The plot is simple. Handsome successful Derek (Idris Elba) exchanges a few pleasantries with the skinny blonde temp at the office, who turns out to be bat shit crazy. Lisa (Ali Larder) continually tries to get in his pants, stalks him, and compromises his integrity.  Eventually she notches up the stalking to kidnapping levels, and only a major girlfight with wife Sharon (Beyonce Knowles) can stop her. 

Although Derek is cleared of wrongdoing by Lisa’s total insanity, he does get in trouble for lying to his wife. Why didn’t he tell her when Lisa assaulted him in at bathroom stall, or snuck into his car in lingerie, or followed him to the office retreat? He admits he couldn’t tell her, because it might make him sound a little guilty. And he was, a little. Sharon used to be Derek’s assistant, so she knows there’s precedent for office flirtation; when the scandal comes to light, she orders Derek out of the house.    

More than Derek, the movie suggests, what’s to blame here is the moneyed male office culture,  a culture that encourages men to cheat, that got Derek into all these fishy situations to begin with.  His office consists entirely of callous men, all white but for him, who compete for the biggest million dollar deals. There is constant ogling of women employees; a sophomoric pressure to drink, cheat, hire strippers; a no-spouse policy at the holiday party; and a decadent retreat for the men to hang out poolside and drink martinis.

Although the movie indirectly casts blame on this aggressive and entitled hyper-masculinity, it makes even more explicit attacks on men whose masculinity could be called into question. Derek’s gay male assistant (the solution to Sharon’s prohibition on women assistants — goodness knows only women and gay men serve as secretaries these days) is portrayed as an irresolute, bitchy queen. He is cajoled by Lisa into the kind of shallow friendship  between straight white women and their gay minions that is frequently feasted upon in popular culture, though often with a kind of foolish playfulness rather than the deep contempt displayed here. Weak, morally corruptible, Patrick abets Lisa even after her character’s been revealed, because he is too slight a man to realize what real consequences are.

When a crazy white girl threatens your job, family, and reputation, your masculinity is definitely at stake as well. Throughout it all, Derek must remain the paragon of manhood. He is more of a man than his oversexed straight colleagues: he is more sexually confident than they are and (therefore) more morally upstanding. Anyone who’s seen Idris Elba play it cool as Stringer Bell can imagine the smoothness he brings to this role, in which the ultimate masculinity means being strong enough to remain faithful to your wife.

But Derek’s power is limited in this situation. First, he is stymied by that ever-present spectre  of REVERSE DISCRIMINATION — the fear that a sexual harrassment complaint would backfire on him– because, as everyone knows, women can always cry victim and be believed (winning millions in settlement). That’s offered up as an incontrovertible reason why he can’t stop Lisa’s advances through official channels.

Unofficially, too, he is bound: though Lisa’s antics are infuriating even for the viewer and though Derek’s anger with her approaches a breaking point, he can never fight her physically. (In his review, Stephen Holden ridiculously indites the undercurrent of violence because he imagines a resemblance between Idris & Ali and O.J. & Nicole. This tells you more about Holden’s idiocy than the movie’s, and as one righteously piqued NYTimes.com commentator noted, “If I was Stringer Bell, I’d sue you for defamation.”) At any rate, despite the rising tension between them, Derek can’t stop Lisa himself. The world that feminism ushered in won’t let you sue women nor strike ‘em neither. He has to leave the beat down to his wife.

This, Sharon can deliver. Today’s (post)feminism demands a certain amount of violence from its heroines. Though the first half of the film belongs to Derek, Sharon comes forward in the latter half, to take matters into her own hands and assert power where the state and her husband have failed.

In the classic call of motherhood, Sharon mobilizes at the first threat to her son, throwing down the gauntlet like we saw in the previews: “You come to my house. You touch my child. You think you’re crazy? I’ll show you crazy.” Lisa is not only trying to take her husband but her whole family — no small threat. The life that Derek and Sharon are building is made much of from the opening scenes in which they move into their big new house with their shiny cars and their baby boy. Derek is ambitious at work, closing one important deal after another, and he would like to continue providing the good life for Sharon while she has more babies and takes care of the home. They have a mild conflict over the fact that she’d like to get her degree — something she starts really working toward once she’s kicked him out. When she eventually lets him back home, she’s ready with her demands: she wants to continue school, but she also wants to drive the Benz. 

