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.
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