Susie Bright on SATC
As usual, inimitable Susie nails it:
For her, it’s like Iggy Pop spotting a CBGB T-shirt for sale at the mall. What “Sex and the City” did was co-opt a very real, very important movement at the time that was dedicated to female sexuality and was in no small part spearheaded by Bright. Unfortunately, “in some cases, like with ‘Sex and the City,’ the fantasy became bigger than the reality of women speaking about their sexuality.” As “Sex and the City” returns, “everyone knows who Sarah Jessica Parker is, but Sarah Jessica Parker is not a pioneer in sex-positive feminism.”
The women of “Sex and the City,” asserts Bright, aren’t political. “They’re desperate to get married. They obsess about their marital status.” And they turned the sexual revolution for women of the new millennium into a business. To make her point, Bright references a recent New Yorker essay, “The Fall of Conservatism” by George Packer, in which Pat Buchanan paraphrased social theorist Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Comments Bright: “‘Sex and the City’ is the racket part of what once was recognizable as the sexual self-emancipation of the feminist movement.” For her, the commodification of the 21st century female sexual revolution hits too close to home. “I can’t watch these women, you know, make asses of themselves and be so petty and small-minded about sexual possibility. I take it too personally.”
Says Bright, “I feel like someone drove over me with a truck. I feel invisible. I feel — you know what I feel like? I feel like Trotsky when Stalin airbrushed him out of all the pictures of the Russian Revolution. I feel like the revisionist version of the sexual liberation movement is so stupid and shallow. If the original idea was about self-knowledge, and being orgasmically aware, and large and in charge, and independent, and not pathetically hung up on a man’s approval, then the show is a failure.” But, she adds, “I take it very seriously. I’m sure the people who make the show would say, ‘Lighten up. Susie Bright — what a pain.’”
This is what bothers me so much about Sex and the City.
And the money quote:
You have to laugh sometimes, how these things finally enter the mainstream vocabulary, what becomes exploitable, and what becomes lost.
And once again I find myself feeling like I did when I first read Full Exposure ten years ago: wishing that I could be like Susie when I grow up.
Yeah, I’ve never been that into SATC, exactly because I felt it was shallow. It’s just not something you can say to people, though, becuase they take it personally – “If you think SATC is shallow, then you must think that I AM SHALLOW!” – and frankly, I graduated in 1998, and I don’t need the drama of that conversation.
Slightly unrelated, I’ve noticed a lot of that is happening to me lately – people around me are making things ALL ABOUT THEM, and I’m like, dude, not about you. About me. Or about some other person. But, not about you.
I never could stand how the women always seemed so miserable without a man around.
Nikki,
I hear you. What’s with the drama? I mean, no offense to Drama Club, of course – different kind of drama! ;) I just like to minimize drama in my life.
And yeah, I graduated in 1998… ten years ago to the date, as of this coming Friday. Yeesh.
Ren,
Exactly! Not exactly the portrait of liberation, is it?
I recall a feminist article written while the TV series of SATC was still running, that characterised the problem thus:
“Feminism finds fault with the idea of ‘man’ (or masculinity), but can accept that an individual man is a decent human; Sex and the City finds fault with every specific example of a man, but idolises the idea of ‘a man’”
Re: SatC characters need a man to live.
Samantha and Miranda never needed a man, nor did they ever really want to be in a relationship. Samantha, notoriously so. She did wind up in a relationship; however, broke it off in the movie stating that while she loves him, she loves herself more and didn’t like her life revolving around him. She acknowledged that she had become “one of those women.” Miranda did end up marrying Steve, but only after she got pregnant and gave birth (and then thought oh, I should try to work it out with the father). Miranda has always been much more focused on becoming partner at the law firm than dealing with men. Steve, i think, started off as a one night stand.
Charlotte, of course, has always wanted the white picket fence life with a husband, 2.5 kids and a dog. And Carrie was just desperate for love – any kind of love really.
Of course, I say this as someone who always felt more like a Miranda than any of the other characters.. so my opinion may be a bit colored.
Wait a minute… are there movie spoilers in your comment, Jen? (I’m not going to see the movie, but if there are spoilers I feel I should flag it for other people!)
One small spoiler about Samantha, which really shouldn’t come to a surprise to anyone who watched the series. Everything about Miranda happened pre-movie.
Sorry about that!
Thanks, Jen, for what I think is a much more accurate portrayal of the show. That article lost any sort of credibility with me at the line “They’re desperate to get married.” Bullshit. Anyone who watched the show knows that, as you illustrated, marriage was never a priority for one of the characters (though she got married) and was an adamant aversion for another.
I never watched SATC as a bastion of feminism. I watched it as entertainment. (Though it is not an anti-feminist show.) It’s a television comedy, not a documentary.