Another theme of postfeminism (very present in Beyonce’s music), that women are entitled to certain material goods, shows up in this film as well. When an angry Sharon confidently tells Derek, “Get out of my house,” one of the girls sitting behind me in the theatre called out, “You don’t work!” Meaning, it’s his house, which sounds at first like a rational critique of Sharon’s demand. The patriarchal view is that, by supporting his wife, the man becomes entitled to more power in the relationship; it’s his house, so he doesn’t have to leave, no matter what he’s done (perhaps even: she has to do whatever he wants, because he supports her).

On the other side, the ideal feminist position would be that women do not need to be paid for their love with material items, both because we can support ourselves and because we all want to get beyond this master-slave brokerage of power and trading of goods. We don’t need you to “put a ring on it”; we’re looking instead for compassion and equality in our relationships and a freedom from this material exchange.

But there’s something else to this too. The house in Obsessed stands for the family and belongs to the family as well. The person who threatens the family has to go. This is the ideal principle upon which people start families together — we will pool our resources and erase disparities in income: it’s our money, all together, because it goes toward sustaining us as a family. Of course supporting the family involves a great deal of unpaid labour, caretaking, and domestic work. That’s why women who earn less than their partners have just as much right to the family’s wealth, and why Sharon can stake a claim to her big house.

But in a classic girl power scene, Sharon proceeds to destroy that big house in the smackdown with Lisa. They tear a great hole through the ceiling, sending the chandelier crashing right on top of the fancy glass coffee table (with a body in between). It’s a pretty dramatic destruction of the home they’ve been working so hard to preserve. One can see in this  a necessary battling of demons to preserve the tranquillity of the home, or proof of the violence lurking behind the most elegant of exteriors. One can also read an assertion of power and even a rejection of the wealth and security the husband provided, in order to express the fierce love and self-protection required here. The house as collateral damage in the defense of the family. 

The Demise of Dating – Charle s Blow (NY Times)

Sigh. Mr. Blow obviously didn’t read my round-up of these pieces from two years ago.  Or he did, and just regurgitated them. 

Guess that means this blog still has a reason to live. Apologies for the months of neglect, but we’re coming back big in ’09! 

Happy holidays ~

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.

Patriarchy aside, these critiques are also a little dishonest, aren’t they? No matter how much we feel the horrors of disaster and war, we will never be immune to our small personal tragedies–and thank heavens. Men and women weep like children over lost love, and Sex and the City wanted to depict and validate that kind of experience. The fact that this representation embarrassed reviewers suggests a deep discomfort with a film that takes women’s lives seriously.

Sex and the City does a few things incredibly well, in a way that I don’t often see. In keeping with the premise of the show, the movie puts friendship between women front and center. It seems that everyone’s favorite moment is when Charlotte fiercely defends Carrie from Big in the street. It’s comical–Kristin Davis has old-school screwball talent–but also incredibly moving, because of the shaking, brittle body Charlotte protects. One second prior, Carrie was lashing out at Big and giving full expression to her wrath, but, with the sharp turn of sudden, unexpected pain, she collapses in grief in her friends’ arms. Dana Stevens, Slate’s apologist fan, notes that “if you bear even a grudging affection for the show’s utopic vision of female bonding as the greatest love of all, you may get choked up when Carrie appears at Miranda’s door one shitty New Year’s Eve (clad only in pajamas, a sequined cloche, a full-length fur, and what appear to be patent-leather spats) and reassures her friend, ‘You’re not alone.’” Definitely a crying moment. And even Meghan O’Rourke likes the bit when Samantha feeds a silent, despondent Carrie spoonfuls of yogurt. This makes me suspect that the earlier posturing about morals and war is more about shame than anything else. She writes, “That scene seemed to capture something real about female friendship. It gets stronger, in my experience, as you age and become more vulnerable, as you find yourself living with less drama, but, perhaps, more pain.”

Sex and the City is exactly about this kind of stark, everyday pain, the pain of intimate relationships, the pain that you only allow your best friends to see. Carrie and Miranda’s suffering is rough and real, and it goes on for months. It startled me to see a woman experiencing depression after a breakup on screen. It’s such a common occurrence, and yet, one that is quiet, ugly, even disgraceful (I guess we should have more important things to get depressed about). It’s definitely an experience that doesn’t typically turn up in the movies.

