the subordination and/or marginalisation of women, are a softer, less-ostensibly harmful form of masculine identity and correlative behaviours. They include what has increasingly come to usurp older ideals of masculinity: what David Buchbinder referred to as the new man, a subject who is ‘less convinced of the authority and rightness of traditional male logic, and more amenable to alternative ways of thinking’ (1994, 2). The disavowal of machismo and the increasing reification of pro-feminist, queer-affirmative discourses (21–25), the repudiation of blatant misogyny (Flood 2007, 11), and the increasingly outright opposition to male violence and sexual violence in public sphere discourse also form part of this more recent shift in what is considered a more accountable masculinity. By the early 2000s, the increasingly dominant, hegemonic, expected, and consensual form of masculinity was becoming closely aligned with the formation that has been termed metrosexuality, representing the heterosexual, fashion-conscious, grooming-conscious urban male. Mark Simpson, who coined the term ‘metrosexual’ in 1994, describes this representative formation of masculine identity as follows: The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis—because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them. (Simpson 2002)

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Much like Buchbinder’s description of the new male, Simpson described formations of new masculinity as simultaneously heteronormative but softer, ‘safer’, engaged in white-collar professions as an ideal, and actively performing masculinity through disavowal of misogyny and sexism, physical violence and aggression (2002). Alternatively, this gender framing has been described as the ‘post-feminist man’, combining the new man and the new lad since the beginning of the twenty-first century: On the one hand, the ‘postfeminist man’ accommodates backlash scripts— drawing upon characteristics of the ‘new lad’. On the other hand, he is more self-aware, displaying anxiety and concern for his identity while re-­embracing patriarchal responsibilities which the ‘new lad’ defiantly threw off. In many ways, the ‘postfeminist man’ could be described as the ‘new lad’ grown up or a less sensitive ‘new man’. Moreover, although the ‘postfeminist man’ is heterosexual, he is style- and brand-conscious, while being slightly bitter about the ‘wounded’ status of his masculinity, which has been affected by second wave feminism. (Genz and Brabon 2009, 143)

We might suggest surface-level compliance with workplace equity policies—in the case of metrosexuality through a turning of attention to consumption and the self; in the case of others in corporate settings through compliance with workplace equity policies. However, while the figuration of new masculinity differs from older hypermasculine performances of misogynistic dominance and exclusiveness, it never attempted to disguise the continuation of attitudes of competitive and subordination of others in other frameworks. What #MeToo reveals, of course, is that new masculinities may not have shaken off misogyny and sexual exploitation either. This figure of new masculinity is marked by the motifs of transnational capital: dominance in one respect, but performances and performativities of gentleness, care, corporate social responsibility (Benn et  al. 2010), ‘sophisticated’ tastes, gender equity, inclusiveness (Beasley 2008)—a figure of a man with whom flirting is figured as safe, playful, and caring. The visual image of the suit as differentiated from the sports shorts of the footballer, the dirty high-vis safety jacket of the worker on a building site, the casualwear of the fraternity member, or the fatigues of the soldier in the ranks is significant. As Ford (2018) notes in her summary of the meaning of the #MeToo movement, there is a connection between a man wearing a suit and the idea that this man is ‘to be considered a feminist superhero’ and therefore safe (45). The performativities of the visual, the

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clothing, the demeanour, the right kinds of touches, and the disavowal of the wrong kinds in public view are markers of new masculinity tied to transnational capital—which is not to suggest that such masculinities are themselves inclusive of transnationality but are marked by cosmopolitanism and mobility, themselves markers of class. Of course this is not necessarily to indicate that an ethical framing of relationality through genuine inclusivity, equality, care, and responsibility becomes the norm, but to say that at the surface level of new masculinity this is articulated and avowed even if the reality is not achieved. This is apparent if one looks, for example, at the publicity images of the figures who have appeared at the centre of #MeToo scandals. Harvey Weinstein may at times appear in the media as rugged and unshaven, but for the most part his image incorporates the key signifiers of transnational capitalist masculinity: suited, groomed, surrounded by international celebrities, appearing at major ‘red carpet’ events, and associated with the ‘business’ of film production. By appearance alone, there is nothing that is indicative of hypermasculinity, sexual violence, or rape. Likewise, Kevin Spacey—groomed, suited, known as gay prior to his coming out, associated with the kind of softer non-­domineering (if dominant) masculinity that is signified in stereotypes of non-­ heterosexuality as well as theatre acting. Matt Lauer, former host of the NBC Today Show, spent years performing ‘new masculinity’ and flirting playfully with colleagues on screen while discussing issues normally associated with domesticity. This is also a ‘white’ masculinity on display—indeed, very few of the men depicted in the many compiled images of male perpetrators in the #MeToo context are non-Anglo in depiction (Berkowitz 2017), and this is part of an older tradition that associates white cosmopolitan men with safety and non-white, blue-collar, working class men and migrants to Western countries as figures of risk of sexual violence and thereby unsafe in flirtation (Evers 2008; Poynting et al. 2004, 6). #MeToo might best be understood as a responsive anger, then, to the failure of ‘new masculinities’ to be in fact ‘safe’ men to flirt with. While there has been a disjuncture in the theatrics of masculinity to embrace respect for women, younger men, minorities, and others alongside corporate and celebrity moves towards surface-level social responsibility claims, the understanding that women, younger men, and others are still perceived as ‘available’ for sexual gratification and the idea of a ‘right’ or ‘entitlement’ to such gratification is continuous. New masculinity, then, appears not as the solution to older cultures of rape, assault, and objectification but as highly duplicitous and as having obscured the motive and

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goal in flirting, especially in workplace scenarios. The #MeToo phenomenon is thus a production of cultural anger in the ‘discovery’ that sexual violence has been continuous despite the surface-level shift from the theatrics of hypermasculine dominance to the transnational ‘new masculinity’. This is anger at the betrayal of the promise of new masculinity as a world in which safety, respect, and responsibility could flourish in the cohabitation of workspaces and creative spaces by people of multiple genders who flirt democratically, safely, equitably, and playfully.

#MeToo as a New Fundamentalism? Populism and Anti-liminality The public discussions around #MeToo and the appropriateness of workplace and celebrity flirting are often polarised, but tend to be united in the cultural error of concern for flirting’s liminality rather than looking to the underlying fact that some men have utilised a performance of new masculinity in order to take advantage of the liminality of flirting to thereby take advantage of women in workplaces. Much of the public discussion against #MeToo centres on the idea of it as a puritanical force seeking to restrict interpersonal communication such as flirting or to re-figure flirting as always dangerous and risky. Important here, we feel, is to differentiate our critique from those that seek to see #MeToo as a form of new fundamentalism seeking to shut down flirting. As with all cultural emergences, in many ways, the #MeToo movement can be described as being, on the one hand, an ethical engagement with issues of workplace gender relationality, necessary at this particular juncture in time, and lending the potentiality of a critical lens on masculinity and interpersonal social behaviour such as flirting. On the other hand, and at the same time, it might also be understood as an emergent form of populism, which allows us a more nuanced concept by which to make sense of the relationship between #MeToo and cultural practice than claims to puritanism, fundamentalism, and sex-negativity. We usually encounter the idea of populism through the figure of the political leader who has achieved a direct affiliation with the people and is elected despite not necessarily expressing policy positions that would ordinarily be appealing to—or good for—the people. Populism, however, can sometimes take the form of a penal interest, in which a leaderless cultural movement emerges against what is seen as a society that fails adequately to

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punish activities broadly seen as crimes (Anselmi 2018, 73). This particular form of populism is usually without a clear leader seeking political gain, and instead has the focal point of addressing the failure of judicial and policing systems to protect a ‘majority’ from the crimes of a minority. It operates by articulating a norm, such as that sexual assault is wrong, arguing that the norm is not fully recognised, and engaging the public to understand the violation of that norm is ‘a damage to the community’ with a view to increasing penalties as part of a social reparation both ‘towards the injured party, as well as to the whole community’ (Anselmi 2018, 76). #MeToo can be seen as such a penal populism, drawing together a community of persons who seek reparation for sexual assault and harassment which is often excused by powerful people (and the media) as ‘just’ flirtation. As we have witnessed with the social expression of #MeToo, penal populism is very much focused on reparation rather than rehabilitation, which is of course the ostensible liberal-normative purpose of the post-­ Enlightenment prison which intervenes to re-produce the perpetrator as a normativised citizen (Foucault 1977). Reparation, however, operates through calling out the perpetrator and extracting a penalty such as humiliation (Anselmi 2018, 76), with loss of community standing or loss of job the outcome. In the case of Kevin Spacey, for example, evidence of his improper sexual behaviour resulted in his public humiliation, his loss of secure work, the cancellation of one of his television series, and his (literal) erasure from a film that was already in post-production. This is the era of populism in which drawn-out legal processes and staid public debate are no longer the mechanism by which to seek reparation and rehabilitation. Rather, such populisms produce the figure of the ‘authentic people’ as a vulnerable people (Moffitt 2017, 3) requiring protection. In the discourse of #MeToo, women and junior men are not seen as victims but as authentic in contrast to the elite new masculine figures who, through various forms of duplicity in flirting, are positioned as inauthentic. The effect on flirting, then, is perhaps a positive one in the sense that it becomes risky not to flirt but riskier to mis-use flirting or to attempt to present it as an excuse for sexual harassment. Populism, importantly, is also an articulation of popular rejection of existing political elites, institutions, and norms which have benefited a group of citizens at the expense of others (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, 103). In this context, #MeToo emerges as a gender-based populist front that rejects the institutions which have benefitted men during rape and

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sexual assault trials, exonerating perpetrators through the excuse that a sexual activity was the outcome of a perceived consensual arrangement that resulted from flirting in a workplace or other scenario (Philadelphoff-­ Puren 2004). Institutions such as judiciaries, political parties, intervening government ministers, senior management in universities and corporations, marketing officers spinning stories, and organisations which protect elite, ‘new masculine’ men from prosecution for sexual crimes or actively discourage and prevent women from seeking justice in the face of such crimes are disavowed. Digital interactive cultures have, instead, provided the affordance for women and others to assert the story of a sexual crime, assault, or harassment in ways which the older institutions have ignored or exonerated, and this importantly opens possibilities for #MeToo to articulate concerns over the ways in which the accepted liminality of flirting has often been utilised to excuse such harassment or assaults by those institutions. ‘Call-out’ culture, as it is beginning to be understood, relies on using popular digital media and social networking to make statements and assertions of sexual assault and harassment that would otherwise potentially be ignored by traditional institutions. At the same time, the focus of that call-out—the perpetration itself—is shared rapidly through digital media in ways which overcome the delays and silencing of past eras in which gatekeeping practices of magazines, newspapers, and current affairs programmes  would refuse to carry stories without substantial third-party evidence, cleared by their legal teams. The fact that such evidence is no longer necessary before a statement asserting a sexual perpetration is also a populist rejection of the news routine processes of traditional media. In early 2018, Canadian author Margaret Atwood (2018) argued that although #MeToo is a symptom of a broken legal system that has treated complainants in sexual assault cases poorly, discarding due legal procedure itself will lead only to trials by extremists. There was considerable backlash against Atwood who was perceived to be failing to stand with other women on an important issue, indicating the ways in which the emerging framework does indeed operate at an extreme that sometimes disavows rational dialogue-seeking solutions that may incorporate the adjustment of extant systems rather than the chaos of none. What this penal populism produces is a disavowal of the courts to decide on what constitutes flirting and what constitutes harassment or assault; to decide on whether or not there is a case to be heard, and to consider the rationality of setting precedents in those decisions. Thus, while #MeToo is correct to be suspicious of legal

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systems and internal corporate complaints procedures, it problematically shifts the culture of flirting by articulating what constitutes flirting via a public opinion engaged with by voices in social networking and online opinion, which can be just as exclusive as more traditional decision-­making frameworks in relation to crime and law. What is notable, however, is that this represents a very significant cultural disjuncture for flirting, in which new ways of discussing the constitution of flirting emerge to rival older formations. The effect in cultural practices of #MeToo as a populist emergence is more about its form as a cultural force than what is actually said in individual or collective statements. Emergent populisms often have a tendency to unseat particular, older frameworks regulating social behaviour and interpersonal relationality (Weeks 2017, 41), and #MeToo disavows legal institutions and communication and reporting practices that have favoured men/perpetrators. In several ways such changes can be understood as emergences which significantly change how we think about particular cultural phenomena such as flirting. Raymond Williams’ (1977) conceptualisation of structures of feeling is a useful way of making sense of such change. Within his conceptualisation of the ‘mood’ of contemporary culture, he articulated a distinction between residual, dominant, and emergent cultural forms, all of which are at play in contemporary culture but in different ways, with different values, in competition with each (122–125). In this context, we might consider the dominant liberal-humanist discourse in which flirting is practiced as part of a semi-regulated laissez-faire arrangement through unequal gender relationality as the dominant expression of culture. The residual, on the other hand, might be in many Western Anglophone countries the remains of forms of puritanical disavowal of any flirtation in the semi-public space of the workplace. Comparatively, of course, certain southern continental European framings of flirtation as normative indicate the absence of such a residue. For Williams, the emergent involves new configurations of knowledge, meanings, values, practices, and relationships. That which is emergent is not necessarily fully oppositional to the dominant, but may include ‘elements of some new phase of the dominant culture’ as well as those which are depicted as ‘substantially alternative’ (1977, 123). In other words, a new emergent process does come about in isolation, but through the dominant in ways which also leave it open to reincorporation (124) or sometimes to being depicted as an oppositional threat to the dominant and

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thereby excluded or suppressed (126). We can, perhaps, understand contemporary ‘call-out’ culture (which in its most extreme forms risks ­disallowing the cultural expression of flirting) not as a return to a residual puritanism in terms of sexual and relational matters, but as an emergent culture re-configuring sexual relationality in ways which appropriately articulate a rejection of sexual assault, harassment, and rape in workplace settings, but in ways which simultaneously defend and critique flirting, and rally against the uncertainties and liminalities through which it is articulated. That is, the new approach actively challenges the dominant which, itself, was no longer repressive but, rather, had opened a licence that bordered on the licentious and the improper. Whether such call-out culture will prove an active and sustained challenge to the dominant and become a new norm cannot be known in advance. Likewise, whether it will be rejected, marginalised, or aspects of it subsumed into the dominant and thereby stymied is also not something which can be predicted. What remains, however, is that in the context of this emergence, the #MeToo movement, its expression through ‘calling-out’ acts which might be deemed flirting, and its appeal to the production of workplace protections are something which can be read as attempting to undo the liminality of flirting. Thus while it powerfully argues against the scandalous behaviour of the contemporary transnational hegemonic figure who wrongfully assumes sexual ownership of women and younger men work colleagues, it rallies against the communicative productivity of liminality as a means of attempting to achieve an important ethical goal. Populisms are built on the articulation of simple solutions and the policing of categorical boundaries—in attempting to police the bounds of sexual mores by reframing what is acceptable, it risks marginalising flirting. This is not a marginalisation in the way described earlier in the chapter by anti-#MeToo writers who are concerned that flirting will no longer be acceptable in everyday society, but in marginalising the very lack of clarity upon which flirting is dependent in order to be flirting. What is required, as we address in the next section, is a framing of flirting that maintains an ethics of care attuned to the fact that flirting occurs between vulnerable, corporeal subjects demanding recognition and reciprocity without the violence of being objectified or being used. Such an ethics might, indeed, prove to be compatible with the continuation of flirting as a liminal event in contrast to frameworks such as #MeToo that remain concerned about flirting’s ‘grey areas’.

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The Vulnerability of Flirting: Beyond Sex-Negative Approaches The #MeToo debate arises, as we have been arguing, through a convergence of different cultural emergences in relation to flirting in workplace settings and the discourses around sexual harassment that have accounted for flirting in practice: firstly, an increasing discomfort with the discomfort of flirting; secondly, a concern around the non-serious nature of flirting as a liminal activity in an era of precarity and reaction to such precarious uncertainties through disavowal of the uncertain; thirdly, an anger around the duplicitous use by ‘new masculinities’ of flirting to enact or excuse objectifying behaviour or self-serving interest in sexual gratification; and fourthly, as a form of emergent populism that draws on other kinds of penal populism to assert greater reparation for sexual wrongdoing while simultaneously disavowing the utility of older liberal institutions such as courts and traditional news routines to produce justice. We would like to end this chapter with some remarks on alternative approaches to #MeToo, addressing flirting as a communicative practice and cultural phenomenon in ways that do not rely on sex-negative thinking or in the shutting down of flirting’s liminality. This involves thinking through an ethics of mutuality, vulnerability, and care in a way which prompts alternative understandings of flirting that are grounded in non-violence, including the non-violence of preventing the objectification of either party in the act of a flirt. One aspect of #MeToo’s responsiveness is to adopt one of the more common, knowable codes of conduct, that of corporate social responsibility (Benn et al. 2010) as a model for appropriate workplace interpersonal communication. This is despite the fact that such a code has been part of the performance of ‘new masculinity’ or ‘transnational hegemonic masculinity’ under the guise of delivering gender equities, care, responsibility, and mutual respect—the very framework of which #MeToo has challenged in its failure to prevent flirting being used as an excuse for sexual harassment (Ford 2018, 46). The call for better codes of conduct reinforces the key problem that sexual harassment and assault occur in workplaces; at the same time the expression of anger that marks the #MeToo movement obscures the possibility for an ethical solution beyond either anger or the extension of the knowable corporate code. In seeking an alternative ethical approach, we can begin by bearing in mind that if flirting is the negotiation of intimacies between two (or more)

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parties in a way that is liminal, playful, and yet also discomforting, then it is both a cultural framework and a communicative mode that involves bodies in their corporeal exposure to vulnerability. That does not mean necessarily only two bodies in a shared space and proximity relevant to touch, since flirting can operate across screens and networks, both visually and in the form of text. This form, of course, is not by any means disembodied—rather, what is at stake is that it involves the affective experience of shame, pleasure, discomfort, guilt at the level of the body. No matter the form of flirting, there are bodies which can be harmed, bodies which can be made to feel as if they have been harmed, and bodies which can be objectified—all of which are violences that can be done by one body to another and, as violences, are the objects of which an ethics seeks to minimise or prevent. Judith Butler’s (2004, 2009) approach to ethical reflexivity here can be useful in pointing the way to a gender relationality of non-violence built on recognising the self and other as sharing a vulnerability common to humanity, life, and being as embodied subjects in the social world. Reliant on a concept of recognition, Butler has argued that an ethics of non-­ violence can be grounded in a conceptual understanding that all humans are vulnerable in our exposure to one another; that is, all corporeal life is precarious, all bodies are easily harmed, and from the very beginning of life we are all dependent upon relationality with others for the ongoingness of life and bodies (Butler 2004, 44). Through perceiving the commonality of vulnerability for ourselves and for the other whom we encounter, we are compelled to engage with others in ways which are responsible and responsive to that vulnerability; that is, in relations of non-­ violence. In encountering one another and recognising one another’s shared vulnerability as that which is prior to subjectivity itself, we are ethically obliged to care, to protect, and to ensure that the encounter is not a violent one. This ethics is not simply a moral or policy injunction to behave in a particular way, but a framework in which non-violence underwrites the encounter between subjects. In conceptual terms, when a man in a power position is in a situation of encounter with a less-powerful woman, he is obliged to consider how to treat that woman in the context of sexual behaviour. It is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes necessary, possible, and self-conscious, and this form of recognition is a reciprocal state of being for the other or given over to the other (Butler 2000). This encounter requires opening oneself to having one’s

