Access Information: Public Lies and Private Peril

Access—in Goffman's sense of openness to and availability for interaction—is an especially salient concept for gender relations. Access information is a related concept defined as information given in public that can be used to locate an individual at some future time. The 25 women and men interviewed as part of this field study reported that rules and practices for disclosing access information are not gender neutral among strangers. Women reported conflicting pressures on them: they desire to remain accessible to others in the limited ways possible to them, and they sometimes want to spark acquaintance with men; but they will always want to remain crime-conscious and not divulge a name or address to a potential criminal. These women also reported that such pressures have given rise to the development of presentational strategies when interacting with strange men. The contingencies and relative success of these strategies are examined here.