SATC allows women to suffer and also to age. While the television show indulged the characters’ fears about growing older, now that a decade has passed, they’re over it. Samantha used to repeat birthdays, refusing for a while to enter her forties. But in this movie, she turns fifty; having survived cancer, uncharacteristically uprooted her life, and then returned to it once more, she has more important things to think about than candles on a cake. Carrie’s not embarrassed to be featured as a bride in her forties; there’s not even a glimmer of the fear that women her age can’t be romantic heroines, a fear that seems to paralyze Hollywood when it comes to female leads. At the end of the movie, we notice that she finally purchases a pair of reading glasses. No fanfare, no small breakdowns–this is simply who she is now.

The biggest complaint about who Carrie is is about her obsession with material goods. The product placements have been catalogued, and you can read my take on class, consumption, and the SJP brand here. In that post, I question Sarah Jessica Parker’s anxious retelling of the Sex and the City story and the New York feature in which she ludicrously insists that Carrie doesn’t care about money and takes pains to express her ambivalence toward commercial projects. I was disappointed, not only in SJP’s strange duplicity regarding her own business decisions, but also in her misrepresenting the SATC legacy. Now, however, I see that the movie serves a similar ideological purpose as the article did, both capitalizing on the show’s iconography, and, in the end, renouncing it.

This is the part the reviewers didn’t seem to grasp–but then, they missed a lot. Anthony Lane calls these women “hormonal hobbits…all obsessed with a ring.” Actually, only Charlotte was ever interested in marriage; Carrie had always felt hugely ambivalent towards the institution; and, if you’ll notice, there’s no actual ring involved in Big’s half-hearted proposal. But thanks for the weird reference. The point, to him and to others, was that these women are gross, shallow, and hardened. The closet was a big offender–and, even worse was the delighted reaction of women in the audience when they saw it. Lane writes that “the tactic here is basically pornographic–arouse the viewer with image upon image what lies just beyond her reach.” Perhaps everyone’s afraid women will run around maxing out their own and their husband’s credit cards after this movie, but they seem to be missing the element of fantasy and pleasurable escapism here. The show has always been an improbable caper through New York City streets in precarious heels; the colors have always been brighter and the fashions nuttier than you’re ever likely to see in real life or even to desire for yourself. It’s like that condescending piece in the New York Times, “Sex and the Rest of the City,” which announced that, against all odds, women of color in the outer boroughs also enjoyed, and even related to, the SATC movie, despite the differences between their lives! I think that city reporter finally hit upon the meaning of fiction.

Two more things to say about the critique of materialism in SATC. One: this sudden panic about consumer goods in film is a sloppy, myopic, and gendered attack. The fast cars and sleek gadgets that crowd the sets of men’s (or “mainstream”) movies don’t receive this kind of condemnation, if indeed these products are even acknowledge. The element of desire is still present in those scenes, though, and so is the corporate influence. But there’s something more offensive about women wanting and buying goods. Women, like magpies, uncontrollably attracted to shiny things and given to excess. As Joseph Addison and Richard Steele wrote in that legendary 18th century journal, The Spectator, women think only of “the drapery of the species…perpetually dazzling one anothers’ imaginations, and filling their heads with nothing but colors,” themselves embodying frivolity. Like I said earlier, not much has changed.

The other thing that confounds me about the attacks on consumer goods in SATC is that everyone’s so determined to condemn the feminine passion for shopping that they miss the fact that movie condemns it too (just as SJP did in New York). At the end of the movie, Carrie holds herself equally accountable for the break-up with Big. She got caught up in the whirlwind of a society wedding, and that’s almost as bad as leaving someone at the altar. With the designer dresses and the magazine spread, she forgot to think about how her partner felt about the whole thing. (Big’s feelings were mostly reluctance and fear about marriage, as well as about his appearance, that he would look like a rich guy who’s gotten married three times to younger women. Right. Because that’s actually who he is.) That schmaltzy Vogue shoot that everyone hated so much was the height of Carrie’s narcissism, the peak from which she has one more spectacular fall. Of course, the movie is trying to have it both ways–tempting the viewers with this indulgent and opulent Vivienne Westwood/New York Public Library/Vogue wedding–and then, after the fact, condemning all that as vanity and candy floss. At the end of the day, a reformed Carrie gets married in city hall in an unlabeled dress. As for what happens to the pre-war penthouse (“I got this”), we don’t ever find out–all I have to say is: don’t sell your apartment this time!”

The truth is, I didn’t trust Big when the series ended, and I don’t trust him now. There was a minute during this movie, when Carrie’s hair was brown and her apartment newly painted, when I actually almost believed they would let her end this thing alone. We’d taken a chance on Big so many times, and I was ready to throw in the towel. How fantastically bold if they do it, I thought, if they leave Carrie alone, to simply do her best to move on.

