A Defense of Sex and the City
June 12, 2008
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 fi
lm 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 m
atter; 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.
Just a few weeks ago, a shocking photograph hit the blogosphere and tabloids: Pamela Anderson was spotted reading former Punk Planet editor Anne Elizabeth Moore’s latest book, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (New Press, 2007). In a bikini, no less:
And really, who doesn’t enjoy a good read in the sun? While gossip blogs made a few painfully old dumb-blondes-can’t-read jokes, Jennifer Pozner chose instead to point out the cognitive dissonance of “one-woman brand-maker for Playboy, Stuff, G.Q., Baywatch, V.I.P., and numerous other my-boobs-move-media devices” reading AEM’s excellent tract against corporate creep.
A brand is a symbol, perhaps also a phrase, that connotes very particular meanings and qualities, and most essentially, that is standing in for a product. The most successful of brands don’t just suggest a specific idea, but actually come to mean them. In other words, if you looked up Busty Blonde in the dictionary, you might just find Pamela Anderson. The product could be any number of things, from Baywatch paraphernalia to men’s magazines. It’s a powerful thing to attach Anderson’s name and image to a product; people might purchase it because they’re attracted to her and want to find out more, but many will also pick up a product for the simple reason that it’s Pamela Anderson. You know that you have branding power when someone will buy something simply because your name is on it, even if that thing is totally unrelated to your work and identity. Celebrity perfumes, for example.
The tricky thing about a person actually becoming a brand is that you run the risk of your body actually becoming the product. Women, already commodities, are particularly vulnerable to this trading in flesh. Like Victoria Beckham in this provocative/misogynist Marc Jacobs ad, women can be t
umbled into an enormous shopping bag and carried home, dangling a pair of twiggy legs that aren’t even recognizably human.
Except, in this case, where the varnished doll-like legs are recognizably Posh. Victoria Beckham, of course, is a perfect example of successful branding. From the beginning, the Spice Girls were built on the idea of five distinct women with easily defined and internally consistent personalities. This premise allowed femininity to include such meanings as sporty and…scary? (read: not white), thus propelling the concept of girl power to the global scene. By way of this, the Spice Girl industry also established the notion of girl power as an explicitly commercial tool, one that initiated pre-teen girls into the role of consumer.
Sex and Therapy on HBO
October 3, 2007
Katie and Dave aren’t having sex. Jamie and Hugo have way too much sex. Carolyn and Palek can have as much clinical or angry sex as they want, but as long as no eggs get fertilized, their problems are far from over.
Tell Me You Love Me has gotten a lot of buzz–for being HBO’s latest brainy show and, mostly, for having sex scenes that aren’t easily distinguished from actual sex. As in, the camera never pans away from a couple’s lusty embrace to a roaring fire, or anything. Instead, we see spread legs, erect penises, pubic hair, everything. Mireya Navarro’s Sunday Styles piece, “It Isn’t a Real Sex Scene? I Still Need a Cigarette” likens the show’s unsettlingly realistic sex scenes to pornography. Whatever one says about pornography, though, at least it’s trying to elicit pleasure. Tell Me You Love Me has no such goal.
I turn on Sex and the City and it’s the first episode of the fourth season, “The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tasy,” in which they confront that classic question: do you believe in soulmates? I can’t seem to stop talking about The One, and it’s not the most encouraging topic, as this episode makes clear. Carrie gets a mailing from a dating service full of warnings about letting her soulmate “slip away.” Miranda declares that “soulmates only exist in the hallmark aisle in Duane Reed Drugs,” but it turns out that the notion is not so easy to shake off.
Miranda’s main problem with the idea of soulmates is that it makes you feel an essential dissatisfaction with yourself and your life as it is. You constantly have to be looking for that magical solution, that person whom you may well never find. Charlotte wants to believe “that there’s that one perfect person out there to complete you,” but Miranda points out the risks of this: “And, what? If you don’t find him–you’re incomplete? It’s so dangerous!” “You’re still looking outside yourself and saying that you’re not enough,” she says, in a very empowered, accept-yourself kind of moment.
But Charlotte’s rebuttal is disconcertingly resonant: “Are you enough?”
Saving Yourself for The One
May 17, 2007
If there is an exact opposite of having Sex Like Men, it’s saving yourself for The One. People might think this doesn’t happen much anymore–whether or not that’s the case, many adolescent girls, and probably some guys, grow up thinking they’ll wait to have sex until 
marriage. Not for religious reasons, necessarily, but for idealistic ones. Whenever I contemplate the idea of The One, I can’t help but think of the fabulously bad Marisa Tomei movie, Only You (1994): when she was a little girl, a Ouija board told her she would marry Robert Downey Jr., so she chases him through Europe to make this happen. Or something like that.
