BOOK Flirting in The Era of MeToo Negoti (1) - Copiar

Flirting in the
Era of #MeToo
Negotiating Intimacy
Alison Bartlett
Kyra Clarke
Rob Cover
Flirting in the Era of #MeToo
rob.cover@uwa.edu.au
Alison Bartlett • Kyra Clarke • Rob Cover
Flirting in the Era of

#MeToo
Negotiating Intimacy
Alison Bartlett Kyra Clarke
The University of Western Australia Massey University
Crawley, WA, Australia 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 pub-
lisher 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 institu-
tional 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 engag-
ing 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.
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
vii
CHAPTER 2
#MeToo: Scandals and the Concept

of Flirting
Abstract This chapter investigates some of the ways in which the con-
temporary #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 impli-
cated 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 mascu-
linity’ 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 23

A. Bartlett et al., Flirting in the Era of #MeToo,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15508-7_2
24 A. BARTLETT ET AL.
Introduction: Flirting and Scandal

Scandals related to sex, sexuality, relationships, and interpersonal interac-
tions 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 fail-
ure to return sexualised attention has been implicated in a conflict of inter-
est, 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 expec-
tations, 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 com-
plex, difficult distinction between flirting and harassment and the compli-
cations 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 inter-
est—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
#METOO: SCANDALS AND THE CONCEPT OF FLIRTING 25
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 indus-
try 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 contem-
porary 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 cer-
tain 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 con-
flated 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 anxi-
ety 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 tra-

ditional 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 dif-
ficult 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)
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 boundar-
ies, categories, responses, and clarity on ‘consent to seek consent’ are pos-
sible. 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 mascu-
linities 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 hypermascu-
line 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 con-
temporary masculinity in which certain subjects are positioned to be able
to complicate flirting and harassment through the performance of a cer-
tain 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 commu-
nication that effectively undo flirting’s liminal potency. Finally, we explore
some sex-positive approaches to #MeToo’s field of address that might
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 occur-
ring in a range of spaces over many years. It can also be seen as an emer-
gence 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 assump-
tions 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 exclu-
sion 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
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 cur-
tail the everyday human communicative form of flirting, particularly in
workplaces. Writing for the Irish Times, Jennifer O’Connell (2017) ques-
tions whether #MeToo goes too far in creating a culture that polices flirt-
ing. 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 flirta-
tious attention might feel (2017). Such a conclusion might be described
as an overly optimistic one in asserting the simplicity of being able to dif-
ferentiate 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
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 guide-
line 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 discom-
fort, 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 posi-
tioned 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’
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 pos-
sibility 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 harass-
ment 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 alter-
native ways of figuring flirting that avoid sex-negative approaches in a
#MeToo era.
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 unknow-
ability and blurred edges of flirting—a perception which points to flirt-
ing’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, emotion-
ally, 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 cere-
monial’ (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 lim-
inality, 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
possibilities of social organisations. Indeed, each flirtation does so within

the context of the micro-power relations at play—the possibility of a rela-
tionship, 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 relation-
ship. In this case, it might be a shift from producer-actor to sexual part-
ners. 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 con-
joined 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, carni-
vale 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 over-
turning 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 nor-
mativity (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 tempo-
ral frame of the carnival allows what is not allowed outside of it.
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 per-
spective that, at times, shifts its target from the vulnerabilities that might
arise from certain kinds of flirting to arguing against the legitimacy of flirt-
ing 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 harass-
ment 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 every-
day). 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, waver-
ing between the contained and the uncontrolled. So in this context, flirt-
ing 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 dif-
ferentiates it from other playful activities such as gambling. Despite flirt-
ing’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
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 rely-
ing on some of those public attempts to differentiate flirting from harass-
ment 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 con-
sider ‘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 mas-
culinity by collapsing all forms of masculinity into a single ‘patriarchy’
(Ford 2018, 44) while articulating at times a moral code that depicts men
flirting as risky. However #MeToo does have significant value by drawing

attention away from older hypermasculinities and towards the perpetra-
tions of contemporary ‘new masculinities’ at play in celebrity workplaces.
One way of making sense of the #MeToo movement as a form of cul-
tural 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 celebri-
ties 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 hypermascu-
linities 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 misap-
prehension 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 domi-
nance 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
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 hetero-
sexual, fashion-conscious, grooming-conscious urban male. Mark
Simpson, who coined the term ‘metrosexual’ in 1994, describes this rep-
resentative 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 profes-
sions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays,
sport, seem to attract them. (Simpson 2002)
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, physi-
cal 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 poli-