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identity re-configured in ways which acknowledge the mutual vulnerability of each party. Understanding all subjects, whether men or women, to have vulnerability in common is not, of course, to assume that vulnerability is evenly distributed. Rather, it is unevenly distributed among bodies according to a broad range of factors, gender being one as understood in the high rates of sexual violence, but also along the lines of differentiation between different masculinities. As argued above, hypermasculinities among working men that are stereotypically associated with sexual violence are not necessarily less vulnerability or more dominant the softer, gentler, socially responsible representations of celebrity, white masculinities as represented by figures such as Spacey, Weinstein, McLachlan, or others. This ethics differs significantly from the approach taken by #MeToo, which utilises social media to ‘call out’ in a game of punishments while demanding a clearer, better-bounded set of codes for interpersonal communication. An ethical encounter, however, can be described as a ‘struggle over the claim of nonviolence without any judgment about how the struggle finally ends’ (Butler 2007, 187). It does not resolve the ethical problem it raises, but opens the possibility for subjects to recognise the vulnerability of others through understanding it in terms of their own vulnerability and thereby initiating a struggle one must undertake with one’s own violence (Butler 2007, 181). It is therefore, as Angela McRobbie puts it, a discourse capable of ‘intervening to challenge, interrupt and minimize aggressive retaliation’ (2006, 82). In the context described here, a sexual ethics based on recognising the mutual vulnerability of all subjects requires re-conceptualisation for those in dominant positions to recognise their own vulnerability rather than, in more simplistic terms, seeing their women co-workers on the Hollywood set or in the theatre as victims. Just as hypermasculine sports stars (Cover 2015) can become the product of an ethics of vulnerability when able to recognise their own vulnerability to loss (of the match), injury (of the body), fragmentation (of the team), or reputation (in both on-field and off-field contexts), the new masculine transnational figure can—through the #MeToo discourse— come to recognise the potential for loss. Weinstein, McLachlan, Spacey all suffered considerable losses when it was revealed through #MeToo that their sexual utilisation of others was a failure to recognise the vulnerability of the other. The value of #MeToo in this context is that it brings about a possibility for the new masculine figure to see himself otherwise: not merely as being ‘at risk’ of reputational damage, but as always to begin

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with vulnerable to losses of career. In the case of Spacey, that loss is not only the possibility that a productive opus of creative work on stage and screen for many years suffers damage, nor only the loss of possible future income as he becomes less palatable to those who would otherwise have hired him, but the actual erasure from film as he is literally CGI’d or re-­ shot out of films that were thought to have been complete. Arguably, while #MeToo is problematic in providing solutions to gender-based sexual violence and has limited itself to the expression of anger, it may serve a subsidiary value in providing an instant of critical disruption that can open subjects to look differently at how relationalities are normalised and how alternative, non-violent practices might replace those norms, or, indeed, to open questions on what might constitute sexual violence in the first place.

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Benn, Suzanne, Lindi Renier Todd, and Janet Pendleton. 2010. Public Relations Leadership in Corporate Social Responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics 96 (3): 403–423. Berkowitz, Joe. 2017. Here’s the Complete List of Men Accused of Sexual Harassment since Harvey Weinstein. Fast Company, November 1, 2017. https://www.fastcompany.com/40489989/heres-the-ever-growing-list-ofmen-accused-of-sexual-harassment-since-weinstein. Buchbinder, David. 1994. Masculinities and Identities. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ———. 1997. Performance Anxieties: Re-producing Masculinity. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Butler, Judith. 2000. Longing for Recognition. Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1 (3): 271–290. ———. 2004. Precarious Life. London: Verso. ———. 2007. Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18 (2): 180–195. ———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso. Clarkson, Jay. 2006. ‘Everyday Joe’ Versus ‘Pissy, Bitchy Queens’: Gay Masculinity on StraightActing.com. The Journal of Men’s Studies 14 (2): 191–207. Connell, R.W. 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Crow’s Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Cover, Rob. 2004. Bodies, Movements and Desires: Lesbian/Gay Subjectivity and the Stereotype. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 18 (1): 81–98. ———. 2013. Suspended Ethics and the Team: Theorising Sportsplayers’ Group Sexual Assault in the Context of Identity. Sexualities 16 (3–4): 300–318. ———. 2015. Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics. Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing. Creed, Barbara. 2003. Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Evers, Clifton. 2008. The Cronulla Race Riots: Safety Maps on an Australian Beach. South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2): 411–429. Flood, Michael. 2007. Men, Sex, and Homosociality: How Bonds Between Men Shape Their Sexual Relations with Women. Men and Masculinities 10: 339–359. Ford, Clementine. 2018. The Turning Point: One Man’s Downfall, #MeToo, and the Rising Up. Meanjin 77 (2): 40–52. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. ———. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin. Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin Brabon. 2009. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gilson, Erinn. 2011. Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression. Hypatia 26 (2): 308–332.

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Huizinga, Jurgen. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Lunceford, Brett. 2012. Political Bodies: Nudity, Protest, and the Rhetoric of the Body. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press. Lunny, Allyson M. 2003. Provocation and ‘Homosexual’ Advance: Masculinized Subjects as Threat, Masculinized Subjects Under Threat. Social & Legal Studies 12 (3): 311–333. Martin, Patricia Yancey, and Robert A. Hummer. 1989. Fraternities and Rape on Campus. Gender and Society 3 (4): 457–473. McRobbie, Angela. 2006. Vulnerability, Violence and (Cosmopolitan) Ethics: Butler’s Precarious Life. The British Journal of Sociology 57 (1): 69–86. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2017. Populism in Australia and New Zealand. In The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edition. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.5. Mohr, Richard. 1992. Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon Press. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munt, Sally. 2007. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. Aldershot: Ashgate. O’Connell, Jennifer. 2017. Are We in Danger of Doing Away with Flirting, Compliments, Sex? Irish Times, November 2, 2017. https://www.irishtimes. com/life-and-style/people/are-we-in-danger-of-doing-away-with-flirtingcompliments-sex-1.3276817. Petter, Olivia. 2018. How to Date During the #MeToo Era. The Independent, April 23, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/datingme-too-era-rules-sexual-harassment-flirting-a8314876.html. Philadelphoff-Puren, Nina. 2004. Dereliction: Women, Rape and Football. Australian Feminist Law Journal 21 (2): 35–51. Poynting, Scott, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar, and Jock Collins. 2004. Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other. Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology. Simpson, Mark. 2002. Meet the Metrosexual. Salon, July 22, 2002. Accessed January 22, 2008. http://www.salon.com. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1993. Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 284–292. London: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago, IL: Aldine. ———. 1982. From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications.

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CHAPTER 3

Playing with Scripts: Social Experiments and Reality Television

Abstract  This chapter is premised on the idea that gender and sexuality are performative, that is, that there are a set of codified and regulated scripts that are socially designated appropriate or inappropriate when it comes to flirting, intimacy, and sexual relations. As a dominant form of entertainment, screen media chart these codifications and their transgressions, and we show this through the romance reality television show Married at First Sight. This is a show that skips flirting and starts with marriage; that is, flirting is latent, or deferred, as an experiment with social scripts. We propose that the show flirts with science as a field of expertise that teaches us techniques of intimacy and negotiation, and its viewing pleasures are manifested through the medium, the spectacle, and the awkwardness of intimacy on screen. Keywords  Romance • Marriage • Wedding • Intimacy • Scripts • Reality television

Introduction The first episodes of the romance reality television show Married at First Sight (MAFS) are full of emotional excess and anticipation, as two strangers ready themselves to walk down the aisle and marry the person at the other end in front of their family, friends, and television cameras, to be televised on a commercial free-to-air channel. Dean, who has been © The Author(s) 2019 A. Bartlett et al., Flirting in the Era of #MeToo, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7_3

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described by the experts as the ‘stubborn alpha male’, remarks in voiceover, ‘Why am I doing this, what the hell am I doing?’ Smiling, he interacts with the family and friends, who applaud, and he cockily comments to them ‘seal of approval?’ and ‘it’s crazy’. In the car with her bridesmaids, Tracey nervously comments, ‘I can’t even get a breath’, ‘I feel like my heart’s racing a million miles a minute’, ‘Can you see him?’ and the girls respond, ‘He’s a giant’, ‘he’s there’. As Tracey and the bridesmaids walk down the aisle Dean remarks in voiceover that he is ‘definitely freaking out about what she looks like’ wanting ‘a beautiful brunette woman, just hope, obviously, that the experts have picked someone good for me’. Meanwhile, Tracey tells us in voiceover that ‘to have both my mums walk me down the aisle to potentially the man of my dreams, like, it’s like a fairytale’. The music swells and he turns and smiles, telling us in voiceover that ‘as soon as I turned around, everything changed and I just relaxed and just looked at her, massive relief, she’s got a good body and she’s tall but not too tall and really good rig and just beautiful, like big eyes, big lips, big smile, she’s gorgeous, I’m stoked’. They introduce themselves to each other: ‘it’s nice to meet you’, ‘finally’, ‘it’s been a while’, they both laugh. In voiceover, as she looks at him Tracey comments, ‘that spark was there for sure, one hundred percent’. The ceremony starts and they make small talk about how the vows were difficult to write and Tracey comments that she is glad she wrote them down as she wouldn’t be able to remember them, joking, ‘I remember your name but, God, I’m flirting already’, and they laugh nervously. This start to the 2018 Australian series is indicative of the kind of frisson, nervousness, anticipation, and also relief and adjustment that build to introduce the popular series that peaked at almost two million viewers for the final episode. It’s a curious premise for a television show—to stage a marriage between strangers—and yet asks them and us to take it perfectly seriously over several months of filming and screening. By asking strangers to marry and then form an intimate relationship, the franchised show inverts the usual set of social codes in Western culture and plays on the fracas that ensues as if it were an extended kind of liminality akin to carnivale. We might expect reference here to Eastern cultural practices of arranged marriage, and yet the show deploys this Western experiment to invest expertise in professional psychologists and relationship therapists as a new form of cultural practice that teaches techniques of intimacy as it produces highly profitable entertainment. Arguably all forms of desire and sexuality are learnt and produced through particular cultural discourses

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and bodies at historically specific times and places (McWilliam 1999; Cryle 2000), so we are particularly interested here in how flirting and intimacy are negotiated in this highly scripted contemporary format. In her book about the endings of stories, American cultural theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that ‘any social convention is like a “script”, which suggests sequences of action and response, the meaning we give these, and the ways of organizing experience by choices, emphases, priorities’ (1985, 2). She talks about scripts as ‘strongly mandated patterns of learned behaviour … that offer a rationale for unselfconscious behaviour’ (2), and then examines the relations between novels, romance, and the scripted options for women characters. The options for women are either marriage or death, she argues, because the maintenance of the social order depends on the heterosexual couple. If a woman character cannot be part of that social order, then she might as well not live. All forms of labour, reproduction, sex and gender, family and kinship: all meet in the couple, and cultural productions like novels maintain this order. Such plots are dominant not only in writing but also in life. Such scripts, DuPlessis suggests, are what she calls ‘social forms expressed at once in individual desires and in a collective code of action including law: in sequences of action psychically imprinted and in behaviours socially upheld’ (2). They become at once ours and everyone else’s. In short, scripts provide ways of imagining our lives within conventional social confines. DuPlessis was writing this in the mid-1980s in the midst of a movement of feminist literary critics looking for alternative plots, for experimental prose, and for new social orders to model lives on. Dissatisfied with those prescriptive and limited options of marriage or death, women consciously invented new stories, new possibilities, and new emotions directed towards being single as an option that could be rich and satisfying outside of the couple dyad and the oppression of the marriage contract as it was understood then. So what would she make of an ongoing television programme like Marriage at First Sight that begins with a marriage rather than ends with one? It is probably not the sort of alternative social order DuPlessis was imagining, but it does prompt questions about what happens when narratives begin at the traditional ending. In this chapter, we’ll be using the idea of scripts in the way that DuPlessis describes them—as social narratives that model and reiterate relations and desires both individually and collectively—and we’ll be applying this idea literally in the scripting of television reality shows.

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The idea of scripts as social models is a widely accepted metaphor for thinking about social relations and practices. The philosopher Judith Butler earned her reputation using the language of the stage and theatre to suggest that gender and sexuality can be understood as a socially constructed performance, albeit one that we barely think about. She describes it like this: ‘gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler 1988, 519). Butler contends that these acts can be understood as material through the ‘stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self’ (519). That is, we incorporate these scripts corporeally. To suggest that gender is constructed, and performative—that is, scripted through a set of identifiable and acceptable movements and behaviours materialised through the body—means that those acts must become ‘reified and naturalized’ (520) to give the appearance of substance, to be accepted as ‘natural’, and to become mandated as expected gendered identities. To be otherwise would lay bare the idea of gender as empty, as a socially agreed-upon act, and then to upset the very idea of identity: to render it illusory. The theatrics of flirting is, of course, one everyday means by which gender, bodies, and sexuality are stylised. If gender and sexuality form the foundations of flirting, of marriage, and of coupledom, gender theorists including Butler are quick to point out the heterosexual hegemony of these expectations and narratives. Indeed, there are many intersecting factors that contribute to cultural scripts—including race, class, religion, age, disability, technologies, and changes over time and place—that expose such practices as constructed and hierarchical, and yet popular culture rests on the dominance of particular narratives over others, as if we all subscribe to the same set of cultural values. Whether we subscribe or not, most of us recognise the dominant cultural scripts and recognise when they are being transgressed. In reality television these scripts are played out by ‘real people’ rather than professional career actors. As we saw in the beginning episode with reference to fairytales, dreams, sparks, and what makes a partner attractive, they do however bare a remarkable resemblance to any other melodramatic production. The authenticity of ‘real people’ becomes questionable through Butler’s and DuPlessis’ understanding of social relations being produced and staged. The tenuous relation between contestants and actors is mirrored in the relation between reality television and real life, and their

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endless circulation of scripts. Narrowing it down further we specifically focus on the genre of romance reality shows: how do they negotiate intimacy? What sorts of scripts are being replayed or transgressed? What might a social experiment indicate about social relations, about hegemonic narratives, and how is flirting constructed and negotiated? Somewhat perversely perhaps, we use the show Married at First Sight (MAFS) as a phenomenon which claims to be a ‘social experiment’ to investigate how flirting is constructed after the marriages that begin the show. MAFS is singular, we argue, in expecting flirting to happen after the spectacular wedding ceremonies: how does this work? What conventions are being mobilised and contravened here? Why do so many people watch this show in particular? And what can it tell us about flirting practices, desires, expectations, discourses, and cultural forms?

Married at First Sight Married at First Sight is a franchised television series that began in Denmark in 2013, and was quickly taken up in the United States and Britain the following year, with the first Australian version broadcast in 2015 on the Nine Network. It can be understood then as a Western cultural phenomenon, in that the programme (and consequently the issues it raises) is restricted to European, American, and Australian contestants and audiences. Both Season Two and Three were screened in Australia in 2016, with Season Four in 2017 and Season Five in 2018; in this chapter we will be using the last two Australian seasons as our primary material. The title plays on the idea of love at first sight, but in this case the contestants (if we call them that) see each other for the first time at their wedding. The sequence of events varies slightly with each season, but the last two seasons have settled on a sequence that begins with profiling each contestant so viewers begin to ‘know’ them, a scenario in which they tell their family or friends that they are getting married (and then the suitably scandalous rider: to someone they’ve never met), selecting the wedding dress and suit, and then the wedding, where the bride and groom meet for the first time at the altar of the secular ceremony.1 After the wedding, photo shoot, and reception, the new couple go to a hotel, and the next day they are taken to their honeymoon location for a week. All the couples return to an apartment block to live as married couples for the next week, they spend a week each at the other person’s regular off-screen home to get to know their spouse’s life and friends, and then another period of

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time in the apartment on-location. Marking the end of each shift there is time for reflection, usually in the form of a commitment ceremony where all the contestants gather and are asked difficult questions by the experts and have to commit to whether they will stay or leave the relationship and the show. The final week of the experiment is spent apart, to decide whether they will commit to continuing the relationship after the show, or not. There are also dinner parties that provoke and hothouse emotional conflicts while the experts look on through a one-way mirror and offer commentary about the way the relationships are panning out. The experts are a key part of this show, drawing on the social education role of experts established in shows like The Nanny in relation to parenting. In the case of MAFS Australia, the experts comprise psychologist Melanie Shilling, clinical psychotherapist Tricia Stratford, and relationship psychologist John Aitken. These three have been present during all of the Australian seasons, and their role is to oversee the matching of applicants, provide expert commentary and advice to the contestants, as well as offer individual and couple therapy if required. The experts draw on a language of psychology as well as technology and algorithms to match the participants, while educating viewers about things like stages in relationships, managing conflict, the production of romance, and likely outcomes. Interestingly, the use of science echoes one of the first romance reality shows screened in Australia in 1984: Perfect Match (which was based on the US show The Dating Game) used a recognisably fake computer named Dexter for matching contestants looking for romance, presaging the use of ‘scientific’ approaches in MAFS. While the season is dominated by white contestants, there are signs that the producers are aware of the politics of diversity in what often slips into another white heterosexual romance show. In 2016 two gay men—Andy and Craig—were married but lasted only a few episodes into the show, attracting criticism for gratuitous inclusionary gestures. The irony was not lost on campaigners for marriage equality being held in Australia during 2017, that while gays and lesbians could not marry and their fate was being put to a national vote in the Marriage Equality Law postal survey, heterosexuals could marry a stranger on television for entertainment value with no obligations to sustain the relation beyond the show’s timeframe (Nunn 2017).2 While racial identity is never discussed on the show, the 2018 season included a ‘proud Aboriginal man’ and participants with cultural backgrounds from Southern Europe and Asia. Some refusal of racial profiling was evident in the 2017 series when one white bride asked to be

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paired with a Polynesian man, or someone with ‘culture’, and left the show disappointed after being married to a white man. Overall, however, the show probably falls into what Hargraves names ‘postracial delusion’ that disavows race (2014). Catherine Squires explains ‘postracial logic’ as presupposing an ‘already achieved multicultural nation’ where race and ethnicity are something to be chosen to display and whiteness is never questioned (2014, 264). Ages range from early 20s to 60s, and while contestants aren’t highly educated they might be characterised as working- to lower-middle-class with trades, businesses, or professions like nursing and firefighting. Beverley Skeggs (2009) has argued that reality television’s rhetoric of using ‘ordinary’ people is often a synonym for the working class, effectively closing down class analysis in favour of ‘the everyday’. She argues that reality shows particularly in Britain ‘over-recruit’ working class participants to publicly display and position them as in need of transformation, often by upper-middle-class experts. To some extent this is rehearsed in MAFS as well, but the normalisation of middle-class values that Skeggs identifies is arguably magnified through the ideologies of romance and weddings rather than through the participants’ personal backgrounds. Either way, we might usefully think about MAFS as part of a genre of television, defined by Fredrik Stiernstedt and Peter Jakobsson as ‘a ritualistic and rule-governed exchange that involves the negotiation not only of aesthetics, but also of culturally shared beliefs and values’ (2017, 699). While it might seem obtuse to take MAFS as a case study in this chapter, a show that skips flirting and goes straight to the wedding at the start of the show, it does offer some expedient insights as a ‘social experiment’ with the usual scripts. As Lara McKenzie and Laura Dales (2017) point out, MAFS differs from other romance reality television shows in a number of ways: it doesn’t objectify women as prizes for men; it is embedded in the mundane everyday life of living as a couple rather than just the glamorous life of extravagant dating on television; and there is an absence of competition between contestants. While the plethora of other reality shows such as The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Love Island, The Farmer Wants a Wife, Temptation Island, and Dating Naked all operate on competitive flirting and aggressive quests for ownership, MAFS circumvents this by assigning couples. The gaming element of choice, or trying out other competitors before choosing ‘the one’, is not available in this programme: the couples have already been matched. In fact, we might say that the show offers training in flirting, as experts are used to commentate and advise on the ‘progress’ of relationships.

