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.

I Didn’t Sleep With Her. But I May As Well Have.

Last night, the first season of Gossip Girl came to a close, or, a kind of fizzle. But if Georgina’s comeuppance was a tad disappointing and all the promising relationships (Lily & Rufus, Blair & Chuck) somehow relapsed, the show might have had one of its most telling and honest moments yet.

After much misunderstanding, Serena and Dan reach what might be the point of no return. The previous episode ended with Dan, manipulated, confused, and believing that Serena just drunkenly cheated on him, canoodling with Georgina on a stoop. The big question was, would they have sex or wouldn’t they? You’d be forgiven for optimistically thinking, as Serena and I did, that Dan and Serena “were forever,” and that the writers would never pull something so cruel. Turns out they’re even crueler than we could have expected.

The next morning Serena finds Georgina coming out of Dan’s bedroom: she assumes the worst but really doesn’t want to know the details. Dan, however, insists on sharing them: “I didn’t sleep with her,” he tells Serena. Relief! “But I may as well have.” Yikes.

Grown-ups usually get pretty nervous over the idea of hooking up. They put the phrase in quotes, they ask each other what it means, and then they declare that kids themselves don’t know what it means. That’s the inherent danger in hooking up: the ambiguity. No doubt many of young people’s romantic and sexual interactions are ambiguous, and I’d like to return to this topic later–exactly how much uncertainty can our delicate frames withstand, I wonder–but in this particular case, it seems that hooking up is scary not because it’s vague but because it’s heartbreakingly explicit.

The bloggers at New York know just what I mean: in their weekly tally of Gossip Girl’s “reality points,” they declared “Plus 8 for the fact that Dan offers an awkward, horrifyingly evocative confession of said visit for the purposes of clearing his own conscience: ‘I didn’t sleep with her. But I may as well have.’” They go on to allot “Plus 2 for the fact that that totally means oral.” Whatever interpretation you choose, what’s so awful about this moment is that it requires you to wonder: if they didn’t have sex, what EXACTLY did they do instead?

Making the Brand: Pamela Anderson, Posh Spice, and Sarah Jessica Parker

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 tumbled 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.

No, Really, You Have to Eat: Body Image on America’s Next Top Model

Last Wednesday, it happened. The “plus-size” contestant got kicked off America’s Next Top Model. We’d all been waiting for it–the only real question was what excuse they would use this time. Actually, it was pretty harsh: Sarah was deemed too skinny for plus-size but too big for regular modeling, and unceremoniously booted from the show. She wept. It was sad.

As Sarah herself had pointed out, she’s a regular-sized girl. Who’s hot, and really awesome, but whatever. I guess we’re not supposed to expect a girl like Sarah to win Top Model–call me crazy, but I actually had thought the show might evolve.

It’s not just the judges’ decision that proved me wrong, but the rest of the episode as well. We’ve got a major front-runner this season, Heather (at right), and her almost unbeatable appeal comes from a pale, bony body and striking, sometimes disturbing, features. Besides making Asperger’s the hottest new neurological disorder, Heather takes great pictures and charms the audience and the judges with her awkward eagerness. She also plays up a kind of false modesty—her favorite story to tell goes something like, “Until I was eleven, I sincerely believed I was ugly.” (Sounds tragic, Heather. We’re glad to hear you’ve since recovered.)

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.”

Sex and Therapy on HBO

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.

While We’re Talking About Commercials,

Have you seen this one for the Clear Blue pregnancy test? (You can find anything on YouTube, apparently.)

This commercial astonishes me every time I see it, I guess because it’s like the exact opposite of most commercials geared toward women. It reminds me much more of, say, an ad for a man’s razor (names like Schick Quattro Titanium,  ever-increasing numbers of blades, etc., as opposed to women’s razor commercials, with synchronized swimmers in bikinis). Even that stream of water at the very end looks much more like the way a man would pee…not to get too graphic on you. The product itself is of course incredibly phallic, as this commercial only emphasizes. 

Clear Blue is selling itself as sleek, dependable, technologically sophisticated for best results. Their biggest selling points are simplicity and accuracy–”So Advanced It’s Easy.” We’re used to scenes from movies and television with women trying to figure out what the various symbols mean on their pregnancy test (“Is that good? Is it bad?” they ask). Women need this information delivered with speed and precision.

It’s cool that the company is selling itself as taking women’s needs seriously; I find it fascinating that it’s doing so with such strong masculine imagery. 

Eliminating Bestiality One Condom at a Time

Controversial, what?

 

Somehow, this commercial got banned by Fox and CBS. Something about….condom commercials should only address prevention of disease not pregnancy…shouldn’t be overtly sexual…shouldn’t exist, maybe, is that what they’re trying to say?

Other than the fact that it’s kind of unpleasant to think about pigs hitting on women, I don’t actually see how this commercial is a problem—and I even had the misfortune of watching Bill O’Reilly complain about it. Of course, the obvious response, made in the New York Times article as well as on feministing, is that commercials for other products make full use of sexual content. Sex is on display in ads for Viagra, deodorant, Doritos, chewing gum, etc. Truth is, this is one of the unsexiest commercials I’ve ever seen: who wants to have sex after watching pigs in a bar? For me the commercial promotes abstinence, if anything!

 

I Kinda Feel Bad For Paris

Whose jaw didn’t drop with shocked delight watching Sarah Silverman’s opening monologue at the MTV Movie Awards? See the clip below.

Silverman was on her game, and I guess it’s nothing I didn’t expect. But there’s something disturbing about this world of relentless display, a world in which Paris Hilton is in the audience (and apparently scheduled for more than that) at the MTV Movie Awards mere hours before she checks in to prison. How strange to think that, for some people, this is actually real life–showing up at an awards ceremony is almost like gamely showing up to work. That it would make some sense to her to share what must be a crisis in her young life with MTV’s viewers and, inevitably, the entire public. Perhaps she didn’t expect the reaction of the audience, but she risked it.

Next! Multiple Choice on MTV

In the latest crop of MTV dating shows, NEXT is a fabulously trashy late-afternoon hit, involving one “dater,” five contestants, and a bus. The “dater” goes on several dates, while the other contestants hang out together on the bus. The “dater” can “NEXT” a contestant at any point, and each contestant gets a dollar for every minute he or she manages to stick it out. If the “dater” likes someone well enough to propose a second date, it’s now upto the contestant whether to accept the offer or just take the cash. 

Of course, like all dating and most reality shows, what happens in each episode is orchestrated by the producers, and all the painful puns and “quips” are obviously scripted. But I remember watching NEXT when it first came on the air, and I actually think the show has evolved into something different from the original intent. The dater is the one who’s supposed to be able to act out his or her fantasies, making the contestants do ridiculous things, like strip down to speedos or ride around on camels. But actually the dating part of the show is never as interesting as the other aspects: the camaraderie between contestants on the bus, the malicious delight of rejecting someone, and the opportunity to be as shallow as you can be. NEXT doesn’t even pretend to be about setting successful couples up; the dating show has become an art and end in itself. A cash prize and a date are now interchangeable.