Wishful thinking. SATC has never been bold enough not to believe in love–and not just love, but the idea that when it’s right, it’s right. and you’ve got to do what you can to make it work. Many of the reviews also criticized the flat, underdeveloped male characters (because the female characters in Superbad and There Will Be Blood were so three-dimensional, if present at all…see Manhola Dargis on the “new, post-female American cinema”). It’s true that these guys weren’t given a lot of air time, and, rather than exploring the back-and-forth in relationships, the movie focused on how women behave in and out of relationships and how they relate to their friends. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that. In the end, of course, the movie is subject to the rules of negotiated happy endings—in order to get there, Carrie and Miranda do some thinking and open up to the men who violated their trust.

It’s one thing to argue, as Carrie often does, that it doesn’t have to do with what’s right, wrong, or rational; it simply has to do with love. It’s another to justify that emotional decision with a kind of complicated moral footwork, placing these women’s flaws and errors (acting selfish or distant, avoiding problems, avoiding sex) on a level with the devastating mistakes made by Steve and Big. This is exactly the attitude that frames infidelity as a natural, reasonable male response to a difficulty. There are many ways that we can hurt each other and push each other away, and most of those muddles can be talked through and cleared up. But there is some damage that cannot be resolved and that sometimes can’t even be healed. For instance, cheating on your wife or balking on your wedding day (and don’t give me any crap about the cell phone mishap; the man could have gotten out of the damn car, or at the very least sent Raul). In these cases, all a couple can do is try to forget and start over; that’s something SATC has always believed in.

So even though I don’t like it and I don’t like to admit it, perhaps women respond to the movie because it both acknowledges the suffering in relationships as well as the need to hope for reconciliation and happiness. The emotions were real. Which goes to show that women might turn out at the cinema after all ($70 million and counting), if Hollywood would only give us something worth watching.

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?

“Sleeping with someone” has always sounded incredibly adult to me. As an adolescent, I felt that the phrase belonged only in a world where people have passionate affairs and betray one another. It suggests the worst, of course. But it also suggests an existence where there are only a couple of options. In most movies, for instance, an adult character might share an unexpected kiss with somebody, but after that it’s straight to the sex.

In some ways, “sleeping together” skips over the whole intimate, heated, hesitant, and unmistakably bodily experience of having sex. It skips over the in-between, the heavy petting, the not-tonight-but, and the i-like-this-better-than. The phrase isn’t meant to evoke actual sex; it’s meant to refer to a social transaction between individuals in an adult world where the sex itself is private, but the fact of having had it carries meaning.

This isn’t the world we live in today, though. We’re more familiar with and exposed to the ins and outs of sex, and we know that it’s an inclusive and often public experience. The kinds of sexual activity that kids engage in before they’re ready for intercourse is no longer hidden, but all out on the table. Sex involves so much variety that we have to say hooking up in order to capture the range of possible experiences. So far from not knowing what our words mean, in fact, our conversations are attuned to every contextual shift. Hooking up suggests a number of things, and, in the case of Dan and Serena, the writers’ wicked and brilliant move was to invite us, and Serena, to imagine its worst possible meanings.

And perhaps that’s why grown-ups are so afraid of “hooking up.” Because it’s all too clear. It doesn’t slip sex behind the bedroom door, but exposes it in the dorm room and on the gossip blog. It acknowledges a very detailed, varied, and concrete experience of sex–and, worst of all, it reminds us that our kids are having it.

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.

Most brands rely on association, but Victoria Beckham’s selling quality is made perfectly explicit: she’s Posh. That quality sold her as a performer and cultural icon in a way that her voice never could. And then she married a hot footballer, thus completing the image: together, she and David Beckham embody wealth, style, and stardom. Sustained by a limitless wardrobe of little black dresses and heavy eyeliner. Posh is the definitive celebrity—a branding that draws on her work, family, and personal history, but that ultimately returns to a toned body in a tight dress.