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In using MAFS as our case study in this chapter, we have three propositions: Firstly, that this show is singular, in that it stands apart from other shows primarily because the apparent storybook ending of marriage is the starting point, so flirting is latent, or deferred. Secondly, we propose that this self-titled ‘social experiment’ flirts with science as a discourse or field of expertise: it proposes that science and expert knowledge might have the capacity to better match couples through algorithms, and psychological profiling. Science just might make more sense than depending on flirting for introductions and development of love, which more often than not seems to end up in a mess of regret for many couples. And thirdly, we propose that the viewing pleasures of this show are manifested through the medium, the spectacle, the awkwardness, and ultimate failure of the show to deliver stable loving marriages. Ultimately it fails in its project, in that very few of the relationships created through MAFS in Australia continue after the show, and none have been sustained to date. Perhaps this suggests that, in the end, flirting is a vital ingredient in relationships, forming part of the emotional, incomprehensible, barely articulable, and often irrational suite of practices that comprise human relationships in all their messiness and unpredictability. The remainder of this chapter is structured around these three propositions, and each begins by setting the scene.

The Wedding He is at the altar, nervous, sweating, calm, patient, in a suit, in tails, waiting. She is in a limousine, a horse drawn carriage, in white, with her sister, her friend, her mother, drinking champagne, laughing, nervous, panicking. They arrive at the wedding chapel, the decorated garden, the posh hotel, a beach, a boat, a heritage-listed estate. She steps out, adjusts the dress and walks down the red carpet by herself, with her dad, with her two mums, with her brother by her side. He turns and sees her, their eyes meet. He smiles she laughs he says ‘oh shit’ and turns back to face the front, she looks uncertain, his face lights up, she is serious not giving anything away. Hello. How are you? You look beautiful. I’m Jo. Wow! Where are you from? This is crazy. What am I doing here?

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The weddings that signal the start of the series of MAFS are lavish, fairytale, fantasy-fuelled events, replete with excesses of flowers and ribbons, the requisite lateness and last-minute panic attacks as in any good rom-com. As a starting point to a series that runs over 30 episodes and two months, the plot device of beginning with a wedding means that viewers won’t be familiar with the narrative arc: we don’t know how it might conclude. The traditional plot of meeting, dating, the problem which (almost) divides the romance and then the resolution in a happy ending is messed up (Schreiber 2014). In MAFS the meeting and happy ending are in the same moment at the wedding, which also sometimes includes a problem which threatens the relationship. In 2017–2018 problems were posed about the existence of children, difficult mothers-in-law, a jealous ex-girlfriend, a wife who is taller than her husband, an embarrassing dad, overprotective brothers, and a wig used to cover a hair loss condition. But these difficulties quickly dissipate, as their usual function in the plot—to be overcome in order for the resolution—is redundant. On the contrary, the wedding itself acts as the hook to invite us to the spectacle of MAFS and its visual excess. Increasingly this ritual is extraordinarily extravagant, as part of an unimaginably massive commercial industry that encourages excess to match the dreams of this special day (Ingraham 1999). The British Royal Wedding in May 2018 is probably an extreme case of lavish production, watched by 29 million Americans (Nielson 2018), 18 million Brits, 4 million Australians (ABC News 2018), and collectively estimations of ­ almost 2 billion viewers worldwide. Even while some consumers were antagonist to the monarchy or the politics of royalty, the fascination with the production and performance of the event seemed to mobilise more deeply held viewing pleasures, or at least fascination, if not critical pleasures. Even the pro-republic news platform The Guardian noted that ‘royal weddings are always interesting, both as theatre and because they tell us something about the kind of nation we have become’ (Editorial 2018). Especially in its amplified performance with royalty, white weddings remind us of deeply ingrained fairytales, happily ever after endings, beautiful brides and handsome princes, a story repeated over and over in films, television, cartoons, romances, and serious literature. In so many ways, our lives have been scripted through these childhood stories and their symbolism. Christyana Bambacas notes the remarkable consistency across cultures in the structuring of the white wedding narrative as the most important day of a woman’s life, and she critically analyses the way ‘public and

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­ opular discourses validate the role and performance of the bride through p positioning her as both the planner and star of the wedding’ from a very young age (2002, 193). While the contestants of MAFS don’t quite fit this narrative—it is not uncommon for them to have been married before, even multiple times—the hope invested in the wedding and its whiteness as a symbolic new beginning is tantamount. Catherine Driscoll reminds us that ‘not all brides are young, but participants in bridal culture are predominantly constructed as immature, or incomplete, and the bride crucially functions as a mode of feminine development’ (in Bambacas 2002, 194). Incompleteness is manifest in MAFS contestants, for both men and women, as if being coupled is something they have yet to successfully accomplish. The symbolism of the white wedding as a celebration of innocence, inexperience, and purity might have been lost long ago in practice, but still offers a model of desire that is actively produced through the social order.

Desire Thinking about the ways in which desire is structured into language and narrative, philosopher Butler asks: ‘Is desire itself metaphysically conditioned, or are there given social arrangements that lay claim to a metaphysical status in order to elaborate and justify their own authority?’ (Butler 2005, 378). She looks to philosophers from Aristotle to the present to think through the way desire is manifested as an idea, and mediated through language: Aristotle situates desire as a culturally produced activity, one that takes place in relation to norms, and one that is related to how to make deliberate choices in the midst of ethical life. Spinoza will later claim that desire (conatus) is the passion in human beings from which all emotions are derived, and that basic to all human striving is a “desire to persist in one’s own being”. For liberal political theorists such as Hobbes, the formulation will turn into a view of desire as acquisitiveness or human selfishness. But there is a critical distance between self-acquiring desire (as a sign of selfishness) and self-­ preservative desire (as a sign of life affirmation) in Spinoza’s view, and later in Nietzsche’s. (378)

Turning to twentieth-century psychoanalysis, Butler asserts the relation between desire and language in that both are opaque, illusive, always

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s­ triving towards resolution or clarity although this is never possible: ‘For Lacan … language itself is structured as desire. Linguistic reference fails in the same way as desire is structured by failure: if language were to reach the object it desires, it would undo itself as language’ (383). For Lacan, desire is originary; the desire for the object petit a is a transference of the originary desire for the pre-oedipal jouissance (of the womb). Flirting is the expression of desire, seeking or chasing something or someone that both displaces and temporarily fulfils the need for that originary desire for the Other. Language makes possible the deferral of this originary and its replacement with the object petit a—the career goal, the aspiration, the collection, nostalgia, and, most importantly for us, the potential lover. Michel Foucault’s work on power and language later dismissed the psychoanalytic foundationalism of desire and instead understands it as both a product of discourse (and thereby historical) and as productive. In a Foucauldian perspective, the desire scripts provide frameworks for normativised behaviour and relationality. Both models, however, contribute useful ways of thinking about the language of intimacy and the work of stories. These ideas of desire can be understood to structure not only our dominant narratives of fairytale coupledom, but are invoked in the very structure of a reality television show like MAFS. People are brought together in this show through a desire to be married, and audiences look on fascinated that their desire for marriage could be played out through such ­contrivance on such a public forum—and subject to the manufacturing requirements of production editors and channel viewing aspirations filtered through other fields of viewing pleasures like the expectation of scandal, uncomfortable social relations, and unpredictable behaviours. In many ways MAFS suspends hope by starting with the fairytale wedding; none of the marriages so far have extended into wedded real life. We might think of MAFS as operating on this desire for marriage, which is itself a desire bound to fail: in many ways a perfect space of contradictions for compelling viewing. As Butler comments, ‘Desire is the site at which demand and need are never reconciled, and this makes of desire a permanently vexed affair’ (2005, 381). The relation of desire to language also structures the contestants’ voiceovers and profile speech-grabs in MAFS. It’s worth looking at the reasons people give to account for their presence on the show, and what kinds of narratives these invoke about the show and about the authority of coupledom in our society. Reasons to participate in the show include a perceived social deficiency—not having a tan, or a six-pack, not

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s­moking-­drinking-­gambling-taking drugs—or a moment of reckoning: turning 31, being 53 and single, something biological kicking in, the thought of being alone for the rest of life, of being scared of loneliness, of getting older. Circumstances are a contributing factor, like living in an isolated region or living in an urban metropolis where first dates lead to nowhere, where dating is endlessly unsatisfying, or where Tinder overdetermines relationships. Participants also talk about their hopes and dreams: of being a young dad, of meeting the one, of having a family, of meeting a soulmate, of lying on the couch watching movies with someone to cuddle. Values like loyalty, true love, commitment, honesty, caring, and downto-earth are used in looking for these dream-loves, who just want to meet the right one, fall in love, and have babies. The yearning in these collective incantations is palpable, and the narrative demand for a partner is a driving force as in most stories. No matter how heartbreaking these stories are (how we respond emotionally to them), they are scripted in the sense that they are socially mandated reasons for wanting coupledom and they may also be scripted for the commercially successful television franchise. The show itself is structured around a virtual epidemic in lovelessness in Australian society, claiming in 2017 that ‘4.1 million Aussies are looking for a partner. We have to tackle this problem head-on. We know it works.’ Thus, the show itself is presented as the ‘solution’ to this ‘problem’ of pairing up people, and its departure from the usual avenues is that it uses experts.

The Experts There are three experts from the associated fields of psychology, clinical psychotherapy, and relationship psychology. They are two women and a man, white, professionals, visually unexceptional, who speak in slow, measured, and serious tones that are also reflected in their bodily gestures and facial expressions. They sit, in a panel, on the couch, behind a table, behind a one-way mirror window. They cast their collective professional gaze on the contestants, and use a collection of key phrases that position them as valuable to the show. They talk about ‘our’ singles having tried every possible avenue and now they are relinquishing their dreams to science to ‘do the work’. They acknowledge that this involves a ‘leap of faith’ for the singles, who might experience fear or trepidation. They refer to analysing data, getting the right match, putting trust in science and psychology. They offer us snippets of professional insider information: that attraction

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at first sight is important, that it takes seven seconds to form a first impression, and offer us hope that deep romantic love can develop into a profound relationship. They talk about emotional responses: that participants are under pressure, that neurochemicals like adrenalin and cortisone will be released, that the brain might be in flight or fight mode on the wedding day, that insecurities might emerge, that uncertainty is guaranteed. They offer the participants and the audience certainty in the role of science and research and their expertise in assessing the show’s trajectories. While the experts draw on their disciplinary fields and use authoritative phrases like ‘research shows’ and terminology like ‘neurochemicals’ to signal their expert knowledge, much of their language can also be likened to cliché or self-help literature referred to in the Introduction to this book. But just their presence on the programme is a source of comfort for many of the participants who invest hope in their expert knowledge. As Alan Petersen and Deborah Lupton explain, experts like scientists and the medical professionals are assumed to base their decisions and advice on ‘objective’ knowledge, while lay people are assumed to be scientifically ignorant and use ‘subjective’ evaluations (1996, 153). There is a clear hierarchy implicit in such values of what the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1980) would call the order of knowledge. Foucault traces the rise of the authority of medical and scientific knowledge from the eighteenth century, when ‘the doctor becomes the great advisor and expert, if not in the art of governing, at least in that of observing, correcting and improving the social ‘body’ and maintaining it in a permanent state of health’ (177). Foucault explains the ‘clinical gaze’ that produces patients, in that people become patients when they are subjected to the scrutiny of clinical observation. In MAFS when the clinicians gaze on the contestants’ lives, they are spatially and socially organised into observer and observed, knower and doer, expert and lay person, and this dyad sets up the terms of the ‘experiment’. This relation clearly operates in MAFS as couples willingly subject themselves to being matched, investing hope and even faith in the capacity of ‘science’. The actual matching process remains a secret, an opaqueness that usually serves to heighten the latent power of expert knowledge. The Nine Network does have an ‘extra’ clip that suggestively alludes to the process, whereby participants ‘fill out tests’, and are then interviewed. Attention is paid to ‘personality, attachment styles, and how they communicate in relationships’; to values, lifestyle, and personality; and also pheromone test-

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ing, and resiliency of the ‘emotional brain’ (Nine Network 2018). These sorts of terms give us little idea of what is involved, but obfuscate the process further lending it mystery, even magic. While participants are thus hopeful of science to match them, they are also wary of its failures and will question its methods; this is evident when couples confront the experts to demand what they could possibly be thinking when they matched each other. When Jo, for example, angrily asks why she’d been matched with Sean who has no feelings for her, the psychologists respond by citing their compatibilities: they both grew up in small towns, live in the same city, are independent, and are open to having a relationship with someone with kids (Jo has children). While Jo is emotional and expressive, the psychologists explain that Sean’s more even keel is often a good match in temperament (Season 5, Episode 13). If we wanted to, we could read this simplistic explanation as covering for matching a loud bubbly single mum with a quiet sullen man, who may or may not like each other; whether or not some couples are matched for their likely volatility, there is probably as much chance as any that two strangers no matter who they are might like each other. The therapeutic alliance however operates to make credible the objective knowledge and scientific method of the experts. It is perfectly evident by the repetition of particular phrases by the experts every season, however, that these are also a form of script being mobilised in the service of a commercial enterprise and highly contrived situation that is romance reality television. Modern audiences are aware of the manufacturing of situations in franchises like this, as journalist James Weir notes when reporting on a 2017 MAFS contestant breaking her confidentiality agreement and speaking out about the series: The public are divided when it comes to hearing former reality show contestants speak out against a show that burned them. Claims of extreme editing, fake storylines and producers with an agenda plague productions every year and fans are quick to roll their eyes when burnt contestants cry foul once it all goes to air.

This particular call by contestant Susan Rawlings, however, targeted the ‘experts’ and their professional ethical responsibilities. Rawlings said that the psychologists wore ear-pieces while filming some scenes (suggesting they were being fed lines), that contestants were never offered counselling when they received threats and national hatred after footage was edited to represent contestants as unlikable, that production staff arrived at their

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hotel with scripts for them to repeat back, and that conditions of filming were unacceptable, restricting hydration, toilet breaks, and sleep in endurance conditions (Weir 2017). Rawlings is reported as saying, ‘It’s an absolute shame because we are not talking to the experts and they are not talking with us. They are just pawns in a game’ (Parri 2017). The invocation of experts, then, adds another layer of contrivance to this reality show, and yet, as Misha Kavka reminds us, ‘rather than erasing the division between mediation and reality, television programming has been foregrounding its modes of mediation, and hence teaching viewers to be savvy about its status as cultural and technical construction’ (2008, 5). There’s even been a fictional television series about the background scenes of reality television dating: UnREAL first screened on American network Lifetime in 2015. Yes, we all know it’s a contrivance, so why is it such a popular form of viewing? What is happening in the relation between reality and real life, through the mediation of technology? At its finale week in 2017, MAFS had almost two million viewers in Australia: that’s one in every twelve people, in a population that increasingly turns off free-­ to-­air television, and without even quantifying the readers of gossip magazines and online media.

Reality Television and Intimacies In tracing the evolution of theorising television from an agent of social control (as trash to keep the masses preoccupied) to a social agent, Kavka argues that we now recognise ‘that television is an everyday instrument of pleasure, identity-formation, and cultural knowledge’ (2008, 20). Reality television in particular, as a form most reviled by critics as it increasingly satisfies mass audiences, is ‘fully appropriate to the medium [of television] as a technology of intimacy’ (20, original italics). Kavka reminds us of the origins of the word ‘tele-vision’, naming its capacity for viewers to see up close but also its capacity to manifest a closeness, or intimacy, which viewers respond to emotionally. She calls this the ‘affective productivity of televisual presence’ (5), suggesting that the emotive responses form a social community engaged in these collective intimacies derived from the kind of presence television generates. That is, while we understand we are not part of any particular reality show, it can nevertheless be regarded as a ‘viewing event’ that we might be a part of, thus belonging to a community of participant viewers. This is certainly evident on social media sites like Twitter

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and Instagram, when fans tweet reactions to shows with a hashtag that creates a community of commentators, and is encouraged if not generated by the television channels. If we can regard reality shows as a sort of peak use of the television medium, then it is no wonder that we are fascinated by the forms of intimacy it experiments with. Shows like Gogglebox (which films viewers watching television) demonstrate the strong responses to reality shows, an affective economy that both reacts to and produces the commercial enterprise, the manufactured desires, and the scandalous provocations set in motion. If reality television shows like MAFS actually produce intimacies, and yet viewers are literate in the manufacturing of ‘romantic love’ in artificial settings in this genre, then how authentic are those emotions produced in both the viewer and the contestants? Kavka talks about the way contestants are obliged to act as if they are in love, or open to romantic love on reality romance shows, in the hope that such acts might turn into the real thing: that is, into feelings. Kavka writes, ‘for the participants of such shows, intimacy is mediated by performance (they must first do as though they feel), while for the viewers intimacy is mediated by the screen itself’ (24) and as viewers ‘we too feel caught up in the performance of feeling, to which we respond affectively’ (24). Following Jean Baudrillard’s idea of life as a simulacrum, imitating life once removed (on a screen, a c­ onstructed Disney-like world, through technology), Kavka suggests that the simulated world of reality television stimulates feelings (25). To perform being ‘in love’ produces unexpected feelings of romantic love. In the ‘amplified settings’ of reality television, Kavka suggests that ‘the performance of intimacy generates intimate affects’ for both contestant and viewer, through the structure of the programme and the medium of television. And yet, while there are many ‘loved up’ couples identified on MAFS, there are just as many ‘stuck’, ‘not progressing’, or not ‘letting go’ or ‘opening up’ to make the marriage ‘real’. Or perhaps they are in fact acting married? Perhaps marriage is, for some, loveless, or companionable, or negotiated, or unromantic, contrary to the flirtatious and romantically engaged relations that usually come before a wedding? If contestants are acting as if they are romantic, then perhaps such intimacies are also being produced for viewers? The circulation of vision-­ feeling-­ behaviour-values is endlessly rehearsed, in the feedback loop between viewers-fans-producers-contestants-experts, all of whom are continually negotiating the social scripts of gender, sexuality, and social relations and testing the limits of acceptability and their desire. While

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contestant Susan Rawlings completed the season, she was clearly uncomfortable enough to break her contract with the network to tell another story about the conditions of filming. A limit was breached, which tested her values and self-identity. The trade between network and contestants is also part of this economy; contestants are rewarded financially for completing the show but are also granted entrée to the burgeoning reality show celebrity world, whereby ‘ordinary’ people become part of glamorous society, magazine content, paparazzi, and aspirational social worlds— what Graeme Turner has called the ‘demotic turn’ to describe the production of ordinary people into celebrities (2010). But Kavka suggests that this context and viewers’ knowledge of it do not preclude the generation of real emotions through the performance of romance. While ordinary people are acting as married couples, perhaps they are generating that married couple relationship. Feelings, Kavka argues, are generated between people and bodies, rather than being innately and individually interior (2008, 124). What happens between people, as between viewers and contestants, generates emotions that are no less real for being performed or mediated.

