Cultural phenomenon has distorted views of women for long enough

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
May 19, 2008

The Sex and the City movie just premiered in London, and when it arrives in North America on May 30 there will no doubt be crazed fans heading to the film wearing Swarovski-crystal-encrusted everything. The problem with Sex and the City has never been the show itself; it's the people who watch it.

I mean, yes, it is a force of evil, but so are a lot of things — the craze for all-brown decorating, Botox and Restylane post-facialism, the Bushes, discount airfares — that we bought or backed.

The phenomenon of Sex and the City was forced upon us, like sex we didn't particularly want, and now the kid is already in high school. We're used to those four awful characters, Carrie, Samantha, and the other two, and it has distorted us. People who liked them are having pink vapours right now over the exciting! girlie! movie! and I can't stand those people. They fill me with such misanthropy that I'm thinking of the Skellig Islands.

The Skelligs are two sticks of black rock off the Irish coast, among the most remote, forbidding places on earth. I will arise and go now, nine bean rows will I plant, but it wouldn't make any difference because the Skelligs are so bleak they can't sustain vegetation. When life gets bad, I dream of them, a place without annoying people who giggle about what they call "pussy" or squeal when that jittery piano theme music comes on, as brittle as the money-hungry nerves of a "single gal," and yes, that's how Carrie Bradshaw refers to herself.

I do love cheap entertainment. I have the summer release date for the new summer Get Smart movie written on my calendar. But men aren't going to watch Steve Carell play Maxwell Smart and start referring to their girlfriends as Agent 99, are they? They aren't going to buy shoe phones and ask their boss for a private meeting in the Cone of Silence. There's light comedy and there's real life.

If you can tell the difference between Sex and the City and real life, you're fine. But millions of viewers can't. The show is celebrated for showing New York women screwing, smoking, drinking, treating lovers badly, behaving selfishly, being seriously un-bright, blowing money, partying with damaged friends, all the things we deplore when men do them.

But in real life, we don't think these things are automatically praiseworthy. The cruelty of Sex and the City is the way it preys on mentally and emotionally vulnerable women and preaches gormlessness. I don't understand why the characters spend their lives pursuing men. Any woman can get laid any time, but the show seems to need a fake hook.

List aloud

Sex and the City has always been a magnet for dimwits, but it is a magnet with genuine influence. Here are some things that were considered wrong before Carrie Bradshaw (Hint: Read them aloud in that honeyed voice she affects in the voiceover):

1. Taking your husband and kids to Medieval Times, getting drunk and making a date with the waiter. Medieval Times is wrong to begin with, but that's a taste crime, fair wench. What do you do when you sober up?
2. Having yourself sterilized and not mentioning that fact pre-wedding to your husband. What do you do when he starts yearning out loud for a family?
3. Referring to yourself as a "girl" in your column when you are over 18, or even 25, or even 30.

Here's what you do after Sex and the City has been in the cultural mainstream for eight years.

1. You call the waiter and keep the date.
2. You string him along for years and break his heart when he finds out.
3. Eight years later, you are still calling yourself a "girl." Flash-forward: you are a 62-year-old girl typing out your column on a plug-in Barcalounger in your long johns, favouring your girlish artificial hips.

Fashionable

Smart young women tell me that Sex and the City is only a fashion show. If that's so, why does no one watch it with the sound off? And why would a sane person go deeply into debt for garments? Toby Young, a British journalist who messed up his professional life by being truthful about the worst New Yorkers, says he has seen New York women up close and the show's assertion of female power is "fraudulent. Once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those … in Jane Austen. Women are second-class citizens who are expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic well-being."

He damns further. "Sex and the City is the equivalent of one of those Soviet propaganda films in which the factory workers are depicted as happy, singing citizens of tomorrow. The truth is that they are wretched, unhappy and isolated. The key to their survival is not the sisterhood, but a combination of slimming pills and anti-depressants." Skelligs, here I come.

The show is ostensibly about sex but really about money. I have to buy all new underwear and also I want to be dead, is what I thought after my "research." That's not what other women conclude. They think, because they have been told this, that everything they do is golden. The loathsome Lindsay Soll (you must read it) writes on Entertainment Weekly's website, "I am a Carrie … To me, Sex and the City wasn't just a TV show … it taught me that it's okay to be me, no matter how flawed I may be."

But what if it's not okay, Lindsay? What if your only attributes are a hard heart and an empty mind?

Pass the sick bag, Carrie. I'm off to the Skelligs where I'll spend my days alone, whipped by the wind with my mouth open to catch the rain and sucking on a gannet's egg for nourishment, but I can't take this folly anymore.