Lots of people have branding power. The DVDs-For-Infants series Baby Einstein wouldn’t sell a single disc without the moniker of a certain woolly-haired genius. Masses of Americans will line up to see “the next Will Ferrell movie” or purchase the next John Grisham novel whether or not they know or care about the plot. My question is, can women only have this branding power if it’s centered on their bodies? After a brainstorm with duckingbeamers, it looked like the answer was going to be yes. Sure, Madonna’s been a powerhouse for years, but her success began with selling sex and has continued to be about a continual reincarnation of her body. To be clear, I do not intend to judge Madonna or Posh Spice or Pamela Anderson for building successful careers on their physical appearance. I assume they’re all smart and savvy, and I’m not interested in debating the right or wrong of it. I’m just curious: does the marketplace allow for a woman to wield this kind of commercial power if it’s not sexual power?

Then we thought of Oprah. Oprah can move mountains, books, voters, millions of men and women to hum “Happy Birthday” while washing their hands. Rather than displaying her body for consumption, Oprah’s the Queen of Talk. Of course, the public has continually scrutinized her weight over the years, and perhaps there is a connection between displaying your body as a sexual object or bait, and displaying your body to establish a common ground with viewers, the everywoman.

This past week’s cover of New York brought to mind another woman with a small empire to her name, one known affectionately as “SJP, Inc.” Sarah Jessica Parker was not only the star but the executive producer of Sex and the City, and, with the recent release of her clothing line, Bitten, and the May 30th opening of the SATC movie, she’s proving to be as smart a businesswoman as ever. Emily Nussbaum’s article (like all celebrity profiles) is a bit fawning, but she does make some effort to take on this question of branding: “There’s a case to be made that if she has marketed her own personality—funny, effusive, motherly, girlish—as a brand…this is a smart move…Like a single woman in an earlier age or a blocked artist in Victorian London, an actress growing older can easily find that her world is shrinking. That will never happen to Parker, who has made certain to seize control of her own larger-than-life image.” Interestingly, SJP, Inc. may be the answer to our earlier question; her brand isn’t about her body or sex appeal (the assholes at Maxim will testify to that); her look is stylish but not overtly sexual. Her brand is about some fabulous unattainable New York City existence. SJP is a fashion icon, and those kinds of things don’t just happen. They’re planned.

Because Parker is and cultivates an image as a person with brains and integrity, it’s important to her to express a great deal of ambivalence towards the commercial aspects of her work. This ambivalence is a bit difficult to swallow. It seems that each one of her projects has to be reconfigured “so I don’t feel it’s vulgar. So I don’t feel it’s just arbitrary or mercenary.” She both professes to a great deal of involvement in these projects (she designs the perfume herself, really!), and laboriously distances herself from them. Her clothing line is actually an intervention in the fashion industry: it “runs up to size 22″ and has rock-bottom prices. This isn’t just spin: Bitten offers really nice clothes at the astounding price of $8.95, and that’s pretty cool. It doesn’t, of course, make Parker a saint or render her business venture any less of a business venture! We’re meant to give her points for feeling conflicted about her Garnier and Gap commercials, but ultimately, guilt or no guilt, she did the commercials, attached her name to a couple products, and took home the checks. As Jezebel points out, this is fine and harmless, and it was probably a good idea to keep SJP on television screens in the hiatus between TV show and movie. But wouldn’t we respect her more if she owned up to her choices instead of denying them?

Nussbaum and Parker spend much of the article wandering through the West Village bemoaning the cupcakes and expensive stores and flocks of cutesy girls. Of course, even they have to admit to the SJP influence on the neighborhood and the gentrification both heralded and perpetuated by Sex and the City. Parker’s in love with an old vision of New York, and laments the fact that “there’s just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colors, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone.” She has also always described SATC as an homage to New York City–but if for a second she imagines that some creative, democratic, and gritty version of the city appears in the show, she’s got to be kidding herself. More than it was ever about sex, SATC was about money. It created a fabulous New York lifestyle, based on club openings and brunches, and tied to a carefully orchestrated series of product placements. Nussbaum ludicrously suggests that “you would have had to concentrate hard to notice [the products] at all,” but seeing as the TBS tagline for SATC reruns is “More martinis, Manolos, and men on the way,” I’m pretty sure that the message got through.

So far from being subtle, in fact, the writers constructed entire plot points around specific products: Samantha gets her boyfriend a gig as the “Absolut Hunk”; “Sad Mac” is what happens when Carrie’s computer dies; Miranda becomes obsessed with her Tivo; Charlotte becomes obsessed with her Rabbit; Samantha vies with Lucy Liu over an Hermes bag; and Berger freaks out when Carrie buys him a Prada shirt. Believe me, I didn’t have to search at all to come up with these brand names. But the product placements in SATC don’t feel irritating or intrusive, as they might elsewhere–precisely because each one of these products is so integral to what the show is about: style, class, and consumption.