Flirting She texts. He texts. They meet in a café, awkwardly hug, sit down, laugh nervously. Her eyes are wide open, broad smile, head angled, lips slightly parted, she touches her hair, her eyes narrow, her head goes back, He is grinning, transfixed on her, his eyelids rise, his lips contract, he reaches to touch her knee and looks away, touches her shoulder, They lick their lips simultaneously, their feet tangle under the table, they flatter each other, he rubs her leg under the table, she adjusts his hair, they snort. They confess to the camera: he gives me butterflies, she’s my type, she’s got a wild side, I know what I want and I want him, she’s definitely sexual, we have chemistry, I’m going to chase that, she’s into me, she’s stunning, I’m excited, it’s a rush, he’s tall and handsome, he’s everything I want in a man, I feel giddy, I’m feeling something now.

This scene from the 2018 Australian season is one of the few scenes of flirting available on the show, and yet the two players Davina and Dean are

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married to other people. This flirting is illicit, risky, dangerously outside of the rules of the show, and because of this compelling viewing that saw a hysterical rise in viewing audience and tweeting activity. The combination of transgression, play, danger, and apparent attraction was exciting (and perhaps manufactured by the producers) but nevertheless otherwise aberrant on the show. Even if it is produced, as we might suspect when their secret rendezvous at a café is filmed and recorded, this performance of flirting produces a similar heightened excitement in viewers. Finally, something unexpected is happening. Will it end in tears? (It does.) Or will a more appropriate matching of couples result? (It doesn’t.) The risk of rejection was worn by Davina, who was demonised thereafter on the show despite her quite acceptable and common narrative of coming onto the show ‘looking for love’, just finding it potentially in someone else’s match. As Skeggs notes, ‘even though “reality” television is highly edited, thereby containing the drama it provokes, some of the affect seeps beyond its containment. “Reality” television offers the pleasure of watching the unexpected’ (2009, 640). This scene is instructive, not only for the ways in which the producers frame it as betrayal and treachery (as psychologist Trish tells us), but also in the expectations of flirting and feeling. While other contestants are trying desperately to articulate their ambivalence around what they are feeling, in this moment, Davina and Dean have no problem with their vocabulary of feelings in short, breathy phrases.

Romance An important part of the process of MAFS is the experts’ role in advising on relationships, and specifically in how to be romantic. We might call this the pedagogy of love, and MAFS draws on dominant scripts about what romance looks like and how to do it and what it should feel like. As ‘expert’ Trish tells us, ‘romance is really important in the early stages of a relationship’: We want to feel that we’re special, and that our partner only has eyes for us. Flowers, romantic dinners, non-sexual touching to build up the sexual chemistry: these are important because they build trust, and you start to feel safe in the relationship. (Season 5, Episode 11)

Amid kisses and champagne, some couples are frustrated by the lack of romance, or even conversation between each other. These provide oppor-

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tunities for the experts to exercise their authority and commentate on ways to keep on script with expected behaviours and attitudes. Carly, for example, is frustrated that she cannot get Justin’s attention, which is focused on pursuing business opportunities. She tells the other wives that ‘all night he didn’t try to touch me once, he didn’t try to hold my hand’, and makes a camera confessional: ‘Justin has these emotional walls, he’s been keeping me at arm’s length, he’s not letting me in’. These symptoms allow the experts to ask whether ‘it’s about him being attracted to her, or he just doesn’t know how to express it? Is it about skill or will?’ (Season 5, Episode 13). He is diagnosed with a ‘failure to communicate, and express any kind of affection’, and the experts urge Justin to put in some effort and ‘turn it around’ (Season 5, Episode 13). Justin quite rationally says he can’t just flick a switch in his brain and feel romantic, highlighting the tension involved in performing feelings. When Carly tells the camera her expectations—that ‘every girl wants fireworks, to be swept away, swept off her feet’—she is clearly expressing the correct script for how romance and love ought to feel for a woman, scenes which literally appear in the next chapter when we consider contemporary teen film. Carly’s brief misremembering of the phrase ­ ‘swept off her feet’ into ‘swept away’ indicates that there is a correct phrasing, just as there is a correct feeling associated with romance and love in contemporary culture. It is with profound irony however that such emotions are expected between strangers after they have been married. The social experiment here is striving to meet the conventional expectations in a topsy-turvy chronology and contrived circumstances. It does demonstrate, however, the conventions of intimacy that are codified in popular culture. Trish’s diagnosing of flowers, romantic dinners, non-sexual touching becomes a triumvirate of expectations. Melissa’s instructions to John on how to be more romantic, for example, is very simple: she expects flowers as a sign of his affection. John’s training in romance is enviably straightforward in wooing Melissa. It is not so straightforward for Davina and Ryan on their honeymoon on a tropical island, where Ryan tries eating an oyster and then promptly spits it out as disgusting. Ryan’s dislike spectacularly contravenes the symbolic function of oysters as a romantic aphrodisiac and correspondingly generates Davina’s scorn. Despite pursuing romantic gestures, Ryan’s physical rejection of oysters can only be considered ‘unromantic’ by Davina and the hegemonic scripts of what constitutes romance.

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It is not always the women that are frustrated however. When Charlene is paired with Patrick, we are told that he is in touch with his emotions and she is loud and expressive. Charlene becomes frustrated with Patrick wanting to talk about emotions all the time, and tells him to ‘man up’. This surprising demand comes amidst a scandal of masculine bravado during a segregated ‘boys night out’, where the idea of wife swapping was canvassed and some of the women were rated by some of the men while others were quite uncomfortable and Patrick called them out on objectifying and demeaning the women. Patrick’s version of new masculinity is placed in an impossible situation, being emotional and sensitive and calling out bad behaviour of other men, and yet being called upon by Charlene to be more of a man, suggesting a desire for those badly behaved and unfeeling forms of husbandry. In this case Patrick is both vilified and celebrated as a figure of new masculinity which we outlined in the previous chapter. Whether this conundrum was manufactured or not, it tells us much about changing expectations of masculinity and the kinds of social negotiations involved in adjusting to decent, feeling men who are adept at feelings of intimacy.

Intimacy Perhaps surprisingly, sexuality is often a halting part of MAFS. Even though they are married and on television performing marriage, couples are often reluctant to have sexual relations. The expectation that sexual relations are a vital part of intimacy is constantly reiterated on MAFS, and much of the collective conversations and the therapeutic alliance are about whether the couples have had sex yet. On the couch at commitment ceremonies, each couple charts how their relationship is ‘progressing’ and make reference to the need for sexual relations to demonstrate its progress. Sean and Blair, for example, report that their relationship is progressing but what is lacking is the ‘passion’. Trish asks, ‘So does this mean you have not been physically intimate yet?’, to which the answer is ‘No’. When John notes he can see the intimacy unfolding between Sean and Blair, Blair laughs, ‘hopefully next week we can report some more juicy action’. When Patrick and Charlene report in, Charlene admits she has been ‘freaking out’ that the ‘sexual chemistry’ hasn’t been happening ‘fast enough’, and says she is to blame for that, to which Patrick responds that it is because she is developing feelings for him (Season 5, Episode 13). While

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sex is anticipated and expected in this scenario, then, there is much reluctance going on and some of it attributable to actually having feelings for the other person. Ryan also notes that ‘when you meet someone you don’t normally marry them straight away; there is a period of getting to know that person first’ before having sex (Season 5, Episode 13). The heavy expectations of sexuality in MAFS and the reluctance of many of the participants suggests an ongoing negotiation of intimate relations and, we would argue, while this is perhaps an unexpected turn for a romance reality show it might also indicate the value of practices like flirting in generating feelings, if not intimacies. When the experts are probing the force of attraction and desire of the couples on the couch, their questions are coded to probe the depth of feelings that are unable to be scripted: Do you feel desired? Is there sexual chemistry? And how is this to be achieved? Perhaps this is the key conundrum of such a programme: how do we learn to love? If it were as easy as buying flowers, then the marriages on MAFS would presumably last, but the show fundamentally fails in matching lasting couples. If the development of feelings is at odds with the structural design of MAFS, perhaps this contradiction is what holds viewers’ attention, undermining the objectivity of science and reaffirming the random, impetuous, and unpredictability of human relations that leaves us giddy with butterflies and superlatives.

Conclusion The kinds of intimacies produced through reality television, and the experiments with scripting romantic love through reality romance shows, provide fertile material for examining the kinds of social orthodoxies that maintain the dominant social order but also suggest its limits through the idea of social experimentation. We have argued here that MAFS is singular in its departure from many other reality romance formats, and also from dominant scripts about coupling as a linear chronology of meeting, courting, committing. In this show, strangers meet at the marriage ceremony, and viewers watch as they negotiate what form of intimacy their relationship might take. There is an aporia or absence of flirting in this show, except for the scene of illicit flirting found in the 2018 season which, whether manufactured or not, introduces heightened emotions for contestants and viewers as it departs from the agreed conventions of the show. This is surely suggestive of the innate messiness of human relations and

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the conditions of flirting, its unpredictability, riskiness, and possibly transgressive potential. It also produces excitement, raciness, and desire both to keep watching and to anticipate a resolution to this decidedly liminal and uncertain practice. The pleasures of flirting within the structure of this show overshadow the more serious business of establishing harmonious or even comfortable relations within the simulated marriage. Perhaps it also draws our attention to the limits of marriage, romantic love, and the ideology of this show. If the only flirting available is illicit (i.e. between two people married to others), and the measure of a sustainable marriage beyond the show is to be ‘romantic’ and ‘loved up’ rather than companionable or even agreeable, then perhaps the institution of marriage is actually the social experiment here. In the broader picture, romance reality shows are instructive and instructional on the kinds of negotiations involved in establishing intimacy. Unlike MAFS, other formats such as The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are premised on one person meeting a large group of people, with whom connections and selections are made, flirtations shared, and ‘committed’ relationships theoretically formed only when the last rose is given in the final episode. In this space, flirtation between bachelor/bachelorette and contestants and on occasion between the contestants ­themselves is overtly blatant and expected. In fact, flirting often overdetermines these shows to the extent that it reaches its limits before dissolving into pure competitive spectacle and resulting in unethical forms of harm and heartbreak, as proposed in the previous chapter. These forms of entertainment and, as we will argue in the next chapter, other screen media both reflect and produce social models of in/appropriate behaviour at any given time, including how we flirt and form intimate relations. Educationist Erica McWilliam (1999) contends that ‘we are constantly subjected to training about how to take our pleasure’, and that ‘it is learned through precise forms of training made available at particular historical times and places in the discursive organization of disciplinary texts and prescriptive stories’ (17). MAFS draws attention to some of these limits in its carnivalesque inversion of the happy ending in the beginning, but also offers sets of prescriptive stories and social conventions no matter that they almost certainly risk failure. As we also argue in the next chapter, screen media like television and film are potent sites of social training in practices like flirting and intimate relations at particular times and places, and yet also test the limits of those practices.

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Notes 1. Whereas other national versions conduct legal weddings, the Australian Marriage Act (1961) requires advance notice of a month and a day before a legal ceremony so the weddings on the show are not binding in law. (Paul Purcell and Darren Cartwright. 2015. Married at First Sight Auditions Prove Telling Sign. The Sydney Morning Herald, April 27, 2015.) https:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/married-at-first-sightauditions-prove-telling-sign-20150427-1mu421.html. 2. Subsequent to the Australian Marriage Law postal survey held in September and October 2017, a bill was passed into law in December 2017 that amended the definition of marriage as a union between two people, rather than a man and a woman—itself an amendment that had only been in operation since 2004.

References ABC News. 2018. Royal Wedding: Why Some People are Sick of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. ABC News Online, May 18, 2018. http://www.abc.net.au/ news/2018-05-18/royal-wedding-and-why-youre-over-prince-harry-andmeghan-markle/9771070. Bambacas, Christyana. 2002. Thinking about White Weddings. Journal of Australian Studies 26 (72): 191–200. Butler, Judith. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay on Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. ———. 2005. Desire. In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, 369–386. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Cryle, Peter. 2000. The Karma Sutra as Curriculum. In Taught Bodies, ed. Clare O’Farrell, Daphne Meadmore, Erica McWilliam, and Colin Symes, 17–26. New York: Peter Lang. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. 1985. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Editorial. 2018. The Guardian View on the Royal Wedding: Have a Lovely Day. The Guardian, May 19, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/18/the-guardian-view-on-the-royal-wedding-have-alovely-day. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon and translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press.

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Hargraves, Hunter. 2014. Tan TV: Reality Television’s Postracial Delusion. In A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette, 283–305. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Ingraham, Chrys. 1999. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Kavka, Misha. 2008. Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Married at First Sight (Australia). Nine Network. McKenzie, Lara, and Laura Dales. 2017. Choosing Love? Tensions and Transformations of Modern Marriage in Married at First Sight. Continuum 31 (6): 857–867. McWilliam, Erica. 1999. Pedagogical Pleasures. New York: Peter Lang. Nielson. 2018. Over 29 Million Viewers Watch Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Wedding. Nielsen Insights, May 20, 2018. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/ insights/news/2018/over-29-million-viewers-watch-prince-harry-andmeghan-markles-wedding.html. Nine Network. 2018. Experts Give an Insight into the Matching Process. Nine Now. https://www.9now.com.au/married-at-first-sight/season-5/extras/latest/highlights/experts-give-an-insight-into-the-matching-process. Nunn, Gary. 2017. ‘Vote No’: Two Simple Words More Hurtful than Any Anti-­ gay Slur. Executive Style, September 18, 2017. http://www.executivestyle. com.au/vote-no-two-simple-words-more-hurtful-than-any-outright-antigayslur-gyju09. Parri, Linda. 2017. Married at First Sight: Perth Truck Driver Susan Rawlings Speaks Out. Perth Now, April 2, 2017. https://www.perthnow.com.au/entertainment/confidential/married-at-first-sight-perth-truck-driver-susan-rawlings-speaks-out-ng-148c90182bd42d0dd3a984982b418a36. Petersen, Alan R., and Deborah Lupton. 1996. The New Public Health: Discourses, Knowledges, Strategies. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Schreiber, Michele. 2014. American Postfeminist Cinema: Women, Romance and Contemporary Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Skeggs, Beverley. 2009. The Moral Economy of Person Production: The Class Relations of Self-performance on ‘Reality’ Television. The Sociological Review 57 (4): 626–644. Squires, Catherine R. 2014. The Conundrum of Race and Reality Television. In A Companion to Reality Television, ed. Laurie Ouellette, 264–282. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Stiernstedt, Fredrik, and Peter Jakobsson. 2017. Watching Reality from a Distance: Class, Genre and Reality Television. Media, Culture & Society 39 (5): 697–714. Turner, Graeme. 2010. The Mass Production of Celebrity: ‘Celetoids’, Reality TV and the ‘Demotic Turn’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2): 153–165.

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Weir, James. 2017. ‘We’re All Too Scared to Say It’: MAFS Bride Raises Concerns Over Extreme Lengths of Reality TV. news.com.au, April 4, 2017, 8:03 PM. https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/reality-tv/were-all-too-scaredto-­say-it-mafs-bride-raises-concerns-over-extreme-lengths-of-reality-tv/news-­ story/6b2320518490b879519a8694254f5a4e.

CHAPTER 4

Flirting on Film: Boundaries and Consent, Visibility and Performance

Abstract  Teen film presents a variety of intimacies between characters, sometimes in constructive ways, other times in ways that demonstrate a lack of care for the self or others. As a popular, accessible textual form, teen film can provide a space to explore ethical practices of relating through flirting. In order to appeal to the largest possible audience, flirting, innuendo, touching, glancing, and talking often replace the representation of sex in teen film, playing a part in testing the waters and learning how to relate to other people. In this way, film has the potential to provide an environment to discuss aspects of relationships and relating that sometimes fall to the wayside. This chapter considers how teen films present pedagogical moments which might be valuable for starting conversations or discussions regarding the negotiation of intimacy, rather than resorting to scandal. Keywords  Teen film • Pedagogy • Consent • Risk • Visibility

Introduction If intimacy is learnt through social conventions of flirting and romance generally, then film can be considered a key media to observe these in action. In their book Mediated Intimacy, Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey note that ‘media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people’s knowledge, desires, practices and © The Author(s) 2019 A. Bartlett et al., Flirting in the Era of #MeToo, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7_4

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expectations about intimate relationships’ (2018, 1) and as a highly ­accessible form representing intimacy between teens, teen film offers a potent space to consider the ways in which flirting and intimacy are negotiated and even learnt through imagined scenes of adolescence. The look, or glance, between characters might be the most well-known convention of flirtation in teen film. We often see two people’s eyes meet across a crowded room, and we talk about the cliché of love at first sight, but in spite of such clichés, such relationships are uncertain: Will they? Won’t they? In the John Hughes teen film Sixteen Candles (1984), the glances between Samantha and Jake are asynchronous; when she sees him looking at her, she turns, embarrassed. In 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) the music changes from a beat-driven background sound, becoming expansive with synthesiser and guitar notes sustained, full of possibility, accentuating a sense of slow motion as Cameron sees Bianca for the first time. While this gaze is initially unreciprocated, after their first kiss, ‘I can’t get enough of you baby’ plays as they share glances in slow motion as she walks past him by the lockers. In The Kissing Booth (2018) the roles appear to be somewhat reversed. Narrating the first 17 years of her life, Elle notes that at 16 she ‘realised I had a crush on Noah’, her best friend’s older brother. She is shown watching him emerging from the ocean in slow motion, sunlight shimmering off water. She looks down and away, in voiceover commenting, ‘got over my crush on Noah’, but as we see a closeup of Noah’s face and torso, she qualifies, ‘mostly’ as she looks up through her eye lashes. While she does not think this is reciprocated, as Silvan Tomkins suggests, ‘adolescent loving is not infrequently carried on at a distance, with each party stealing glances at the other’ (1995, 86) and earlier we saw Noah watching her dance, smiling and shaking his head. Such scenes work to ensure we know these characters are looked at (Dyer 1982) and the smiles shared can demonstrate enjoyment in these interactions but also neutralise the dominance implicit in the stare. As Rosemarie Garland-­ Thomson writes in her book about staring, the ‘unethical stare … is looking without recognising’: to stare ethically we have to recognise the humanity of others (2009, 186). The look shared between Bianca and Cameron, for example, with a ‘responding gaze and smile suggests the interest is mutual’ (Clarke 2017, 167). Looking can be intimate and pleasurable, provided the parties enjoy looking and being looked at (Tomkins 1995), but there can be a fine line between looking, flirtation, and objectification. Indeed, it is not only how characters look, but how we as viewers are encouraged to watch.

