A Defense of Sex and the City

In the couple weeks since Sex and the City movie came out, the film has taken something of a beating at the hands of the news media. These articles read much less like film review than cultural critiques, perhaps because the movie was poised to disrupt box office trends, or because the four-year hiatus gave everyone an opportunity to say his or her piece about the series and its legacy. Embarrassed by the fan frenzy (female pleasure is just so frivolous), many of these reviewers have taken out on the movie issues that have long been understood about the show. Goodness knows I have plenty to say about what’s wrong with SATC on the big, or small, screens. I’d like to take this moment, however, to stand up for a film that was, at the very least, a love letter to fans, but also significantly more than that.

Anthony Lane begins his snide review in the New Yorker with a reflection on the excitement and secrecy that surrounded this release. Standing in line at the theatre, Lane shares his predictions about the plot with a woman nearby:

I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

Already, Lane begins with the notion that the film’s subject matter is too appallingly trivial to care about. What an incisive and witty take-down of those silly female fans: this movie is about nothing but love and suffering, and it definitely wasn’t worth his time.

Lane reveals a nasty condescension towards the subject matter; indeed, many writers seemed mortified by the masses of women who invested their time, money, and emotions into this movie. Slate assembled four of its women writers to dish on SATC, and their conversation was saddled with the persistent need to condemn and distance themselves from the movie’s frivolity.

Meghan O’Rourke: Carrie, after Big Jilts her, says, “I feel like I took a bullet.” Um, really? You mean like a soldier?…

Erin Bucklann: So many audience members were sobbing throughout my screening and I was struck by hearing more crying in that movie than during any serious war movie or mourning scene I’ve watched in a looong time.

Measuring stories of intimacy, friendship, and heartbreak against war, politics, and tragedy, these critics participate in a didactic and classically sexist framework that assigns value to one experience over another and pits the mythical and heroic against the everyday and interpersonal. Historically, women’s stories have always been relegated to second-class art, and it looks like not much has changed. This is a zero-sum game in which women always lose.

Abstinence: Close Your Eyes and Think of Gandhi

Sure, I’ll admit it. Sex Like Men has been out of commission. But that was before a spokesperson for the anti-sex campaign went and employed my phrase, in the goddamn New York Times Magazine (you’ll remember them from that classic piece, “The Kids Call It Hooking Up”). This most recent article features Harvard student and abstinence-crusader Janie Fredell, who argues that:

“Conventional feminism teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. ‘I am an unconventional feminist,’ Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.”

While abstinence-only programs are federally funded and touted by many of the nation’s leaders as the only moral choice, on a conventional college campus in the Northeast, the public decision to abstain from sex can be a lonely road. But Janie had coping mechanisms of her own: “To bolster herself, she often thought of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.”

Iphigenia in Skinny Jeans

Thanks, Koreanish, for this sad/funny post on the way the media (everyone) hounds young female celebrities in some weird ritual sacrifice. My feelings exactly.

We prop these women up, rewarding all kinds of idiotic behavior, only for the pleasure of punishing them when they stumble. (For more, see my previous posts on Vanessa Hudgens and Paris Hilton.) As you say, “it was like after Princess Di instead of ‘never again’ it was ‘oh yes, annually.’”

And can I just say, I fucking hated Iphigenia in high school? Even that one important film version from the ’70s. It’s just this small gag reaction I have to the brutal sacrifice of young women in the service of working out society’s problems.

Gossip Girl: All’s Fair on the Upper East Side

Dear Gossip Girl,

In the first episode of this admittedly fascinating show, Chuck attempts to rape Jenny on a rooftop. He’s mildly punished by the valiant brother Dan, but faces no consequences from his own social group. In almost every episode, he pays fleets of women to service him and his friends, not to mention making sexist and classist remarks at any moment—-but his friends seem to brush it off. “That’s Chuck,” they justify, or, more likely, “That’s what this world is like.” As Chuck says himself that first night: “It’s a party–things happen.”

So I Posed Naked Once. Fuck Off.