Nussbaum hints at the importance of money to the male/female dynamics on the show, but “as for Carrie, Parker rejects entirely my theory that she had any attraction, conscious or unconscious, to Big (or Aleks or Aidan, for that matter) because of his money. Carrie wasn’t like that! she says. Charlotte was, but Carrie wasn’t. Hey, she dated Berger, didn’t she? ‘I really don’t think that money was a criteria. It never would have occurred to her to take money from a man.’” I guess it was just a coincidence that all of Carrie’s boyfriends had money, that Aleks kept her for weeks in a Paris hotel, that Aidan offered to buy her apartment and the one next door, and that Big kept showing up in a long black town car driven by the faithful if unseen “Raul.” Sure, she dated Berger, but she also insisted on buying him a Prada shirt; it was very important to her to live as a wealthy woman, even if she wasn’t one. The fabulous New York lifestyle depended on Carrie dressing in very expensive clothing and being taken out to expensive dinners by rich men.

If Parker thinks money is indecent, she definitely thinks sex is too. Of course, Sex and the City is of special interest to this blog, as it was one of the first presentations of the sexually liberated woman, the first to ask if women could have sex like men. How unsettling, then, to see Parker now, promoting the Sex and the City movie while also refusing any implication in the sexual liberation movement. (Nussbaum condescendingly offers that “Kim Cattrall seems to be the last person waving the flag of third-wave sexual rebellion that the series championed early on.” Sexual freedom is just so distastefully late-nineties, isn’t it?)

With a disturbing “anxiety about purity” and a penchant for calling things “vulgar,” Parker is busily explaining that Carrie never appeared nude or used profanity. I have to admit, this truly disappoints me. For one thing, as executive producer, Parker had to have some investment in what else was going on the show; even if she didn’t bare much skin (except her midriff), the other characters certainly did, and that was part of what made the show provocative as well as great physical comedy (thanks to Kim Cattrall).

More than that, Carrie valued good sex, and her best and worst decisions were often motivated by sexual attraction. Even if she ended up with Big (and how could they not give the viewers what they’ve been trained to want?), Carrie seriously questioned these ideas of true love and marriage and family. Sex and the City was radical because it took sex seriously, but it looks like that history’s now being rewritten in the interest of brand management.

“vanessa hudgens”; “vanessa hudgens naked”; “vanessa hudgens naked pictures”; “sex fuck girls naked”; “sex children girls”; “vanessa hudgens pics”; “vanessa hudgens sex”; “naked vanessa hudgens”; “men who want to watch young girles have”; “pigtails sex”; “lesbians having sex naked”; “vanessa”; “women sex party”; “vanessa hudgens naked pics”; “girls watch men have sex”

I know. The name of this blog is Sex Like Men. There was bound to be some confusion. Which is exactly what concerns me–that, despite my wish not to judge people’s desires, I’m terribly dismayed every time I read these search terms. Is this really what people look for on the Internet? Obviously it is, and the truth is that I just didn’t want to know.

My reaction reminded me of the response to the recent Eliot Spitzer scandal. Across media outlets and private conversations, people were confronting the same conclusion: prostitution? cheating? losing control over one’s urges? This is what men do, and now we know for sure. I heard men joke about this on the radio, that the Spitzer scandal proved once and for all that men really are pigs. And I heard women ask each other nervously if this is just what all men are secretly like.

The notion that men are pigs, of course, relies on the basic assumption that men are full to the bursting with sexual desire. They want sex so badly and so often, they just can’t control their actions. (Caution: justification for rape is just around the corner.) And so, if this is the biological truth of what it means to be a man, isn’t it better that men channel these baser urges into meaningless sex acts (with or without payment) and save their truly loving feelings for the wives waiting at home? Let’s just be practical, right?

I’m skeptical. Saying that men are pigs sure does sound critical, but actually it’s nothing but a blithe excuse. It places all the blame on men’s supposedly insatiable sex drives. But surely men and women with strong, voracious sex drives can find joyful, respectful, maybe even legal outlets for their desires. Don’t sex fiends walk among us, living in a manner that is loving and faithful, in addition to safe and appropriate? I think they do. If men like Spitzer make poor decisions, it’s not because they can’t keep a check on their libidos. It’s because society allows and encourages men to act in ways that selfish, entitled, and disrespectful towards women. You heard me: I’m blaming the patriarchy. Saying that men are all pigs actually just lets everyone off the hook.