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Flirting on film offers an opportunity to explore the ways we might ethically relate to others. Flirting plays a part in testing the waters and understanding interest. As viewers, we are familiar with the furtive glances in classrooms and hallways, the banter, texting, and touching, all elements which are sometimes desired and sometimes very clearly ignored or refused. Teen film presents a variety of intimacies between characters sometimes in constructive ways, other times in ways that demonstrate a lack of care for the self or others. As such films demonstrate, flirting can be playful, or uncertain, detached; it is not always good or pleasant, it can be unethical and lack mutuality. Of course, flirting is a form of communication where communication is ‘something that happens between people all the time in explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal, ways’ (Barker et al. 2018, 188). Examining moments in teen film can highlight that sexual intimacy can be fun and playful, but also complex and confusing. This chapter considers teen film as a site of flirting’s representation and a pivotal site of flirting pedagogy and we argue that it might be a space where conversations or discussions around negotiating intimacy and ethical relating can be engaged (Buckingham and Bragg 2004). While the endings of teen films are often heteronormative and predictably scripted, flirting occurs in moments throughout the film. As we note in previous chapters, flirting is liminal, and this is also a way we can consider teen film (Driscoll 2011; Davis and Dickinson 2004). Teen film is ‘a genre with a tradition of considering the contradictory sexuality experienced by young people’ which ‘plays with borders’ (Clarke 2017, 16). Of course, as Samantha Colling notes, the possibilities made available in mainstream teen film are regulated, with boys ‘hedonistic’ and responsible, and girls ‘innocen[t] and experience[d]’ (2017, 5). What we understand as teen film can be broad, as Catherine Driscoll (2011) writes: ‘any film reference to youth brings with it the capacity to “become” or “perform” teen film’ (139) noting narrative conventions that include a cast of youthful characters, and plots associated with coming of age, romance, and ‘management of adolescence by families, schools, and other institutions’ (1–2). However, these films are often engaged (particularly in scholarly literature) in ways which moralise, ‘critical of its unrealistic portrayal of adolescent experience’ and which ‘tend to judge films in the genre as good or bad in terms of a responsibility to represent adolescence in ways that would be good for adolescents’ (Driscoll 2011, 4, emphasis in original). In considering teen film, we have no desire to moralise; rather, we are interested in exploring ways that people can show concern for themselves

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and others rather than prescribing ‘appropriate’ behaviours (Carmody 2015, 108). Indeed, while suggesting that we might learn from such films, this is an ambiguous form. Exploring the aesthetics of teen film, Colling notes that such films ‘feel fun’ (2017, 4), where ‘fun is performative’ specific to time and place, but also repeated to the extent it becomes normative (19). This repetition of particular forms over time has naturalised them. In this way, Colling argues that the representations of girls in Hollywood teen film ‘create[s] a version of girlhood, rather than represent[ing] actual female desires, memories or fantasies’ (2017, 5), and for us to enjoy these films we ‘go along with’ it even if we do not believe it (13). These films flirt with reality, fantasy, and imagination. As we argued in relation to romance reality television shows in Chap. 3, they produce intimacies that are referenced to other texts and fantasies, and while we might ‘go along with’ them while we watch, arguably we also recognise the construction and scripts at play. Indeed, part of the pleasure of watching can be the way filmmakers play with these scripts. In this chapter we consider two recent teen films with a wide release and reach, and ‘Hollywood’ style, classified for young audiences: Love, Simon (2018) (classified PG-13 in the United States) and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018) (All the Boys) (classified TV-14  in the United States). Described as ‘a gay teen romance released by 20th Century Fox’ (Collins 2018), Love, Simon follows Simon, a white, middle-class young man who is gay, while All the Boys is a Netflix film and features an Asian-­ American protagonist, Lara Jean. While not having a traditional release, All the Boys is reportedly one of Netflix’s ‘most viewed original films ever with strong repeat viewing’ (Roettgers 2018). Thus, in some ways, recent teen films have diversified beyond the straight, white, middle-class demographic they are known for (Colling 2017). At the same time, recent films remain homogeneous, normative, and banal (Collins 2018): as they broaden into a touch of diversity, in keeping with the perception of ‘fun’, discussion of class, sexism, homophobia, race, and racism is limited. Flirting is prevalent in teen films for a range of reasons, one of which is classification, with films rated to appeal to the broadest possible audience: flirting, innuendo, touching, glancing, and talking often replace the representation of sex. Indeed, Roz Kaveney suggests ‘sexiness’ in teen films often emerges ‘in the form of non-overt interactions—straight and gay’ (2006, 9; Driscoll 2011). In representing teen relationships, teen film has the potential to provide an environment to discuss the aspects of sexuality that are often absent

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from current sex education which tends to focus on penetrative heterosex and risk, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy (Clarke 2017). Considering young people’s discussion of the absences in sex education, Moira Carmody suggests that for young people ‘sex has much more complex relations with going out, dating, forming relationships, and feeling their way. It sometimes seems as though film, television, and much else in popular culture better understands this’ (2015, 8). Exploring flirting in teen film might thus be useful for considering ethical ways people engage with others, particularly sexually and romantically. Indeed, Kyra Clarke has argued ‘the emotions and feelings produced by film and television hold significant potential for developing affective sexual pedagogies, that is, ways of discussing feelings and experiences that we do not necessarily have the words for’ (2017, 25). In considering ethical practices, we think through Carmody’s ‘Sex & Ethics Program’ which has a focus on reflection and negotiation, establishing ‘a set of tools to make informed ethical decisions’ (2015, 10). Carmody draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of care of the self which she suggests ‘is synonymous with living an ethical life … by critically reflecting about their self, a person is free to develop as a particular human being because they are free from the inhibiting normalizing or dominating discourses’ (111). This is relational as it ‘implies complex relationships with others, and is also a way of caring for others’ (111). This concept of care of the self is not ‘know thyself’ (111) or ‘an individualized notion of “working on the self” or a consumer capitalist “treat yo’self” mentality’ (Barker et al. 2018, 213, emphasis in original); rather, there is a focus on continual consideration: ‘This process of ethical reflection is not intended to be a one-off reflection, but dynamic, open to constant change, and context specific. Indeed, it may even be used many times within one encounter’ (Carmody 2015, 113). This framework encourages us to be ‘aware of our own desires and wants and the possible impact of them on the other person’ (114) and may be applied to our relationships more broadly. There are questions around utilising the terminology of ‘care’, which Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi argue can be used in asymmetrical, neoliberal, individualistic ways (2007). As they note, ‘the vocabulary of care is at least somewhat levelling, in that all of us do undertake and need care’ (285) and yet, it can both critique and leave in place ‘the rational atomistic self/citizen’, prioritise ‘improving citizens’ (Beasley and Bacchi 2012, 105), and suggest ‘the fragility of the other’ (Beasley and Bacchi 2005, 59). In contrast, Beasley and Bacchi note the importance of

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c­onsidering interconnection, community, and sociality (2012, 115). Thinking about sometimes fleeting flirtatious moments in film can provide us with an opportunity to think about how to take care of ourselves and other people. Such moments can help us recognise the complexity and confusion that can surround sexual intimacy and might be valuable for starting conversations or discussions regarding the negotiation of intimacy more generally. Discussing the embodied experience of flirtation might be part of acknowledging young people as sexual citizens, and perhaps going beyond heteronormative conceptualisations of sex to consider broader practices of intimacy. Touch can be an experience which acknowledges intimate practices other than sex. Touch can be erotic, intimate, impersonal, painful, between lovers, friends, or enemies, and is often shown in teen film to depict connections between characters. We might consider the way touch, such as the heteronormative kiss, is romanticised in films, accompanied by fireworks (Everything, Everything), fountains and twinkling lights (Princess Diaries), and imagined exploding light bulbs (The Kissing Booth). But touch is not always good or pleasant or even flirtatious. A gentle touch on the leg in Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) is a reminder of child sexual abuse. Moreover, touch can be unethical and lack mutuality. For example we might ask questions about the Geek’s continual attempts to kiss Samantha in Sixteen Candles (1984) as well as touching the drunk and unconscious Caroline, or, more recently, a boy tapping Elle on the bottom in The Kissing Booth (2018). At the same time, while there might be differences in experience (e.g. with regard to gender, age, class, race, and popularity), in contrast to some of the relationships we have considered in this book, power can take a different form in teen film and might be perceived as ‘play “among equals”’ (Fleming 2015, 24). In this way teen films are an ideal media to consider the ways in which apparently ‘harmless’ touching can be considered flirtatious and fun for one but invasive and harming for the other, so bringing an ethical dimension to the politics of flirting. Hollywood films are ambivalent, ambiguous, designed to appeal to the widest audience possible and designed to better serve ‘Hollywood’s commercial interests’ (Maltby 2003, 305). Similarly, Thomas Elsaesser suggests that Hollywood ‘strategies of audience-engagement can all be accommodated under a general policy of “access for all”’ where this ‘aims at a textually coherent ambiguity, … extending interpretation while retaining control over the codes that make interpretation possible’ (2011, 248).

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Recognising this ambiguity and the multiple meanings and interpretations that might be perceived can put in question our interactions more generally and highlight the difficulties/intransigence/uncertainty of communication. In analysing teen film in this way, it is valuable to recognise the ‘multiple meanings’ that films can hold with variations in interpretations ‘not only for different audience members but also for the same user/consumer at different ages, in different spaces or with different companions’ (Albury 2013, S41). Similarly flirting is understood as ambiguous and uncertain and, as we have considered, it can be this element that creates the interest of flirtation and makes it confusing. Indeed, we argue that there are analogies between the ambiguity of film and flirting, as interactions, including glances, must be interpreted (Höcker 2015, 52). Paper Towns (2015) opens with the glance, the-boy-meets-girl moment in which Quentin describes Margo Roth Spiegelman as his miracle: we watch as a young boy playing with a basketball in his driveway looks up as a car pulls up outside the suburban house across the street. Shots that slowly move closer to the young boy interchange with shots of a young Margo, shown in slow motion as she exits, walks to the back of the van, and squints, looking across the street and presumably seeing Quentin before turning and walking into the house. In voiceover, he explains, ‘from the moment I saw her I was madly, hopelessly in love’. Margo’s response is not to smile; she does not avert her eyes. Indeed, the premise of this film is miscommunication. After Quentin assists Margo to seek revenge having found out that her boyfriend was having sex with her friend, their flirtatious evening and slow dance to ‘Lady in Red’ looking over the twinkling lights of the city is read differently by each character. While watching Margo during this conversation we might perceive that she receives a compliment from Quentin uncertainly—she closes her eyes, inhales, rolls her eyes, licks her lips, and shakes her head slightly before responding—other moments, such as a tight hug, a grab of the shirt, a comment that things might be different tomorrow, are interpreted by Quentin with joy. That is, acts which might be read as part of their long-term friendship are read in relation to his love for her. But friends also impact his interpretation. Not only is one incredulous that he did not ‘hook up’ with her, but when Margo disappears the next day (something she is known to do) the clues she leaves him are interpreted by Quentin and his friends as an invitation. Although it is noted that she always leaves clues for her sister to let her know her she is okay, these young people interpret this act as a message: as her best friend comments, ‘you were with her that night, her last night, it must mean

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something’. The film hinges on Quentin’s mis-reading of her words and actions, as more than flirtation, an assumption which is shown to be mistaken. While the film ends happily with Quentin dancing with his friends at his prom, the film raises question about the less-than-straightforward ways that characters communicate, perceive, and engage with others, the role of romance scripting in these relationships, and the role of interpretation in our encounters. What flirtation means or what it will lead to is uncertain. The possibilities of intimacy can be observed in these sometimes fleeting moments which provide us with an opportunity to think about how to take care of ourselves and other people. We might identify with some moments more than others, but such moments can allow us to recognise some of the ways that sexual intimacy can be complex and confusing. In what follows we consider the ways Love, Simon and All the Boys consider themes of boundaries, consent, negotiation, and performance as well as the implications of flirting that reach beyond these protagonists.

Love, Simon: Tensions and Boundaries Love, Simon follows Simon and his friends through their final year of high school. Describing himself in the film opening as having ‘a perfectly, totally normal life’, he nonetheless notes, gazing through his bedroom window at the buff lawnmower man across the street, that he has ‘one huge arse secret’. That is, Love, Simon starts by fixing the glance/gaze, this convention of teen film on another boy. Simon’s navigation of high school is altered when another student, with the pseudonym ‘Blue’, reveals he is gay on the school’s gossip blog ‘Creek Secrets’. Quickly setting up his own Gmail account to communicate anonymously with this student, Simon starts a correspondence that soon becomes flirtatious, is highly anticipated, and is undertaken entirely online via email. The day is long as Simon waits for the first response, compulsively checking his phone—as he exits the shower, in the school bathrooms, at lunch—and this waiting for the first response builds anticipation. After he receives the first email their flirtation progresses quickly and their communication speeds up. For Georg Simmel, writing in the early twentieth century, flirtation is the ‘movement between having and not-having’ (Simmel 1984, 135). And we can consider the importance of tension and uncertainty to flirtation and the film narrative more generally.

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Not knowing the identity of the correspondent is a central tension in Love, Simon. As they share information about themselves, Simon tries to guess who this might be. Their written conversations are portrayed through a combination of words on the screen, narrated emails and re-­ enactments, intensified through cutting, cross-fades, montages, and the ‘Simon and Blue’ music theme, a synth-heavy pop tune that plays whenever they communicate. But their conversations are intersected with Simon’s glances with people that Blue might be: Game of Thrones fans and the blonde pianist working on the play Cabaret. We might consider these elements as montage, but also recognise ‘music video aesthetics’, elements which provide an added ‘intensity to situations’ making them fun and significant (Colling 2017, 117). Together these elements convey excitement and anticipation despite the everydayness of an email exchange. After an email comment about Halloween Oreos, and a chance encounter with Bram who notices the Oreo biscuits in Simon’s pocket and mentions they are his favourite, Simon comes to believe that Bram might be the person he has been communicating with. During a test, Simon continually looks at Bram, seated towards the front of the classroom and in a blue tinted shot, imagines Blue writing an email we assume he received: Bram types on his laptop, eats Oreos, and looks directly at the camera as he asks, ‘is it weird that I have no idea what you look like, but I can’t stop thinking about kissing you?’ Broken out of his reverie by the teacher telling Simon to keep his eyes on his test, Bram turns and looks at Simon, smiling slightly. Such moments suggest mutuality in their shared glance and plays with this idea: it might be Bram. While Simon and Blue only talk via email, their exchange creates ‘an intimate culture of connectivity’; this communication ‘promot[ing] feelings of intimacy and closeness’ (Albury 2018, 10) between not only the characters, but us as viewers. As this flirtation is getting started, however, Martin, another student at the school, finds the emails sent between the pair on a school computer and blackmails Simon. He threatens to disclose the emails if Simon doesn’t help him talk and hang out with Abby, one of Simon’s friends. While Simon initially encourages Blue to share their identities, wanting to meet him, he agrees to help Martin after Blue states in an email, ‘I’m just not ready for my whole world to change’ and, watching his family play happily in his golden-lit house, Simon responds that he understands. Coming out is signalled in this film as possible, but not simple: although clearly capable of dealing with the taunts of his peers, the experience of the ‘out’ kid at school, Ethan, establishes from early in the film that prejudice remains in

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this space. Indeed, not sharing identities and maintaining anonymity is a form of safety. Their flirtation has a sense of negotiation, of presenting boundaries and engaging with them: Simon suggests they should meet, and that is refused, while maintaining the possibility of flirtation. Just because they don’t want this flirtation to go beyond the internet doesn’t mean that it cannot continue. Simon conveys care for himself and this person he is flirting with, and in their flirtatious online encounter, they learn about each other. In this way, the digital is a source of both pleasure and difficulty. Indeed, we might question to what extent homosexuality here is ‘framed through responsibility’ (Hemmings 2018, 967). Flirting in Love, Simon is represented as exceedingly long-drawn-out, ‘safe’, a ‘getting to know you’ that may be considered as a heteronormativisation of dating. In contrast to older teen film representations of masculinity in the 1980s and 1990s in which virginity loss or sex is a primary focus, in Love, Simon, sexual engagement is not an ostensible goal and in this respect the film might be seen alongside those films that eschew sex altogether for gay men, representing a non-sexuality (Cover 2000). Does the portrayal of flirting (excluding sex) enable the presence of this representation of queer teen relating in the current political environment? At the same time we can see this flirting as a tactic of safety, made even more safe (and difficult) by occurring online. Discussing the use of dating websites and hook-up apps by same-sex-­ attracted young people, Kath Albury and Paul Byron (2016) note the methods used by young people to negotiate safety and ‘risk’ where ‘“risk” was not framed by HIV or sexual health but discussed with reference to unwanted sexual contact or sexual harassment, the risk of outing in potentially unsafe settings … or risks of deceptions by “time-wasters” … or sexual predators’ (3). In Love, Simon, email as a form of digital interaction negotiates safety and risk. Their anonymous online flirtation provides a space to avoid or manage exposure, but also to manage the risk that comes with any relationship: ‘personal rejection’ (Mortensen 2017, 583) and embarrassment (Punyanunt-Carter and Wagner 2018, 229). At the same time, Martin acts unethically in screenshotting their conversation. We might also consider Phillips’ comments that ‘in flirtation one does not take risks, one only sustains their possibility’ (1994, xxi) and thus this risk may be perceived as ‘nourishing … the excitement of possibility’ (Mortensen 2017, 583, emphasis in original). Joy and pleasure is explored through interaction online but also spills over into offline interactions, collapsing the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ with ‘mobile digital

