Tynan's Anger

I thought we were done with Sex and the City. I had hoped that a television show that determined feminism to be professional women who can only talk about sex and shopping had outlived its welcome. Well, the movie that should never have been made has now had the best opening weekend ever for an R-rated comedy, and has even trumped Indiana Jones for box-office supremacy. And I'm here to bury it, not praise it. Why? Because I can (note the sarcasm).

Sex and the City is a microcosm with everything wrong with the treatment of professional women in this country. There's nothing wrong with successful women being able to screw around, but the show depicts women who have everything going right for them as still hopelessly dependent on men to make their lives somewhat meaningful. There's also the constant, never ending dependency on consumerism in their lives. When men aren't plentiful, material goods will have to do, usually clothing that's purpose is to attract men.

No one seems to remember that the show was created by a man, or that men wrote nearly half of the episodes and directed just about all of them. Darren Star, the creator, is an openly gay man who doesn't seem to know how to write women other than as a gay men. What's worse is that so many women who have no place identifying with the show somehow did (a fact spoofed on the Simpsons, when Patti and Selma Bouvier commented that the show "Nookie in New York" was so like their life"). And there have been a whole slew of imitators, such as Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia that, to borrow a phrase from Cinematical's Ryan Stewart, are possibly the two worst things to happen to New York since 9/11.

Apparently this depiction of women is only getting stronger, and has now trumped the depiction of say, a hard-assed Russian spy and a top notch archaeologist who can outdrink frickin' Indiana Jones. This is why I want to date a girl who has as much of a sense of fashion as I do, which mainly consists of having few pieces of clothing in their wardrobe that are not incorrectly sized and/or stained.

Labels: bad movies, feminism, here's what's wrong with the world today., sex and the city