“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.”

Jill at Feministe sums up the issues here. But actually, Fredell is getting at a basic question of feminism. Does empowerment mean simply that women have the freedom to act like men? Or can they carve out another path, based on their own values, perhaps even in strict opposition to the male-imposed status quo? Rather than have sex just like men do, couldn’t women make an equally radical decision to not have sex at all? We’ve addressed this and other questions in this space, and there’s one thing we know for sure: what’s radical is the notion that women could make decisions about their sex lives without being judged, one way or another.

Fredell also misses something pretty basic about feminism. She discovers that, “women are subordinated in relationships as a result of ‘socially constructed norms.’ If men are commonly more promiscuous than women, it is only because the culture allows it.” Exactly. The same culture that encourages men to carry their sexual encounters like trophies also instructs women in the meaning of virtue: save yourself, repress your desire, and wait for true love to imbue your (otherwise empty) life with meaning. Fredell correctly rejects the traditionally masculine approach of sexual exploitation but then, instead of dismantling the double standard, she retreats deeper into it.

Fredell cautions women against the risks of sexual pleasure, blaming it all on the oxytocin. But doesn’t that approach chain us to biology—just at the moment when we’re meant to overcome our physical urges? (The True Love Revolution recommends going for a long run until desire passes.) If we’re going to be honest, we’ll see that the danger in sex is not about the oxytocin. It’s about the possibility that, as the maligned campus sex blogger, Lena Chen, pointed out, it just might feel good.

Chen’s story strikes the journalist, Randall Patterson, as excruciatingly simple—she likes sex, she puts it out there (never mind the public risk she too is taking). Then there’s Fredell: “The more she studied and learned, the more Fredell came to realize that women suffer from having premarital sex.” Randall thought the sex blogger was a bimbo, but, boy, was he enamored of Fredell’s intellectual journey to this place.

He may have been intrigued by their competing claims to feminism, but he also couldn’t help but employ the most reductive and stereotypical standards when evaluating the two women singled out to represent college culture.

Chen and Fredell described the event to me later, when I met them separately for lunch. Chen was a small Asian woman in a miniskirt and stilettos who ate every crumb of everything, including a ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote. Fredell, when the dessert menu came, paused at the prospect of a “chocolate explosion,” said, “I may as well — I mean, carpe diem, right?” And then reconsidered — she really wasn’t that hungry.

You’re right, Patterson. Women really are this simple. Sex, cake, it’s all pretty much a series of base desires that we either indulge with thoughtless, physical abandon, or, in the age-old tradition that equates a woman’s self-denial with her moral worth, we withhold.

In the end, Fredell speaks out of fear and confusion. Oral sex is “disgusting and disrespectful”? There’s a slight immaturity to her responses, a blinkered refusal to acknowledge that vast and fruitful part of human experience, sexuality. And that makes perfect sense to me–it’s a very reasonable reaction to have, if you’re not ready to have sex.

The thing is that even if you are ready to have sex, Fredell is right about one thing. The misogyny and misinformation indulged on college campuses, and throughout the world, is astounding, and hurtful. You have to be careful. You have to have a strong sense of self so as not to come out bruised. Of course, we might never get there–not with a madonna/whore story plastered across our national magazines, anyway.

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.)

Every cycle, there’s a medical emergency during a shoot; this time, it was, unsurprisingly, Heather who had a mild collapse. (Watch the clip here.) The way she phrased it, “I just pushed myself way past my limit.” What actually happened: she hadn’t eaten all day. The medic suggested food, for future reference.

It was just too much this episode. In the face of Sarah’s departure, Heather’s success felt offensive. Her demeanor is vulnerable and helpless, and her physical appearance is sickly (or, as one of the other contestants put it, “dead”); she is rewarded for these very qualities—chosen to star in a music video, for instance, because she has that under-nourished, ghostly vibe. It’s amazing to me how consistently frailty in women gets re-interpreted as sexy and beautiful.

Especially when Tyra means to do better. Sure her methods are often questionable (fat suits, anyone?), but I think her heart’s in the right place. She really wants us to “use our loveliness.” Which is why I was so disappointed a little earlier this season, when Tyra sat the girls down for a heart-to-heart about body image. (Now that she’s a daytime television life coach, she likes to explore people’s psyches, or at least their vulva puppets.) She brought on Cycle 6 winner Danielle to tell her weight-loss story from inside the industry. After her 2006 win, Dani found herself pressured to lose weight, so she called Tyra for advice. Tyra said, “Let’s figure out a plan, how you don’t sacrifice your spirit, you don’t sacrifice your health, and you can live your dream.”