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technology devices and networks … dissolving the virtual/real digital/ material binaries’ (Renold and Ringrose 2017, 1068) and this possibility might be found in an exchange between Bram and Simon at a Halloween party. Bram removes Simon’s glasses before they play a drinking game, and on winning shots share a handshake, their interactions assisting us to construct this as possibility. Such possibility seems dashed when Simon sees Bram kissing a girl but is reopened when once home Simon emails Blue and accidentally signs off with ‘love’. Phillips writes, ‘flirtation does not make a virtue of instability, but a pleasure. It eroticizes the contingency of our lives by turning doubt—or ambiguity—into suspense’ (1994, xxiii). Within this film, Simon flirts with Blue, but also with who this person might be. Although by the conventions of teen film we might assume he will end up with someone, who that someone might be is deferred throughout the film. In contrast to films where the love interest is established in the opening of the film, here this is left to the end. Instead, we see Simon interact with three boys: Bram, a guy from the Waffle House, and the blonde pianist from Cabaret who he imagines kissing under the mistletoe at Christmas. As viewers we also experience suspense and doubt. Kaveney suggests teen films are in part defined by ‘a free-floating atmosphere of sexual chemistry’ (2006, 8), a space in which ‘anyone can potentially be paired with anyone else’ (Driscoll 2011, 75). The uncertainty of the correspondent’s identity, combined with the blackmail, provides the primary tension in the film. Flirting is all about possibility: we don’t know what’s going to happen when we flirt, how the other person will respond, and this is something we have to learn to negotiate. Indeed, here flirting is tied to resilience, as Simon continues to ask who this person might be. In this way, flirting works to produce narrative tension, and this uncertainty is designed to provide excitement and interest for viewers. We can compare Simon’s flirtation with Blue with Martin’s flirtation towards Abby. Thinking about an ethics of care, in blackmailing Simon, Martin places his own desire—the desire to date Abby—over care and consideration for others (Abby and Simon at the very least). Martin is clearly into Abby, but Abby is clearly not interested in Martin. Indeed, at first, we might question whether Martin’s actions are flirtation, given that generally, to flirt, ‘someone must always be flirting back’ (Stone 2015, 62). Here Abby provides little response to Martin’s overtures. Early in the film, Martin walks up to Abby and Simon at the lockers and attempts to initiate conversation. Abby smiles briefly at him, tight lipped, before returning to the task of emptying her locker into her bag. Simon greets

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him, but Martin focuses on Abby. The shot frames them, Abby with her back to Martin, and prompted she responds to Martin’s ‘Hi Abby’ with little enthusiasm. Martin continues talking, telling her the history of Cabaret, the play they are rehearsing. The school bell goes and Abby smiles, briefly responding, ‘that’s awesome, I have homeroom’, before walking quickly away. It is clear that she is uninterested, and yet he comments, ‘I think she found that interesting’. While Abby smiles in politeness, her behaviour here might be compared to her openness with others. Indeed, while she smiles and curtseys at a comment on her Halloween costume from Nick, at Martin’s comment ‘Abby, Wonder Woman’, she uncomfortably pulls on her short shorts to try to make them longer. There is a value in being aware of body language when one is flirting and while this is possibly easier to recognise in film, Carmody proposes that ‘one way to enhance the quality of consent negotiations and mutual enjoyment is to increase women’s and men’s skills in giving and receiving nonverbal gestures and signals’ (2015, 57) with ‘nonverbal communication … open to being read inaccurately, ignored, or misinterpreted’ (56). Abby’s dislike/ disinterest towards Martin might seem obvious: as viewers, we are not encouraged to like Martin. And yet, in accordance with a history of teen film he is nonetheless somewhat redeemed, complicating this representation. Following another threat from Martin, Simon invites him and Abby to Waffle House to rehearse lines. Martin asks about Abby’s reasons for moving to the town and her answer is defensive, Martin listens and then makes a public overture. Telling her ‘you deserve a goddamn superhero’, he insists she repeat the statement, and then standing on his chair in the restaurant states, ‘I won’t stop until you say it’. Her response, ‘no’, is unheard and under pressure she joins in, states the words, increasing in confidence, smiles, then looks around and sits down, asking him, ‘please sit down’. She seems embarrassed but also pleased, and driving home with Simon she comments, ‘honestly, Martin used to annoy the crap out of me, but he’s actually kind of a cool person’. We might think here about ideas of persistence and pestering in teen film and everyday forms of consent. Indeed, we might consider whether Abby’s engagement with Martin here reinforces the idea that women are encouraged to put up with such behaviour rather than questioning it. A pestering person coming to be seen more sympathetically is common in teen film and it is useful to consider issues of consent and boundaries here. The ‘consent culture movement’ considers consent beyond sex, noting that it ‘operat[es] within wider cultures’ and beyond ‘freely choosing

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i­ndividuals’ (Barker et  al. 2018, 197). For example Barker, Gill, and Harvey note that people ordinarily use responses other than ‘no’ ‘to sound less rejecting in adherence to cultural conversational conventions’ (2018, 194; Carmody 2015, 46) and we might question what it would mean to think here about ‘affirmative’ or ‘enthusiastic consent’ (Barker et al. 2018, 195), a form of consent which highlights ‘a responsibility to engage in a process of dialogue and negotiation that includes mutual agreement and clearly articulated statements of consent’ (Hasinoff 2016, 60). In understanding a consent culture, Barker, Gill, and Harvey argue for recognising the cultural circumstances in which we interact with others (and have sex) and they particularly note the importance of considering ‘consent and communication … as ongoing, relational negotiation’ (2018, 200). In this scene we have a refusal of consent and yet Martin overrides this as flirtation. Of course, different things will be acceptable in different situations, but persistence to get the girl and romantic gestures are a large part of teen film (e.g. Say Anything; 10 Things I Hate About You; Sixteen Candles) and lead to questions about overstepping boundaries and thinking about our culture more broadly. For example, is it always girls who are pursued like this (and on this we might think about Lara Jean’s behaviour in All the Boys)? Does it contribute to a no means yes culture? At the Homecoming Game, Martin interrupts the national anthem dressed as a mascot bear, and declares his love for Abby in front of the large crowd. Considering filmic public displays of affection in film (such as standing outside her house with a boom box in Say Anything 1989) where overstepping boundaries seem acceptable, Anne Barnhill asks why we find representations ‘charming’ (2010, 91). Barnhill notes the gendered scripts and ‘retrograde romantic notions’ that impact this understanding and make ‘it romantic and fitting for the man to violate the woman’s boundaries, despite her protests’ (91). She argues that these characters ‘are acting like boundaries don’t exist, in the hope that the boundaries will cease to exist’, that is, ‘they’re faking it till they make it’ (92) and suggests that in some circumstances this can be appropriate. Barnhill sets out a series of ‘rules’ including that the person must not be harmed; although she may be ‘a little embarrassed or annoyed’, the treatment may only imply ‘a somewhat closer relationship’, the person pushing boundaries ‘must genuinely want to be in the closer relationship (97) and this must be a relationship that ‘the other person would plausibly want to have’ (98). To return to our discussion in Chap. 3, it might be that Martin is attempting to simulate being ‘in love’ in order to be in love here, a practice that, as we will see, is far more successful in All the Boys. And yet, considering Martin’s

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display, it is clear that this behaviour is disproportionate to their relationship. We might consider the ways that Martin is ‘self-deceived’ (99) or fails to understand Abby. At Waffle House, what might Abby have liked here? What elements made her uncomfortable? What did she say no to? Could reflection and discussion with Abby assist here? Martin clearly prioritises his own wants over others in his engagement with Abby and Simon. But this is not just a problem of one person. It reflects a history of film, behaviours, and social structures which Dubravka Zarkov and Kathy Davis note ‘allow men—be they ‘powerful’ or not—to treat women as their sex objects’ (2018, 6). While this is not necessarily an extreme of harassment, we might see it as part of these broader issues. How can we recognise this and make space for change? Simon’s experience following Martin’s exposure, outing Simon to divert attention from himself after the Homecoming Game incident, is portrayed with loneliness, anger, and frustration. Friends, while initially attempting to get in contact with him via phone and text, realise he had been lying to them and avoid him, as does his father, embarrassed at a life of heteronormative jokes. At school at lunch, other boys perform a suggestive dance to suggest Simon and Ethan are having sex and while one teacher is highly supportive, the Vice Principal nonetheless continues the assumption that as the two gay boys in the school they must be dating. That is, the film conveys some of the complexities of coming out in a homophobic school environment, with discrimination and acceptance. As life settles and Simon makes up with his best friend and talks to his parents, Simon makes a public declaration of love on the Creek Secrets blog, read by his peers, teachers, and family in shots that echo films such as Easy A and Never Been Kissed, connecting the characters through this concluding story. He invites Blue to meet him at the winter fair, proclaiming, ‘everyone deserves a great love story’. As he sits alone riding the Ferris wheel, a reference to Blue’s original Creek Secret post, a crowd gathers to cheer and at the last moment Bram/Blue joins him and they kiss. In considering flirting pedagogies and an ethics of care, we might consider Simon and Blue and Abby and Martin’s engagements alongside each other. Both Martin and Simon’s declarations are public and yet, given Simon does not know who this person is, Blue must come to him. Throughout the film, Simon has listened to Blue’s requests: while Simon suggests, ‘maybe we should ride this bravery train together’ and ‘I’m dying to know who you are’, Blue comments that while he likes him, ‘I’m sorry, I’m just not ready for us to know each other’s identities’. In this

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post, Simon encourages him to join him, at the same time as he notes ‘no pressure to show up, but I hope you do’. While the conventions of teen film suggest it will all be okay, we share the film’s suspense watching him sitting alone as the Ferris wheel turns, flirting with the possibility of failure. While in some ways everyday and banal, in others, Simon and Blue’s email discussion provides space for an awareness of the other person, for learning and listening and paying attention to other people’s wants and needs—there is an ethics of care in the way they relate to and learn about each other, albeit complicated by circumstance. This flirtatious emailing communicates information and as viewers we see the potential of uncertainty and difficulties waiting for responses. Of course, this can idealise the role of online communication in relationships—not everyone is going to listen attentively, pestering is still possible, and these moments in film might be read by other people in different ways—but in considering flirting, it might be useful to consider the possibility of connection and responsiveness or awareness of the other person, a connection which is rarely seen between Abby and Martin. More broadly, it is useful to think about how this film fits within wider social structures and conventions of teen films. Considering masculinity, Zarkov and Davis question, ‘what kind of masculinities are offered as ideals to boys and young men, and how to make them not just aware that sexual harassment is simply unacceptable, but also to recognize it and act in the situations in which they see other men do it’ (2018, 7). There are questions to be raised around Martin’s behaviour, but also the way he implicates Simon, questions that are also explored by his friends. Discussing #MeToo, Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad critique the focus on individual perpetrators in the entertainment industry, commenting that this ‘has been mostly divorced from critical discussion of the huge role played by films (the commodity produced and distributed by this capitalist industry) in naturalizing and normalizing violence against women’ (2018, 1320). While this film might provide a space for thinking through relationships, what other questions might we raise here with regard to systemic oppression?

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: Fantasy and Performance While Love, Simon can encourage us to think about boundaries and the implications of acts, All the Boys is interesting for thinking about negotiation and performance. Lara Jean is a romantic, a fan of romance novels

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and teen film such as Sixteen Candles. Arguably, she is well aware of the conventions of teen film and is shown to critique aspects of the texts. At the same time, the film begins with a fantasised scene in a field, the lead up to a ‘forbidden kiss’ with her older sister Margo’s boyfriend (and her former best friend) Josh. Having written a secret love letter to each of her crushes over the years, those crushes ‘so intense that I don’t know what else to do’, drama ensues when Margo leaves for college (dumping Josh before she goes) and her younger sister Kitty, worried at Lara Jean’s lack of a social life, mails the secret letters to her crushes. These letters are an interesting analogue shift, reminiscent of 1980s teen films and dropped notes (Sixteen Candles), and a contrast in an environment in which young women are often cautioned regarding their digital entanglements. Further, it is clear here that it is not the production of the material (the letters) that is the issue, but that someone has worked to share them against the wishes of their creator. In her private fantasies and letters, Lara Jean has flirted with the possibility of encounters with these boys, but no more and yet, these fantasies become public, shared with the objects of her affection. As Paul Fleming writes, ‘flirtation … always flirts with the real’ (2015, 28). For Lara Jean there is a conflict between reality and her fantasised world, and here they brush up against each other. Lara Jean flirts with the idea of loving her friend who dated her sister: she insists that he is Margo’s, and yet, she imagines talking to him in her bedroom. In this way, the film flirts with a relationship with Josh as a possibility. At the same time, this possibility is constrained by her own set of ethics: she continually flirts with what she can’t have. Lara Jean first learns the letters have been sent out when she is interrupted at school by Peter who comments, ‘I appreciate it, but it’s never going to happen’. Peter is described by Lara Jean as a boy she had a crush on in grade seven. While she notes that at a grade-seven party her former best friend Gen and Peter ‘only wanted to kiss each other’, in a flashback we watch Peter ignore her hesitance when she gets him in spin-the-bottle and leans across the circle to kiss her briefly as Gen is shown affronted in the background. At first, Lara Jean appears unclear as to the point of Peter’s conversation, asking ‘I’m sorry what?’ He continues, ‘from what I remember of that kiss, I mean it was hot, you know, for being seventh grade, look I think it’s really cool that you think I have…’ As he speaks, the shot follows Lara Jean’s look to his hand where he holds a letter. A tight closeup on Lara Jean’s face is followed by one of the letter. She stands open mouthed and Peter keeps talking as the shots switch between the

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letter and her face, becoming blurry before the shot spins and she faints. These point-of-view shots establish her panic and align us with her subjectivity. While she lies in a faint on the track, the shot cross-fades into the image of spin-the-bottle and the memory of her kiss with Peter. Returning to consciousness, she initially insists she is fine, but then sees Josh walking towards her and the letter he holds in his hand in increasing closeups. Images of her life and friendship with Josh and her sister flash and classical music plays with increasing intensity. She states, ‘oh my god’, before grabbing Peter’s neck, pushing him onto the running track and kissing him: Peter lies arms outstretched on the track; Josh stops shocked; students run past around them as they kiss; a teacher calls ‘hey’ and thanking Peter, Lara Jean runs past Josh and away. This kiss is public and follows Peter’s refusal of her advance in the letter. In some ways it might be perceived as a persistent, pestering flirtation, ignoring his comments. It is presumptive, a ruse to distract Josh, and suggests a failure to hear his earlier refusal, as he comments when he later finds her to talk at a café. They sit far apart at a counter, the full wide screen format drawn upon to separate them. She looks ahead while he looks at her explaining, ‘I just want to be super clear, I’m flattered, I am, but, Gen and I like just broke up’. Lara Jean responds, ‘Are you trying to reject me?’ She pulls a face and he replies, ‘Well yeah, cause it didn’t really seem like it stuck, back the first time?’ He points behind him. While Lara Jean explains ‘I’m not trying to date you’, he comments, ‘yeah, but your mouth is saying something, but then your mouth said something completely different’. At this, she informs him this was a ruse ‘to make it look like I liked you so somebody else wouldn’t think that I like them’. When she won’t tell him who, he jokingly threatens to tell the school about the love letter and she reveals that he did not receive the only one. At her explanation that she wrote five love letters, he questions, ‘five love letters? … Damn Covey, you’re a player, who else did you write letters to?’ He leans towards her and she replies, ‘if I tell you, will you leave me alone?’ His answer is almost a question, ‘maybe?’ Their conversation is playful, awkward, uncomfortable but upfront, and as he drops her home, she thanks him for the ride and apologises ‘about the whole me jumping you thing’. He smiles, ‘could have been worse, right?’ before following her to her door and proposing, ‘what if we let people think that we’re together’, noting this will make Gen jealous and distract Josh. While Lara Jean’s unsolicited kiss can be seen as pestering and presumptive, Peter’s acceptance of this might be attributed to, and reiterate, gendered scripts which

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expect girls to refuse sex, and boys to desire it. The relationship between Lara Jean and Peter becomes a primary tension of the film as they date and flirt with each other (and others), publicly performing this relationship which leaves in question what is real and imagined. Lara Jean agrees to Peter’s proposal in public. She boldly approaches him on the oval during La Crosse practice and states, ‘hey Kavinsky’, let’s do this.’ Removing his helmet he smiles and kisses her in front of his team mates. Surprised, reeling, she responds, ‘I’m going to trig, have a nice day, carry on’. While this relationship is ‘fake’, it has a physical effect and these kisses become a point of negotiation. Barker, Gill, and Harvey write ‘that consent can easily become increasingly constrained in the context of relationships where people feel uncomfortable saying “no” to something they’ve said “yes” to in the past’ (2018, 199). Upon deciding to perform this relationship, Lara Jean and Peter negotiate what it might look like. While he initially seems uncertain at her insistence that they write up a contract commenting, ‘you really know how to zap the fun out of a situation’, she insists, noting ‘it’s important to know where you stand on certain issues’ and immediately prohibits kissing. He looks shocked and his mouth opens, ‘are you crazy? Who’s going to believe that we’re in a relationship if I’m not allowed to kiss you?’ and emphasises that she kissed him first. Her response is to note, ‘I don’t want all my firsts to be fake’ and insist that ‘it’s non-negotiable’. He sighs, accepts, and stands up, commenting, ‘but we need to figure something out, because people are going to get very suspicious if I’m not allowed to touch you’. In this way, they outline and recognise social expectations and scripts of teenage relationships, and her compromise references mediated forms of intimacy, suggesting he can put his hand in her back pocket because that’s what happens in the opening shot in Sixteen Candles. When she suggests another rule is that no one can know, he enthusiastically insists she watches Fight Club. Their conversation is excited as they trade cultural references and slight jibes. She asks, ‘anything else?’ and quietly he asks, ‘I could, um, I could write you notes?’ he nods, ‘everyday?’ She looks at him and smiles ‘you’d do that?’ Such moments play with this flirtation: the moment seems sweet, authentic, and yet, his response is to note that Gen will be ‘pissed’ because she always asked him to write her notes and he never did. Lara Jean looks at him open mouthed, ‘how romantic?’ They negotiate other elements, such as parties, lifts to school, and attending the ski trip together, and the music starts as they sign the contract and shake hands. In this way, questions are raised as to what counts in a public ‘teen’ relationship: touch,

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and, later, phone backgrounds and the need to post on social media. But we also might think about what this negotiation opens up. Once kissing is off the table, what other actions might convey flirtation and affection within the normative space of the school? And how are they themselves normative and correspond to the past? As a performance, visibility is a significant part of this relationship. In teen film, Colling suggests ‘visibility, manifest as popularity and celebrity, is where fun is found’ (2017, 47). Here this visibility is localised, focused on the school. But Colling argues such visibility is linked to celebrity and glamour, a public intimacy in which characters are ‘available and unbiddable at once’ (52). In All the Boys, the ‘catwalk moment’ in which ‘girls achieve visibility by means congruent with notions of ‘feminine’ (62) occurs as Lara Jean and Peter walk into lunch. The upbeat song ‘Boyfriend (Repeat)’ by Confidence Man plays. People watch in slow motion as Lara Jean comments in voiceover that ‘I was used to being invisible but now people were looking at me, talking about me’. Colling notes that slow motion provides ‘the opportunity to dwell on the moment’ and here it is used as ‘a lingering look’ (63). This is combined with a body tilt, from the backs of their heads as they walk along, down to his hand in her pocket. Indeed, it is perhaps interesting that while in Sixteen Candles they both have their hands in each other’s pockets, here it is his in hers. The slow motion ends as he spins her around. The shot cuts to Gen, clearly watching, and the smile fades from her face; as their faces close, Peter hands Lara Jean a note and whispers ‘good job’ in her ear. While such scenes are often ‘double coded’ presenting glamour and undermining it through action (such as a fall), this feminine performance is queried in voiceover in which Lara Jean critiques how little she has done to earn this praise. As Lara Jean walks back through the hall alone, she comments, ‘it’s weird, and somewhat off putting to be congratulated for doing no more than accepting a note and having an ass pocket for someone to stick their hand into, but I guess that’s where my life has taken me.’ Colling suggests such moments provide ‘feelings of potential and promise at the same time, as ‘it restricts the girl figure to specific (institutional, domestic or commercial) spaces’ (70) with little power. Here Lara Jean appears to allude to this contradiction, clearly uncomfortable as she discusses the relationship with best friend Chris and acknowledges that she hasn’t yet told her sister. But we might also consider such scenes as a flirtation with visibility. Discussing Lauren Berlant and ‘the intimate public of girlhood’, Colling suggests that ‘being somebody in [teen film worlds] always involves the girl body and its