cies—in the case of metrosexuality through a turning of attention to con-
sumption 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 mascu-
linities 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 fig-
ure 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 mean-
ing of the #MeToo movement, there is a connection between a man wear-
ing 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
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 cosmopolitan-
ism and mobility, themselves markers of class. Of course this is not neces-
sarily 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 exam-
ple, 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, sur-
rounded by international celebrities, appearing at major ‘red carpet’
events, and associated with the ‘business’ of film production. By appear-
ance 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 associ-
ated with domesticity. This is also a ‘white’ masculinity on display—indeed,
very few of the men depicted in the many compiled images of male perpe-
trators in the #MeToo context are non-Anglo in depiction (Berkowitz
2017), and this is part of an older tradition that associates white cosmo-
politan 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 corpo-
rate and celebrity moves towards surface-level social responsibility claims,
the understanding that women, younger men, and others are still per-
ceived 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 objectifi-
cation but as highly duplicitous and as having obscured the motive and
goal in flirting, especially in workplace scenarios. The #MeToo phenom-

enon is thus a production of cultural anger in the ‘discovery’ that sexual
violence has been continuous despite the surface-level shift from the the-
atrics of hypermasculine dominance to the transnational ‘new masculin-
ity’. 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 gen-
ders 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 work-

place 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 mascu-
linity 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 fundamen-
talism 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 under-
stood 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 ordi-
narily 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
punish activities broadly seen as crimes (Anselmi 2018, 73). This particu-
lar 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, argu-
ing 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 pop-
ulism 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 humil-
iation (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 authen-
tic 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
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 corpora-
tions, marketing officers spinning stories, and organisations which pro-
tect 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, pro-
vided 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 lim-
inality 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, news-
papers, 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 frame-
work 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
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 indi-
vidual 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 cul-
tural phenomena such as flirting. Raymond Williams’ (1977) conceptuali-
sation of structures of feeling is a useful way of making sense of such
change. Within his conceptualisation of the ‘mood’ of contemporary cul-
ture, he articulated a distinction between residual, dominant, and emer-
gent 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 dis-
course in which flirting is practiced as part of a semi-regulated laissez-faire
arrangement through unequal gender relationality as the dominant expres-
sion 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 ‘ele-
ments 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 dom-
inant in ways which also leave it open to reincorporation (124) or some-
times to being depicted as an oppositional threat to the dominant and
thereby excluded or suppressed (126). We can, perhaps, understand con-

temporary ‘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 artic-
ulated. That is, the new approach actively challenges the dominant which,
itself, was no longer repressive but, rather, had opened a licence that bor-
dered 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 protec-
tions are something which can be read as attempting to undo the liminal-
ity 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 sub-
jects demanding recognition and reciprocity without the violence of being
objectified or being used. Such an ethics might, indeed, prove to be com-
patible with the continuation of flirting as a liminal event in contrast to
frameworks such as #MeToo that remain concerned about flirting’s
‘grey areas’.
The Vulnerability of Flirting: Beyond Sex-Negative

Approaches
The #MeToo debate arises, as we have been arguing, through a conver-
gence 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 mutual-
ity, vulnerability, and care in a way which prompts alternative understand-
ings 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 responsibil-
ity (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 mascu-
linity’ 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 harass-
ment (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)
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 disem-
bodied—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 mini-
mise 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 ongoing-
ness of life and bodies (Butler 2004, 44). Through perceiving the com-
monality 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 ethi-
cally 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 par-
ticular 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 recogni-
tion 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
identity re-configured in ways which acknowledge the mutual vulnerabil-