Don’t you wish that was the standard response? C’mon, Vanessa Hudgens, stand up for yourself!

Apologies for the hiatus. Moving to a new city, floundering from apartment to apartment, and not having a television for three months can do that to you. The good news is: I’m settled for a while and my roommate has DVR. I think we have a very chatty fall ahead of us, what with Grey’s starting up again, my new addiction to Ugly Betty, and the upcoming films on my radar, like Lust, Caution; Across the Universe; The Brave One and Ira & Abby. Marykate Olsen’s been doing the talk-show and magazine circuit, Britney’s been looking very despondent on live television, and then there’s the Vanessa Hudgens issue.

She’s been made to apologize for having once posed nude—before she was noticed, in fact when she was probably struggling to get noticed, and, most unfortunately, before she was the Disney princess she’s since become (I mean, she’s even dating her dreamy High School Musical co-star; what more could the pre-teen fans desire?). We monitor the sexuality of our young female stars, and then we punish them too. Of course we can go on and on about Lindsay and Paris, etc., and girls who deliberately expose themselves to the public, but dredging up dirt from the past? I don’t like it.

The beauty queen scandals bother me too (although who needs a stupid crown? just look at the kick-ass Vanessa Williams now!). The bigger questions is: to whom are these girls apologizing? Disney issued their own lovely statement: “Vanessa has apologized for what was obviously a lapse in judgment…We hope she’s learned a valuable lesson.” Naughty child, go to your room.

I Don’t Want No Baby: Knocked Up, Waitress, and Shmashmortions

I may be the only person in the country who cried in sadness during Knocked Up. I did: I shed a tear for Katherine Heigl’s Alison, when she’s weeping at the doctor’s office having just being told officially that she’s pregnant. That moment is so difficult, and not just for Seth Rogen’s awkward Ben who’s standing next to her unsure what to do. It felt painfully accessible–what young woman couldn’t imagine the terror and confusion Alison is experiencing?

Knocked Up is #3 at the box office right now. It’s a great movie, but there’s no doubt Judd Apatow’s strength is in capturing the male voice, as Dana Stevens notes on Slate. The film succeeded not just in the extended stoner scenes and bathroom jokes–which got a little tiresome if only by their length–but in the poignant conversations between the men, between Ben and his friends, his father and, especially Paul Rudd’s character, Pete. Stevens cites the moment between Pete and Ben, when, high on shrooms in a Las Vegas hotel room, they share their fears and disappointments in a scene that is “as revealing as it is hilarious.” Suddenly honest with one another, they express their feelings and, indeed, their love and respect for the women in their lives, the women who, earlier, had seemed like nothing so much as intrusions on good old masculine fun. A.O. Scott identifies a larger critique here, one that is cheerily embedded in jokes about bongs and getting laid:

A Woman Like a Soldier, Holding Him Down: Fabolous, the Angel in the House, and Club Security

“Make Me Better” is a recently released single by Fabolous, featuring Ne-Yo. The lines of the chorus are, “I’m a movement by myself but I’m a force when were together/ Mami, I’m good all by myself but baby you, you make me better.” The song praises that supportive girlfriend, the woman who stays by her man, encouraging and guiding him. This is sort of what Beyonce is talking about in “Upgrade You”: “I can do for you what Martin did for the people/ Ran by the men but the women keep the tempo/ It’s very seldom that you’re blessed to find your equal/ Still play my part and let you take the lead role…I’ll follow…I’ll be the help whenever you need me.”

Such a woman is essential to any man’s success. The old adage goes something like, “Behind every great man is a great woman.” In Fabolous’s song, it’s a little different: “Beside every great man you can find/ A woman like a soldier holding him down” (emphasis mine). There’s an ongoing battle, and women have their part to play as well. Clearly there’s some history here, the image of the strong black woman floating in the background as Beyonce sings those lines. Women are supposed to do that essential work behind-the-scenes, to hold down the home front, and, in any war, to give their men something to fight for. Fabolous declares, “I’m a need Coretta Scott if I’m gonna be King.”