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visibility at the centre’ (116). While visibility holds a place here, the film seems to recognise that Lara Jean is already visible, and that her behaviours, fantasies, and relationships have an impact on others. Indeed, visibility is shown to be entangled in a range of forms. Arriving at a party Peter and Lara Jean take photographs, with Peter insisting Lara Jean include a photo of him as her phone background, just as he puts a photo of her as his. Later Peter takes selfies of them as they sit together on a couch. After, they go to a café where they talk about relationships and loss and he asks, ‘why haven’t you ever had a boyfriend’, and Lara Jean tentatively explains that while she enjoys the fantasy of romance, she has a fear of ‘real’ relationships, commenting ‘the more people that you let into your life, … the more that can just walk right out’. After a sensitive conversation, he comments, ‘you say that you’re scared of commitment and relationships, but you don’t seem to be afraid to be with me’. Her response is that there is no reason to be ‘because we’re just pretending’. His reply is almost sarcastic, commenting on her honesty, upset and Lara Jean seems unsure at his reaction, asking if he is okay. Arriving home, she receives a notification and checks her phone to find a selfie taken by Peter on his Instagram: he holds the phone sticking out his tongue and she kisses his cheek. The comment reads ‘Me and BAE’, a term often used to suggest ‘before anyone else’ and she smiles, looks at image, bites her lip, and then types ‘BAE? YOU ARE SUCH A DORK’. She holds the phone against her chest and the camera slowly moves towards her before another notification: his response is a ‘kiss’ emoji. She smiles looking at her phone. Watching, we’re aware of the maybe, the perhaps, the uncertainty and negotiation of this relationship—his disappointment, her dismissal, as well as her pleasure. In teen courtship these practices of commenting indicate romantic interest (Albury 2018, 2) and here, the line between performance and reality is constantly placed in question. As Daniel Hoffman-­ Schwartz notes, the uncertain line between the spectator in the tableau of flirtation and the spectator of the tableau of flirtation is in fact part of what is at stake in ­flirtation itself. We never know who really is watching us flirt or who is virtually flirting with another by watching us being flirted with; flirtation merges with surveillance. (2015, 34, emphasis in original)

Here flirtation occurs both online and offline: at the party, at the café, and in her bedroom. Larissa Hjorth notes that ‘mobile media can be con-

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sidered as part of shifts in conceptualizing and practicing intimacy as no longer a “private” activity but a pivotal component of public sphere performativity’ (2011, 41); that is, this relationship is premised on their relationships with others—an acknowledgement is made that they flirt with others by flirting with each other. Flirtation is visible and public, watched by Gen and Josh, but also by friends and family. Indeed, to return to the concept of ethical relating and care for the self and others, here there are elements of care, they have conversations about their lives and connections, Lara Jean tries to look after her sister Margo, but at the same time, this relationship is intended to make others jealous. There is also a lot not said in these moments. This Instagram exchange directly follows in-person conversations, with the possibility that online interactions can provide a space to say things that were more difficult in person, but which remain ambiguous—is this real or part of the performance? But such surveillance also restricts what they might do, as well as how others might perceive their behaviour. Just as on reality television contestants may act as if they are in love with hopes that this will become real, here the performance of love produces it. As they discuss their relationship and its future, her questioning his relationship with Gen, and him questioning why she never posts about them on social media, she narrates, ‘how do you tell your fake boyfriend you can’t go skiing with him because you’re starting to have real feelings?’ What is fake and real, performed, is placed in question throughout the film. Indeed, it might be said that the film suggests all flirting is performance, whether real or fake: how do we know what is real? In agreeing that this relationship is a performance, they appear to imply a premise of flirtation: ‘We are both (just) flirting here’ (Fleming 2015, 24). And yet, Lauren Stone suggests that for flirtation to be titillating … there is a contingency that is also made visible. If flirtation is to be any fun at all the parties involved cannot mutually and explicitly agree in advance that this will be an ‘act’; rather they revel in the open futurity. Indeed one never knows quite what the other wants or intends. (2015, 63)

While an agreement is made to perform, in the space of the teen film this relationship is not certain. In the play of potential relationships as viewers, we may be unsure whether it is Peter or Josh who is the love interest. Indeed, binaries are placed in question: Does she like Peter? Does he

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like her? And how does this effect the people around them? Indeed, we might consider the depiction of Instagram here ‘as a media where content sharing is persistent—that is, the app allows the users to organize, use, document and remember in a persistent manner’ (Kofoed and Larsen 2016, section 3). In utilising Instagram, Peter perhaps attempts to give the relationship authority. While Lara Jean and Peter do not share a conventional glance, it is discussion of the glance that leads to their first ‘real’ kiss. After a conversation with her friend Lucas about her faked relationship with Peter, Lucas tells her ‘I just know that home boy likes you, I mean, I can tell by the way he looks at you. … Like you’re a sexy little Rubik cube, he can’t really figure you out, but he seems to have a lot of fun trying.’ A turning point in the film, Lara Jean finds Peter in a hot tub and after suggestions that he has feelings towards her she joins him and they kiss. And yet, just as it seems their relationship has become ‘real’, a conversation with Gen the next day leads to a breakup, and a video is uploaded to Instagram implying Lara Jean and Peter had sex in the hot tub. While the Instagram-posted video is, with Margo’s help, dealt with minimum fuss, the repercussions link issues of visibility, care, and relating. When Instagram is used to imply Lara Jean had sex with Peter, she is viewed, judged, and exposed, exposure which is not physical nudity but rather emotional through the ambiguous ways an image of them kissing in a hot tub might be read. While on the first day back at school after Christmas break, Lara Jean comments that she will be happy to go back to being invisible, she arrives to find graffiti and a screenshot of their kiss on her locker, and a crowd surrounding it. Prompted by Lara Jean and Chris, Peter announces to the crowd that they didn’t have sex, and Lara Jean confronts Gen who she assumes posted the video. Lara Jean’s discussion with Gen is not clear-cut. While Lara Jean comments that ‘it’s bad enough if a guy were to do this, but the fact that a girl did, it’s despicable’. Gen responds that while she didn’t post the video, ‘I’m glad someone did … because finally everyone’s going to see who you really are’, explaining, ‘Peter, he is not as confident as he pretends to be, I am not as tough as I pretend to be, and you, Lara Jean Covey, you are not as innocent as you pretend to be … cause you kissed the boy that I liked’, referring to the spin-the-bottle kiss in grade seven. While Lara Jean responds, ‘It was spin-the-bottle, you psycho, and it was tongueless’, Gen comments, ‘well it wasn’t tongueless to me’. After Gen leaves, Lara Jean stands alone in the bathroom as though observed from above and in

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voiceover comments ‘I always thought that no one was paying attention to what I was doing, that the only drama in my life was in my head, but, it turns out that I wasn’t as invisible as I thought’. While perhaps a trivial example, the scene indicates thought about relationality and connections to others. Here, the options for Gen seem limited, indeed, in contrast to Lara Jean’s earlier presumption that they are no longer friends due to Gen’s popularity; it raises questions about the lack of communication between them. Colling (2017, 141) notes that recent ‘millennial girl teen films have sometimes combined Cinderella and the “bitch”, or try to redeem the “bitch” character’ with some protagonists, such as Cady in Mean Girls ‘both’. Here we see Gen’s perspective and might question Lara Jean’s position. What impact did this flirtatious game have and how does the positioning of ‘rumor spreading and the silent treatment as feminine’ (Day 2017, 137) restrict the relationship between girls and what they believe might be possible? Moreover, the film complicates an active/ passive binary questioning who might be the ‘bitch’ character in this scenario. While linked to a fight over a boy, this moment perhaps queries ‘the larger social and cultural mechanisms that work to maintain these attitudes about adolescent womanhood’ (Day 2017, 151). The ‘mean’ girl is given space for justifications of behaviours, and questions are perhaps raised about the ethics of working to make someone else jealous. Indeed, the film ends with Lara Jean sharing conversations with Josh, Margo, and Kitty prior to making the decision to pursue a relationship with Peter.

Conclusion What does teen film tell us about the available ways of thinking about flirting and intimacy? Flirting and intimacy are obviously both available and practiced in teen film, with a range of connections established between characters. While these are two examples of flirting in teen film, as a pedagogy of flirting they might raise broader questions for discussion and consideration. What are the trends in relating across teen films? Can considering flirting trends across film alert us to some of the structural conditions that surround gendered relationships and the experiences of people with intersecting identities more generally? How is thinking or acting romantically assumed to produce romantic feelings in film? How are persistent characters conveyed or critiqued? In many ways the endings of these films promote a sense of mononormativity—characters end up coupled—and while the films conclude by

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considering engagements with friends and family, the ‘kiss’ in each suggests that flirtation has led to a committed relationship. And yet, the films play with the pleasure of instability and uncertainty. While as viewers we might know how these films will end, tension is built intentionally in teen film: as Jack Halberstam suggests, critiquing romantic comedies, problems are ‘created, crafted, nurtured, and then quickly discarded as soon as an hour and twenty minutes of fun has been had by all’ (2012, 18). These flirtations act as complications and deviations to a straightforward plot, unpredictable, suspenseful. We started this chapter considering glances and looking and quoted Garland-Thomson: the ‘unethical stare … is looking without recognising’ (2009, 186). What is perhaps interesting about much of the flirting discussed here is that flirting whether online or otherwise in these films provides potential for recognition, for awareness of the other person, for learning and listening and paying attention to other people’s wants and needs. These films suggest that flirting can provide connection, provided the parties are attentive to the other person, going beyond looking to discussion and conversation. As viewers we also flirt with these stories and performances as they unfold. Indeed, we might consider the ways that flirting is a form of visibility where the concept of visibility is highly ambivalent. For Simon and Blue, this flirtation allows them to be heard and seen by each other in romantic, connective, complex, and challenging ways. For Lara Jean, this highlights that perhaps she was never as invisible as she might have thought she was. In both examples, flirting highlights these characters’ connections to those around them, to family and friends, and indicates the complexities of these relationships and entanglements.

References 10 Things I Hate About You. 1999. Directed by Gil Junger. USA: Touchstone Pictures, Mad Chance, Jaret Entertainment. Albury, Kath. 2013. Young People, Media and Sexual Learning: Rethinking Representation. Sex Education 13 (Suppl. 1): S32–S44. ———. 2018. Sexual Expression in Social Media. In The Sage Handbook of Social Media, ed. Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick, and Thomas Poell. London: SAGE Publications. [Electronic Version]. https://doi.org/10.4135/ 9781473984066.n25. Albury, Kath, and Paul Byron. 2016. Safe on My Phone? Same-Sex Attracted Young People’s Negotiations of Intimacy, Visibility, and Risk on Digital Hook-Up Apps. Social Media + Society 2: 1–10.

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Barker, Meg-John, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey. 2018. Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture. Newark: Polity Press. Barnhill, Anne. 2010. Just Pushy Enough. In Dating Philosophy for Everyone: Flirting with Big Ideas, ed. Kristie Lyn Miller and Marlene Clark, 90–100. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Beasley, Chris, and Carol Bacchi. 2005. The Political Limits of ‘Care’ in Re-imagining Interconnection/Community and an Ethical Future. Australian Feminist Studies 20 (46): 49–64. ———. 2007. Envisaging a New Politics for an Ethical Future: Beyond Trust, Care and Generosity—Towards an Ethic of ‘Social Flesh’. Feminist Theory 8: 279–298. ———. 2012. Making Politics Fleshly: The Ethic of Social Flesh. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges, ed. Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley, 99–120. Adelaide, SA: University of Adelaide Press. Buckingham, David, and Sara Bragg. 2004. Young People, Sex and the Media: The Facts of Life? Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Carmody, Moira. 2015. Sex, Ethics, and Young People. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, Kyra. 2017. Affective Sexual Pedagogies in Film and Television. New York: Routledge. Colling, Samantha. 2017. The Aesthetic Pleasures of Girl Teen Film. London: Bloomsbury Academic and Professional. Collins, Austin K. 2018. ‘Love, Simon’: Progress in the Form of Deliberate Banality. TheRinger.com, March 16, 2018. http://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/3/16/17129342/love-simon-film-review-josh-duhamel-nick-robinson-jennifer-garner. Cover, Rob. 2000. First Contact: Queer Theory, Sexual Identity, and ‘Mainstream’ Film. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5 (1): 71–89. Davis, Glyn, and Kay Dickinson. 2004. Introduction. In Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity, ed. Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson, 1–13. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Day, Sara K. 2017. Mean Girls End Up Dead: The Dismal Fate of Teen Queen Bees in Popular Culture. In Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, ed. Julie A.  Chappell and Mallory Young, 135–155. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Driscoll, Catherine. 2011. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Berg. Dyer, Richard. 1982. Don’t Look Now. Screen 23 (3–4): 61–73. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2011. James Cameron’s Avatar: Access for All. New Review of Film and Television Studies 9 (3): 247–264. Fleming, Paul. 2015. The Art of Flirtation: Simmel’s Coquetry Without End. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-­ Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 19–30. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online.

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Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2009. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. 2018. The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo. Sexualities 21 (8): 1313–1324. Halberstam, J. Jack. 2012. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon Press. Hasinoff, A.A. 2016. How to Have Great Sext: Consent Advice in Online Sexting Tips. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13 (1): 58–74. Hemmings, Clare. 2018. Resisting Popular Feminisms: Gender, Sexuality and the Lure of the Modern. Gender, Place & Culture 25 (7): 963–977. Hjorth, Larissa. 2011. Mobile Specters of Intimacy: A Case Study of Women and Mobile Intimacy. In Mobile Communication: Bringing Us Together, or Tearing Us Apart, ed. Rich Ling and Scott W.  Campbell, 37–60. Edison, NJ: Transaction Books. Höcker, Arne. 2015. Playing with Yourself: On The Self-Reference of Flirtation. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 51–60. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Hoffman-Schwartz, Daniel. 2015. Barely Covered Banter: Flirtation in Double Indemnity. In Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, ed. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone, 13–18. New York: Fordham Scholarship Online. Kaveney, Roz. 2006. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars. London: I.B. Tauris. Kofoed, Jette, and Malene Charlotte Larsen. 2016. A Snap of Intimacy: Photo-­ Sharing Practices Among Young People on Social Media. First Monday 21 (11). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i11.6905. Love, Simon. 2018. Directed by Greg Berlanti. USA: Fox 2000 Pictures, New Leaf Literary & Media, Temple Hill Entertainment, Twisted Media. Maltby, Richard. 2003. Hollywood Cinema. London: Blackwell. Mortensen, Kristine Køhler. 2017. Flirting in Online Dating: Giving Empirical Grounds to Flirtatious Implicitness. Discourse Studies 19 (5): 581–597. Paper Towns. 2015. Directed by Jake Schreier. USA: Fox 2000 Pictures, Temple Hill Entertainment. Phillips, Adam. 1994. On Flirtation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Punyanunt-Carter, Narissra M., and Thomas R.  Wagner. 2018. Interpersonal Communication Motives for Flirting Face to Face and Through Texting. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 21 (4): 229–233. Renold, Emma, and Jessica Ringrose. 2017. Selfies, Relfies and Phallic Tagging: Posthuman Part-icipations in Teen Digital Sexuality Assemblages. Educational Philosophy and Theory 49 (11): 1066–1079.

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CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Uncertain Times for Flirting

Abstract  In the current political moment of uncertainty, this chapter concludes the book by thinking particularly about time in regard to flirting as a critical concept. It positions flirting within a political and legislative framework, considers trajectories of success and failure, and the uncertain time that flirting constitutes. The contingency of this historical and political point in time is addressed in the context of the media and cultural framings discussed in this book, and the ways these provide both normative and potentially transformative pedagogies for intimacy as a negotiated form of interpersonal relationality. Keywords  Time • Chrononormativity • Politics • Uncertainty • Public • Private

Timely Considerations In his 1994 book On Flirtation, psychoanalytic theorist Adam Phillips suggests that, among other things, flirting ‘is a way of cultivating wishes, of playing for time. Deferral can make room’ (xix). In concluding our book on flirting and the negotiation of intimacy after #MeToo, we want to consider the idea of time: of the time that flirting takes and gives, of flirting times, and when might it be the right time to flirt, or not. Linking time to wishes, desires, fantasies, or even fancies offers another vector through which we might consider flirting as a liminal event or process that © The Author(s) 2019 A. Bartlett et al., Flirting in the Era of #MeToo, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7_5

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can take the wink of an eye or years of repartee and gestures. It can stretch over lifetimes, twisting its way through intimate lives and loves in unexpected and unpredictable ways. In its association with waiting, flirting potentially values moments which centre the unknown, in which futures are uncertain and remain liminal. Over the summer of 2016, an Australian male politician and a cricketer were called out for making sexual advances during the course of their jobs to professional women in public. Social media responded with outrage about heterosexual male privilege and then about feminism as the ‘anti-flirting movement’. This moment in time instigated the conversations in this book, just prior to the current #MeToo era. Indeed, reflecting on this prior moment we might consider how the time was ripe for public debate and change. A critical approach that brings to the forefront the ways in which flirting upsets the normative and constitutive role of conventional ideas of time in our lives, challenging linear societal expectations of relationships (chrononormativity) (Sharma 2011) can help us make sense not merely of the role of flirting in human engagement but of the unsettled nature of intimacy itself. While flirting might seem an individualised practice even while it is historically specific and culturally constructed, we position it as a highly political form of play. The feminist mantra that the personal is political has inflected critical analysis of gender and we apply it to critical understandings of flirting as straddling both the intimately personal and publicly political spheres. While the #MeToo scandals have, to some extent, ‘called time’ on male behaviour in a heterosexual context, we have drawn attention also to the ways in which new forms of masculinity have perpetuated problematic proprietorial behaviours understood as part of an outmoded form of patriarchal privilege which is unstable and contested. In her work on heterosexuality, political theorist Chris Beasley draws attention to the ways that ‘the normalisation of particular sexualities is viewed as crucial to modern identities and modern citizenship’ as well as ‘implications for social life, citizenship and indeed even state policy’ (2011, 27). State and federal government legislation as well as local institutional policy in Australia exemplify the ways in which particular sexual behaviours are politically regulated, as briefly mentioned in Chap. 2. In interpreting the Australian Sex Discrimination Act (1984) the Australian Human Rights Commission states that ‘Sexual harassment is not interaction, flirtation or friendship which is mutual or consensual’, even though the list of behaviours constituting harassment might at other times and contexts be read as flirting. In thinking about social and cultural change, Beasley argues that

