wordsmithlind

Note: I was asked by another blog to rewrite my previous SaTC piece with hopes it getting on that blog which pays a nice sum per piece, but it did not, so now it is here on my proletarian blog instead…  

After a recent discussion with a female friend, I’ve come once again to question why intelligent, independent women continue to view Sex and the City as the mouthpiece of emancipation when it is so wholly the opposite:  

I see the show and the movie as nothing more than a reinforcement of cultural and gender stereotypes, only reworked from a slightly edgier perspective.  I see women characters created by men saying things that men wish to believe all women say.  I see women characters doing things that men believe all women do.  I see women dependent on men having conversations revolving around men, their lives circling the male universe; I see nothing more than urban Cinderellas and Betty Freidan choking on this bastardization of feminism.  

The women I know discuss politics, the environment, social issues and equality; the women on TV have deep conversations about shoes and designer labels.  The women I know read Judy Butler and know of The Feminine Mystique; the women on TV are never seen with a book.  The women I know have sex and relationships, but also an independent life outside of it.  The women on TV can think of nothing else.  The women I know are independent, yet at the same time seek independent representations of themselves on television.  The women I know watch Sex and the City and somehow believe the women on TV are free and liberated.  The women I know are nothing like Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte, so why do these same women want to believe they are similar to these shallow, superficial, self-centered, and male-dependent depictions of women?  This I do not know.

The characters of Sex and the City are not liberated.  The faster this is realized the better off society will be.  Instead of rehashing women into clichés, why doesn’t TV try something truly revolutionary and give honest representations of women who do not use sex and sexuality as a means to empowerment?  Sex and the City, like all television shows, is a for-profit venture.  Like all good shows it found a niche market that had yet to be touched and now many people are rich while others are left believing stereotypes and gender roles that women and feminists have been fighting for the past 50 years.

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