So what brilliant plan did they settle on? Danielle reports: “I decided to start eating healthy, exercising—and I got the weight off.”

Oh.

You can observe Danielle above. A skinny girl, no question. And losing weight in a “healthy” way (as opposed to starvation, I guess they mean) is still, actually, losing weight. It doesn’t matter how you got the weight off, once you cross a certain threshold in your body mass index, you are underweight and unhealthy. I guess people think they can throw the word “exercise” into a weight loss plan and thereby avoid the stigma of an eating disorder. Actually, compulsive exercising is a dangerous and incredibly common manifestation of disordered eating and weight problems.

Anyway, after that deeply disappointing conclusion, the conversation devolved into the rest of the girls complaining about how they had always struggled with body image in the opposite direction (“I was always too thin!” wails Heather), while Sarah expressed some of her frustrations at the criticism she’d been receiving. Here’s the clip: skip ahead 3 minutes for the pow-wow on body image.

I know that America’s Next Top Model supposedly functions according to industry standards. In theory, they choose winners who can succeed as models in the real world. Someone like Sarah probably wouldn’t get hired as a runway model; it’s possible that neither would thinner contestants like Keenyah and Anchal, who also came under fire for their weight in the judging room. But the thing is, ANTM winners don’t actually go on to become top models–at least not so far. It’s unclear to us laypeople at home if they can even get modeling work after this show. It’s about the process, not the prize.

Not only that, but the longer it’s on the air and the more ridiculous it gets, America’s Next Top Model takes on a status of its own, one that is separate from the actual workings of the fashion industry. Sure, most of the audience likes to laugh at Tyra and semi-ironically engage with the competition, but we’re also watching because we love to critique women’s bodies, and we’re just as susceptible to the show’s messages about beauty. The producers and judges surely understand that, or they wouldn’t even let plus-sized (or average-sized) women be contestants at all. They bring nontraditional women on the show in order to prove a point, to make progress, to begin some kind of cultural work. It’s just that every single time, they fail to follow through.

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.

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.”

On the other hand, we have Serena. We’re told she used to be a bad girl. Right now, she seems okay and she ended the last episode sweetly kissing her new beau in the streets. Nonetheless, the first couple episodes were taken up with Serena’s reputation and her integrity. Her all-time humiliation occurs at a fancy brunch when she’s outed to the world for having slept with her best friend Blair’s boyfriend. (The viewer, too, is treated to a hazy scene of bar sex between, what, sixteen-year-olds?) Surrounded by a circle of critics—her former best friend, the boy she slept with, the boy she likes, and the sinister rapist-boy—her own poor choices are thrown in her face: she’s shamed. No one blames it on their world at this point; rather it’s Serena’s own immorality. In order for the show to move forward, she’ll have to prove she’s a reformed, repentant woman.

Meanwhile, the wooden box of a boyfriend, Nate, takes absolutely no flack for having cheated on his very affectionate girlfriend. (Blair gets my pity for those early scenes in which she’s into her boyfriend Nate, she loves him, she wants to have sex with him, and his distraction amounts to nothing less than rejection. Top that off with his father’s financial coercion, and it turns out that Blair, the queen bee, is the one being used.)

As for Dan, we loved him at first for his manly defense of his sister from the evil rapist, whom no one else was going to hold accountable. But it seems that every episode he has to prove his sweet, poor kid status (‘I only live in WILLIAMSBURG, after all’) with an overheated defense of a woman’s honor and an attempt to beat up an Alpha Male. Is that the only way to be a nice guy in this town?

This show offers what may or may not be a realistic portrayal of Upper East Side wealth and it does so by flaunting all manner of risky behavior. Girls sleep with their boyfriends while their parents socialize downstairs, fourteen-year-olds down martinis (gin), and everyone is dressed much better than I can afford. Next time someone writes an article about a decline in our teenagers’ moral values, I’m sure they can look to Gossip Girl for material. The thing is, the show confronts a lot of taboos, mostly for shock value, and it’s probably pretty harmless. What I do mind is what it ends up saying about sex.

I put it to you, Gossip Girl. What’s the point of being brazen and daring if not also to be radical and progressive? Why go to the trouble of breaking boundaries if only to reinforce conservative cultural norms?

XOXO,

Sex Like Men