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attention to libidinal bodies is crucial, and can be understood as instrumental in constructing repertoires of everyday practices that contest normalised heterodoxies (2011). The #MeToo movement suggests another destabilising of what might be considered heteronormativity by its extradition of sexual harassment as abnormal. Even though legislation defined such behaviours as illegal over three decades ago, changes in cultural attitudes in this case have lagged behind state policy. As a concept, flirting might offer possibilities for thinking about our social relations in alternative ways. In the tensions it produces and makes visible, contemporary flirting is both provocative and conservative, negotiating an assemblage of shifting values. At a time that seems incredibly uncertain, we might be best placed to understand flirting as a space in which to learn to navigate this uncertainty, to centre the importance of risk and play, and find a way to engage with others that is in the moment, that responds to and endeavours to recognise others. What might it mean to think about flirting as a form we can utilise to practice relating in all its complexity, disconnecting from a preoccupation with sex, and recognising the multiple ways we relate? As we have explored, flirting can be linked with liminality and ambivalence, mixed feelings, and contradictory ideas that are not definite. Indeed, flirting can confuse ideas such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’, questioning what these terms might mean in the context of engaging with others. Both success and failure are intrinsically tied up with simplified norms of linear progress. As Judith Butler and Cornel West have pointed out, any notion of progress is tied up with a notion of its own failure as ‘catastrophe’ (2011, 104). This spectre of failure reminds us that progress is not an automatic and natural unfolding such as from a flirtation to a sexual encounter to a relationship. Rather, what flirting’s liminality shows us is that such narratives of progression are haunted by the ever-­ present possibility of anxieties, stresses, and loss, as the #MeToo experience has demonstrated so emphatically. In this sense, such chrononormative frameworks of temporal progress are always marked by their own grievability, since the catastrophic failure of flirting’s goal is part of its very narrative structure, whether in scandal, in the scripting of reality television, or in the stories told to and about young people in teen film. At the same time, we might consider flirting as a hopeful modality. One which should be engaged in ways which are not overbearing or pestering, but which recognise occasion and circumstance and might be linked to a sense of resilience, elasticity, and recovery that acknowledges difficulties, rejections and which builds upon them for the future. To negotiate

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i­ntimacy in relation to flirtation is to recognise multiple ways of perceiving a moment, and acknowledge these other ways of thinking in responses, to accept or reject advances, and to maintain an awareness of the complexities of all our engagements. Perhaps in polarised times, there is space in flirting for acknowledging these complexities as opening out possibility. Certainly its liminality makes it a very good example of the unknowabilities in interpersonal relations that provide opportunities for the sort of critique that can—in the right conditions—lead to more ethical ways of being, engaging, and belonging. We might also think about the kinds, types, and content of stories about flirting, intimacy, and relationality that are told and heard. The stories we have explored in this book are of a particular moment and are always, of course, filtered through the machinations of representation and remediation whether that be via social media, print media, television, or film. In doing so, they exclude other stories: of diverse feminist discussions and movements, of other times and places, feelings and experiences. As Chelsea Hart and Amanda Gilbertson remind us, ‘racialised and classed discourses are integral to constructions of who is a “grievable” … victim of male violence’ (2018, 1). The contingency of local, national, and global politics are writ large on the intersections of media and the public sphere. Indeed, it is often noted that the relatively tiny numbers of #MeToo scandals even reported in Australia compared to the United States is due to Australia’s strong defamation laws, and lack of a clearly articulated right to free speech (Lavoipierre 2018). At the same time, the use of digital media in the US context can occur in lieu of the difficulty of legal recourse, and contributes to its highly emotive and inflammable facility. Perhaps this partially accounts for the relegation of such events to ‘benign’ instances of flirting rather than more libellous acts. By considering timing, we can also identify moments when flirting is not appropriate. When cricketer Chris Gayle was reprimanded for flirting with a journalist during an interview in 2016, he was clearly shifting the modality of the relationship from a professional to a personal one (Guardian Sport), transgressing professional time. The situation was exacerbated by the sports and media industries which, together, actively authorise masculine prowess alongside a history of excluding women from professional roles. Similarly, the attention turned on the entertainment industry generally and Hollywood specifically through the Harvey Weinstein scandal demonstrates the ways flirting is abused at a professional level when it is commonly understood as a personal relation. When men and boys

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a­ rticulate fear of flirting due to the repercussions of #MeToo, the cultural confusion around whether flirting is okay might be considered through not only the cultural times—what Phillips would call our contingency— but also the timing. The complicating factor in these entertainment industry scandals is that their professional work often pivots on acting risky, romantic, transgressive, and also criminal relationships for the stage and screen. If film and television and theatres represent cultural anxieties played out before us, then they also shape the scope of behaviours possible. As we argued in Chap. 3, the kinds of intimacies engendered by screening and scripting such relations are generative and unpredictable, but being able to discriminate between personal and professional times still seems pivotal to the line between playful flirting and professional misbehaviour. We hasten to add that understanding flirting as personal does not mean it is not political as the corpus of feminist writing based on the politics of the personal demonstrates. Indeed to bring critical analysis to a topic like flirting relies on its political relations to power, agency, cultural values, and social change. The significance of flirting to contemporary relationality is discussed across the previous three chapters. In our exploration of scandal in Chap. 2, we considered how flirting’s liminality produces a responsive #MeToo movement which presents a critical anger against the mis-use of that liminality by men in powerful positions for the benefit of sexual gratification. Here, competing norms of relationality in workplaces both evoke and respond to scandal in ways which allow us to see how flirting is a personal relationship that is in transition at this particular time. In Chap. 3, the regulation of scripts that govern what is seen in reality television responds to flirting’s uncertainties by presenting techniques of intimacy that provide a pedagogy of pacing relationality in steps over time, while Chap. 4 points to some of the ways in which ethical forms of flirting are explored in films for and about contemporary teen audiences. In all cases, the personal relationality of flirting is explored in the context of its ever-present possibilities of slippage into other realms sometimes deemed improper or inappropriate, for example in the context of professional, peer, or friendship relations. The fact that these manifold representations of flirting are apprehended by publics who engage with scandal, with television and with film, indicates how the intersections of different temporalities and narratives articulate a complexity that makes flirting an object of simultaneous pleasure and tension, knowability and confusion, and recognition and changeability over time for many people.

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In considering not what flirting does but what we might do with flirting as a concept demanding an ethical responsiveness, we might think in futural terms about how the representation of the ‘youthful’ time of teen film might be valuable in thinking through these cultural values and issues of power and agency. While characters are of similar ages, and not in professional relationships (arguably teen film is largely confined to the ‘personal’), there can nevertheless be a time and place for flirting. Public encounters and pestering behaviour are highlighted in some films as overwrought, as requiring attention to other people and their response. Indeed, they highlight the importance of responsiveness to others in encounters that potentially establish connections between people. These films are pedagogical not only in depictions of flirting and highlighting both difficult and pleasurable encounters, but also flirt with us as viewers and highlight the ambiguities of our encounters more generally. In watching teen film there is opportunity to explore ethical practices of relating, and consider moments which might prompt conversations with others. The interactions in these films are intentionally ambiguous, uncertain, and in this uncertainty they offer space for further thought and consideration. At the same time, these are commercial Hollywood productions utilising formulaic techniques to appeal to audiences who recognise their plots. Like romance reality television, these narratives share particular values and forms of suspense to produce intimacy. Their commodification is part of the contract we enter into when viewing such media, and its familiarity is part of the pleasures of viewing. Our analyses of such viewing pleasures in the previous chapters have interrogated what is being opened up, laid bare, uncovered prior to the closure of endings in order to pry apart the intricacies of flirting as a deferral of time and outcomes. In the case of Married at First Sight, the upending of narrative chronology to begin with the wedding places these plots under pressure, as the production of intimacy stumbles along awkwardly and unsure without being accountable to the usual structures of time and process. With the assistance of experts and television producers, this social experiment is arguably compelling viewing due to its unpredictability and unknowability, features we have argued are inherent to flirting itself.

Conclusion In this book we have sought to pay serious critical attention to the idea of flirting, tracing its etymology through language and handbooks through to its recent representation within discourses of sexual harassment and

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abuse via the #MeToo movement which has created a groundswell for naming and critiquing problematic masculinised sexual behaviour in certain settings. The defence that such behaviours are ‘only’ flirting has given flirting an unwarranted bad name in suggesting that it might cover such heinous behaviours. We argue, on the contrary, that scandalous sexual behaviour can rarely be considered flirting. We seek to re-establish flirting as playful, uncertain, messy, and brave. As a personal relation between people that is not dependent on leading to any particular outcome, flirting subverts the commonly held chronological narrative of progress that expects something to happen and potently opens time up to new models that involve deferment, waiting, suspense, and unknowability.

References Australian Human Rights Commission. n.d. Sexual Harassment. Accessed December 17, 2018. https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/sex-discrimination/guides/sexual-harassment. Beasley, Chris. 2011. Libidinous Politics: Heterosex, ‘Transgression’ and Social Change. Australian Feminist Studies 26 (67): 25–40. Butler, Judith, and Cornel West. 2011. Dialogue. In The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, 101–108. New York: Columbia University Press. Guardian Sport. 2016. Chris Gayle Tells Reporter: ‘Your Eyes are Beautiful, Hopefully We Can Have a Drink’. The Guardian, January 5, 2016. https:// www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jan/04/chris-gayle-reporter-drinkblush-network-ten-big-bash-melbourne. Hart, Chelsea, and Amanda Gilbertson. 2018. When Does Violence Against Women Matter: Gender, Race and Class in Australian Media Representations of Sexual Violence and Homicide. Outskirts 39: 1–31. http://www.outskirts.arts. uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-39/chelsea-hart-and-amanda-gilberston2. Lavoipierre, Angela. 2018. #MeToo: What’s the Holdup in Australia? ABC News Online, June 1, 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-01/what-isholding-up-the-metoo-movement-in-australia/9822350. Phillips, Adam. 1994. On Flirtation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sharma, Sarah. 2011. The Biopolitical Economy of Time. Journal of Communication Inquiry 35 (4): 439–444.

Index1

NUMBERS & SYMBOLS #MeToo, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 24–47, 105–109, 111

Blanc, Julien, 10, 11 Boundaries, 12, 26, 29, 32, 43, 77–100 Butler, Judith, 45, 46, 54, 60, 61, 107

A Abuse, 1, 5, 26, 27, 82, 111 Affect, 5, 66, 68 Affective, 13, 14, 27–30, 45, 65, 66, 81 Agency, 4, 54, 109, 110 Ambiguity, 31, 82, 83, 87 Ambiguous, 6, 7, 28, 82, 83, 97, 110 Ambivalence, 6, 68, 107 Ambivalent, 82, 100 Assault, 5, 17, 24–27, 30, 33–36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44 Authenticity, 9, 15, 54

C Capitalist, 6, 15, 38, 81, 91 Care, 3, 18, 26, 27, 37, 38, 43–45, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 97, 98 Carnival, 32 Celebrity, 24, 27, 29, 35, 38, 39, 46, 67, 95 Citizenship, 3, 106 Class, 2, 38, 54, 57, 80, 82 Commitment, 14, 56, 62, 70, 96 Consent, 3, 8, 26, 28, 77–100 Courtship, 7, 8, 29, 96 Crush, 78, 92

B Bachelorette, The, 18, 57, 72 Bachelor, The, 18, 57, 72

D Danger, 4, 15, 68 Deceit, 15

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Desire, 2, 11–13, 16, 18, 31, 52, 53, 55, 60–62, 66, 70–72, 77, 80, 81, 87, 94, 105 Digital, 2, 6, 17, 27, 41, 86, 87, 92, 108 E Email, 84–87, 91 Emotion, 9, 12, 53, 60, 66, 67, 69–71, 81 Erotic, 26, 28, 31, 82 Ethical, 16, 18, 19, 24, 26, 38, 39, 43–46, 60, 64, 79, 81, 82, 97, 108–110 Ethics, 43–46, 87, 90–92, 99 Everyday, 4, 5, 24, 28, 29, 33, 35, 43, 54, 57, 65, 88, 91, 107 Expectations, 13, 24, 35, 54, 55, 61, 68–71, 78, 94, 106 Experts, 17, 18, 52, 56–58, 62–65, 68, 69, 71, 110 F Failure, 15, 16, 24, 26, 32, 34, 38, 40, 44, 46, 58, 61, 64, 69, 72, 91, 107 Fairytale, 52, 54, 59, 61 Fantasy, 80, 91–99 Feminism, 2–6, 37, 106 Feminist history, 2 Film, 2, 16, 18, 27, 32, 38, 40, 47, 59, 66, 72, 77–100, 107–110 Fort/da, 13 Foucault, Michel, 28, 40, 61, 63, 81 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 12, 13 Fun, 28, 79, 80, 82, 85, 95 G Gay, 9, 18, 36, 38, 56, 80, 84, 86, 90 Gaze, 3, 13, 62, 63, 78, 84

Gender, 1, 2, 4, 8, 17, 25, 27, 34–37, 39, 42, 44–46, 53, 54, 66, 82, 106 Glance, 78, 79, 83–85, 98, 100 Greer, Germaine, 3 H Harassment, 1, 5, 6, 13, 17, 24–30, 33–36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 86, 90, 91, 106, 107, 110 Hashtag, 5, 6, 66 Heteronormative, 14–16, 37, 79, 82, 90, 107 Heterosexual, 14, 36, 37, 53, 54, 56, 106 Heterosexuality, 106 Hollywood, 17, 24, 27, 33, 46, 80, 82, 108, 110 Hypermasculine, 26, 27, 34–39, 46 Hypermasculinities, 34, 35, 46 I Instability, 87, 100 Instagram, 66, 96–98 Intelligible, 16, 36 Intimacy, 1–19, 24, 44, 52, 53, 55, 61, 65–67, 69–72, 77–80, 82, 84, 85, 94, 95, 97, 99, 105, 106, 108–110 Irigaray, Luce, 4, 13 K Kiss, 78, 82, 87, 90, 92–96, 98, 100 L Language, 2, 7, 13–16, 18, 54, 56, 60, 61, 63, 88, 110 Libidinal, 16, 107 Libidinous, 4

 INDEX 

Liminal, 26, 28, 29, 31–33, 43–45, 72, 79, 105, 106 Liminality, 11, 13, 24, 26, 30–34, 39, 41, 43, 44, 52, 107–109 Look, 56, 58, 61, 78 Looking, 39, 53, 56, 61, 62, 78, 100 Love, Simon, 80, 84–91 M Marriage, 2, 3, 9, 18, 52–56, 58, 61, 66, 70–72, 73n2 Married at First Sight (MAFS), 17, 18, 51, 55–58, 110 Masculinities, 9, 26, 27, 34–39, 46, 70, 86, 91, 106 Media, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 15–19, 24, 27, 36, 38, 40, 41, 46, 65, 72, 77, 82, 95–98, 106, 108, 110 Men, 3–5, 8–11, 17, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32, 34, 38–41, 43, 46, 56, 57, 60, 70, 88, 90, 91, 108, 109 Metaphor, 4, 7, 54 Metrosexual, 36, 37 Moralise, 79 N Negotiation, 2, 17, 26, 44, 57, 70–72, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 94–96, 105 Neoliberal, 81 New masculinity, 26, 30, 34–39, 44, 70 Non-violence, 44, 45 O Online dating, 10

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P Patriarchal, 4, 6, 9, 35–37, 106 Pedagogy, 2, 6, 9, 10, 16, 68, 79, 81, 90, 99, 109, 110 Performance, 3, 15, 24, 26, 30, 35, 37, 39, 44, 54, 59, 60, 66–68, 77–100 Performativities, 35, 37 Phillips, Adam, 8, 13–15, 86, 87, 105, 109 Playful, 9, 13, 15, 18, 19, 33, 37, 45, 79, 109, 111 Playfulness, 2, 5, 29 Pleasure, 3–5, 12, 15, 17, 25, 28, 31, 36, 45, 58, 59, 61, 65, 68, 72, 80, 86, 87, 96, 100, 109, 110 Politician, 9, 28, 106 Politics, 1, 9, 14, 16, 19, 39–41, 56, 59, 60, 82, 86, 106, 108, 109 Populism, 27, 30, 39–44 Pornography, 3, 4 Power, 2, 5, 8, 11, 12, 19, 26–28, 32, 34, 35, 40, 43, 45, 61, 63, 82, 90, 95, 109, 110 Private, 14, 92, 97 Privilege, 5, 27, 106 Psychoanalytic, 13, 16, 61, 105 Psychosocial, 9 Q Queer, 15, 16, 86 R Race, 2, 54, 57, 80, 82 Reality television, 2, 15–18, 51–72, 80, 97, 107, 109, 110 Rejection, 40, 41, 43, 68, 69, 107 Resilience, 87, 107 Risk, 29, 34, 38, 68, 72, 81, 86, 107

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Romance, 2, 17, 18, 51, 53, 55–57, 59, 64, 66–72, 77, 79, 80, 84, 91, 96, 110 Romantic love, 63, 66, 71, 72 S Scandal, 1–19, 24–47, 61, 70, 106–109 Science, 9, 17, 56, 58, 62–64, 71 Screen, 16, 32, 38, 45, 47, 52, 55, 56, 65, 66, 72, 109 Scripts, 2, 14, 17, 18, 37, 51–72, 89, 93, 94, 109 Seduce, 10 Seduction, 2, 11, 12, 15, 16 Serious, 7, 8, 10, 15, 33, 52, 58, 59, 62, 72, 110 Sex-negative, 3, 17, 30, 44–47 Sex-positive, 3, 4, 26 Sexuality, 2–4, 8, 9, 11, 14, 17, 24, 25, 27, 36, 52, 54, 66, 70, 71, 79, 80, 106 Sexual revolution, 4, 9 Sexual violence, 4–6, 27, 35, 36, 38, 39, 46, 47 Shame, 12, 28, 45, 65 Social change, 2, 3, 6, 9, 109 Surveillance, 96, 97 Suspense, 87, 91, 100, 110, 111 T Teen film, 2, 16, 18, 69, 78–84, 86–89, 91, 92, 95, 97, 99, 100, 107, 110 Television, 13, 17, 34, 40, 41, 51–72, 81, 108–110 Tension, 2–6, 69, 84–91, 94, 100, 107, 109

Theatre, 3, 27, 34, 38, 46, 54, 59, 109 Time, 2, 4–6, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 33, 38, 39, 41, 44, 53–56, 60, 70, 72, 78, 80, 105–111 To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, 80, 91–99 Transgression, 15, 68 Trolling, 6 U Uncertainty, 13, 18, 26, 29–34, 43, 44, 63, 83, 84, 87, 91, 96, 100, 107, 109, 110 V Violence, 4, 13, 26, 35–37, 43, 45, 46, 91, 108 Visibility, 6, 77–100 Vulnerability, 12, 27–29, 32–34, 44–47 W Wedding, 18, 55, 57–61, 63, 66, 73n1, 110 Whiteness, 57, 60 Women, 3–5, 8–11, 27, 30, 32, 34–36, 38–41, 43, 46, 53, 57, 60, 62, 70, 88, 90–92, 106, 108 Women’s liberation, 3, 4 Work, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 40, 43, 47, 55, 61, 106, 109 Workplace, 24–27, 30, 33, 37, 39, 41–44