ity of each party. Understanding all subjects, whether men or women, to
have vulnerability in common is not, of course, to assume that vulnerabil-
ity 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 vio-
lence are not necessarily less vulnerability or more dominant the softer,
gentler, socially responsible representations of celebrity, white masculini-
ties 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 com-
munication. An ethical encounter, however, can be described as a ‘struggle
over the claim of nonviolence without any judgment about how the strug-
gle finally ends’ (Butler 2007, 187). It does not resolve the ethical prob-
lem 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 prod-
uct of an ethics of vulnerability when able to recognise their own vulner-
ability 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
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 sex-
ual 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.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Albury, Kath, and Kate Crawford. 2012. Sexting, Consent and Young People’s
Ethics: Beyond Megan’s Story. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural
Studies 26 (3): 463–473.
Anderson, Eric. 2008. Inclusive Masculinity in a Fraternal Setting. Men and
Masculinities 10 (5): 604–620.
Ansari, Sadiya. 2018. 8 Men & Women on Dating in the #MeToo Era. Flare,
February 22, 2018. https://www.flare.com/sex-and-relationships/dating-
and-metoo/.
Anselmi, Manuel. 2018. Populism: An Introduction. Abingdon and New York:
Routledge.
Atwood, Margaret. 2018. Am I a Bad Feminist? The Globe and Mail, January 15,
2018. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/
article37591823/.
Baidawi, Adam. 2018. Henry Cavil on His Best Life Lessons: ‘Your Head Can Be
Messed With, But It’s Down To Me To Deal With That.’ GQ Australia Online,
July 11, 2018. https://www.gq.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/henry-cav-
ill/image-gallery/faed7f272f09bdf899c92b63a7149cba?pos=2.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Beasley, Christine. 2008. Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a Globalizing
World. Men and Masculinities 11 (1): 86–103.
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-of-
men-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.
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-flirting-
compliments-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/dating-
me-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.
Walden, Celia. 2018. Don’t Let #MeToo End Office Flirting. Grazia, September 2,
2018. https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/opinion/flirting-provocateur-harassment/.
Waterhouse-Watson, Deb. 2011. (Un)reasonable Doubt: A ‘Narrative Immunity’
for Footballers Against Sexual Assault Allegations. M/C Journal 14 (1). http://
journal.media-culture.org.au.
Weeks, Jeffrey. 2017. Sexuality. 4th ed. London and New York: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. 2018. Ambiguities and Dilemmas Around
#MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo? European Journal of Women’s Studies
25 (1): 3–9.

BOOK Flirting in The Era of MeToo Negoti (1) - Copiar

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

BOOK Flirting in The Era of MeToo Negoti (1) - Copiar

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Flirting in the

Flirting in the Era of

ISBN 978-3-030-15507-0 ISBN 978-3-030-15508-7 (eBook)

Cover credit: Pattern © Melisa Hasan

The authors wish to thank the Institute of Advanced Studies at the

1 Introduction: Flirting, Scandal, Intimacy 1

2 #MeToo: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting 23

3 Playing with Scripts: Social Experiments and Reality

4 Flirting on Film: Boundaries and Consent, Visibility and

5 Conclusion: Uncertain Times for Flirting105

#MeToo: Scandals and the Concept

Keywords #MeToo • Scandal • Masculinity • Liminality • Populism

© The Author(s) 2019 23

Introduction: Flirting and Scandal

There’s something wonderful about a man chasing a woman. There’s a tra-

Extending into the public and semi-private settings of the workplace,

provide more useful critical engagement with harassment without the

#MeToo Contra Flirting? Affective Engagements

sexual activities that operate in a space outside of clear consent frameworks

of harassment should simultaneously have an effect on revising the role of

Flirting’s Liminality: Play, Potency, and Uncertainty

possibilities of social organisations. Indeed, each flirtation does so within

Within contemporary Western bourgeois culture, however, that which

Masculinity, Flirting, and #MeToo:

flirting as risky. However #MeToo does have significant value by drawing

The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or

Much like Buchbinder’s description of the new male, Simpson described

On the one hand, the ‘postfeminist man’ accommodates backlash scripts—

We might suggest surface-level compliance with workplace equity poli-

goal in flirting, especially in workplace scenarios. The #MeToo phenom-

#MeToo as a New Fundamentalism? Populism

The public discussions around #MeToo and the appropriateness of work-

sexual assault trials, exonerating perpetrators through the excuse that a

systems and internal corporate complaints procedures, it problematically

thereby excluded or suppressed (126). We can, perhaps, understand con-

The Vulnerability of Flirting: Beyond Sex-Negative

identity re-configured in ways which acknowledge the mutual vulnerabil-

Huizinga, Jurgen. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.

You might also like

1 Introduction: Flirting, Scandal, Intimacy 1

2 #MeToo: Scandals and the Concept of Flirting 23

3 Playing with Scripts: Social Experiments and Reality

4 Flirting on Film: Boundaries and Consent, Visibility and

5 Conclusion: Uncertain Times for Flirting105