Clearly, I enjoy the show. I think it presented a variety of perspectives on sex and relationships while pushing the envelope of socially acceptable dialogue on sex. It’s not a show with a political agenda and it never claimed to be one. I actually think that by not taking a direct political approach, it probably did much more to increase the dialogue.
Sorry, but Susie doesn’t nail it. She doesn’t actually know the subject she’s criticizing. There’s plenty to criticize in SATC (as with anything else), but it needs to be done by people who have actually watched the show.
I gotta agree with Jen and jt. SATC is hardly revolutionary, but it was nice for those of us who believe in personal, sexual and financial independence for women to see a show with characters who fit those traits being portrayed positively rather than as soap opera vamps/ tramps/dragon ladies, or otherwise secretly desperate to throw it all away and get married.
*shrug* I guess to each their own. I believe in personal, sexual and financial independence for women (obviously!) and SATC rubs me in the worst way.
Well, I wonder if that has less to do with how it portrays female sexuality and power, and more with its focus on superficial things you’re not interested in like shoes and fashion and social climbing?
I just know that I often found it very, very funny and that was the primary reason I watched. Not everyone would, however.
Well, I think that’s part of it. It’s true that I don’t have much interest in shopping, fashion, shoes (much to Jenny’s chagrin) etc.
I’ve seen about 4-5 episodes and all of them left me feeling surly. I don’t think the superficial topics alone would be enough to cause surliness, just disinterest. I think it was more the vibe I got that they’re saying being interested in all these things, and acting a certain way, and talking a certain way about men and sex, and gossiping, etc. is the model of modern empowerment.
(Not really saying what I mean very well… might try again after dinner.)
One of the problems, as exhibited in the SATC link in your most recent post, is that people go on and on and on about how SATC is not about feminism, but only talk about SJP / Carrie. Newsflash: She wasn’t the only character. But this is to be expected from people who never really watched the show.
I should have a “blog SATC” party. I’ll rent Season 1 and we’ll go to town on our laptops.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume they never watched the show. They have plenty of valid criticisms of it.
The show also changed a great deal over the years from when it first went on the air to now, when the movie is wrapping things up that were left unresolved from the finale. As someone mentioned above, when it began Miranda was single-mindedly career-driven, and only when she unexpectedly became pregnant did the wheels set in motion for her to end up in a marriage with a child. Carrie went from so violently opposed to marriage that she got hives when trying on a wedding dress, to this movie beginning with her planning her wedding. (I presume I am not revealing any spoilers with that info since it’s all over the previews.)
It’s funny, the show started when I was in college and I rarely watched it for the first few seasons. I remember that I was in college, because Ann Coulter started writing for the newly created George magazine back before she took on her full whackjob persona, and one of the first articles by her that I remember reading while in college was a criticism of the show. She complained that “real women” don’t date, screw, or talk about dating and screwing, in the way portrayed on the show. She accused it of being gay male dating and sex patterns pasted onto female characters that bore no resemblance to real New York women. And at the time, I was too young to really have friends whose lives or experiences matched that of the characters to know if it was an accurate portrayal or not. As I got older, the show started to resonate with me more and I did think that plenty of the sex and relationships situations played out in later episodes mirrored things that were occurring in my life and my girlfriends’ lives.
So, that’s the incredibly long way of saying that I don’t know when you last attempted to watch an episode, but I think the show evolved and our own attitudes toward it can evolve as we get older and have different experiences. And someone whose views are based on one very brief snapshot from watching an episode or two may not be aware of all the many ways in which it changed, grew, and in some ways perhaps disproved the assumptions you might make by watching just one or two episodes.
The last episode I watched was in either late 2003 or early 2004 (I was living in Texas at the time). Don’t know what part of the series that was in. I remember there was some ridiculous sub-plot about one of the character’s dogs having its period (?).
If the show changed and became more “marriage-oriented” later on, I think that’s a shame (even if I don’t like the seemingly materialistic gossipy nature of it otherwise, anyway)… just goes to show TV can’t ever deviate too far from the societal norm, right? Just like how on Grey’s Anatomy (SPOILER ALERT FROM LIKE THREE SEASONS AGO), they ended up having Christina have an ectopic pregnancy… I thought for a fleeting second that they might actually have a woman on a network TV show choose and go through with an abortion and not hate herself. But, alas, no.
“I don’t think it’s fair to assume they never watched the show. They have plenty of valid criticisms of it.”
I said they never really watched the show. Watching a few episodes doesn’t suddently mean that you have this valuable insight, especially when you characterize all characters as desperate to get married. Someone who says that clearly never more than an episode or two.