Posted on 06/19/2018 9:52:38 AM PDT by DeweyCA
In the same way that the show had an outsized influence on women’s fashion, so too did it influence their behavior. The latter didn't work out so well.
“Some people are settling down, some people are settling, and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.”
“The most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love, well, that’s just fabulous.”
— Carrie Bradshaw
This month marks the twenty-year anniversary of the iconic television series “Sex and the City.” With smart writing and fantasy fashion, it’s easy to see why the show was beloved. It featured an irresistible ensemble of women strutting down the street, heads thrown back in laughter, looking forward and looking fabulous, unmoored, but somehow seemingly on course. Carrie Bradshaw was winsome, witty, and chic — imperfect, yet perfectly enviable. In watching her, fans had a sneaking feeling that they might be living the wrong life, and that somewhere bright city days filled with brunches and purses, brownstones and love affairs awaited them.
In the same way that the show had an outsized influence on women’s fashion, so too did it influence their behavior. Inevitably, there was a vast gulf between how Carrie’s life seemed and how it translated into reality for her fans. Casual hook-ups after a night of drinking Cosmos is decidedly less glamorous in real life. The material aspiration encouraged by the show is imprudent for all but an elite few. Even fewer can sustain the licentious sexuality without lasting physical and emotional wounds. The societal physics of a growing hookup culture result in an increasing number of men who are coarse and entitled and women who feel used and discarded.
Sophisticated moderns think of “Leave it to Beaver” as a contrived reflection of a societally imposed, but ultimately unfulfilling domesticity. We should now see “Sex and the City” as the “Leave it to Beaver” of the sexual revolution: a glossy representation at odds with the sad reality on the ground. Our new conception of the good life for women as highly ambitious sexual libertines has created a generation of Stepford single girls pantomiming a life of glamor that can feel as hollow as it does harmful.
The show’s stepchild, “Girls,” was in many ways a response to this inauthenticity. While reflecting the real sadness and complexity that stems from a hook-up culture, it reassured women that this is just the cost of their empowerment. But reflecting reality turns into validating it, which quickly becomes normalizing it. What we do not get from either of these shows is a way out of that reality.
If there’s a way out it’s in questioning our presuppositions about sex. What have women gained from this experimental reorientation of our understanding of how men and women ought to live and love? That’s the discussion we need.
The traditional understanding of sex is based on the nature of the act itself which has as its purpose the goal of emotionally and physically uniting two people and establishing families. It’s life-giving both in the way it demands each person give his or her entire life to the other permanently and unreservedly, and in the quite literal way in which lovers give their whole bodies to one another and create children, further bonding the two. Trying to use it as a means of narrowing down potential life partners denies the very nature of sex. Hook-ups confuse our ability to assess potential partners by creating unwarranted emotional attachments and the inevitable trust issues that come with the dissolution of every love affair.
Still, the answer isn’t to simply look backward. Correctives were needed for the “Leave it to Beaver” world. There was surely some repression and dysfunction in the old domesticity, and in certain ways male and female relationships can truly be said to be healthier now. But a corrective that rejected the intelligible nature of the act of sex has left a culture disoriented and dysfunctional in ways that are far more difficult to repair the further unmoored we become.
Yet still the revolutionaries insist it be taboo to even question the tenants of the sexual revolution. They’ve replaced dogmas built on nature with dogmas built on will: the good is determined merely by my act of choosing it. This sets us up for a clash of wills as we’ve seen painfully in the revelations of the #MeToo movement.
But nature has a way of having the last word over even the strongest of wills. Pleasure as a highest good quickly becomes elusive. Any man digging down into a rabbit hole of porn addiction can attest to that. We create a society of boorish men then complain about the diminishing pool of marriage prospects. Virtue is difficult for everyone, but it becomes impossible if it’s not even identified as a goal worthy of pursuit. Without virtue, we lose the ability to freely choose what we ought.
The sexual revolution promised freedom, but ended up enslaving its advocates and their acolytes alike. In its wake are generations of victims and layers of injustice. One bubbly television show is certainly not to blame for all of this. It came years after the revolution had firmly embedded into the culture. But in giving an enticing yet profoundly dishonest picture of what such a life would be like it surely multiplied the revolution’s effects.
My husband said that and I think he said Ann Coulter pointed that out as well.
I’ve never seen the show but I can gather from the comments about the characters I’ve read that it is not female behavior.
Why guys and gals seem to thing this show represents women is a mystery.
Sort of like the song "before he cheats" written by a sodomite but certain guys latch on to it as proof "women are evil/crazy/whores".
What a mindless world we live in when a shallow TV show has a significant effect of n people.
Your TV hates you and your “smart” TV spies on you!
I watched 5 minutes of it and thereafter referred to it as “Wrecks In the City.”
Exactly,
Sex and the City was basically 4 gay men being portrayed as straight women, because it was easier to sell then to actually have 4 gay guys whining about their “sex” lives.
That rings a bell of truth!
We pretend that working women have careers that they love. What real working women have is a wish to stay home with the kids, at least until kindergarten. Pre-feminism, women could do that.
I never saw the show either. I will probably depart this vale of tears without ever having done so.
Sluts and the City.
They were the most pathetic, hyper-sexed, grovelling idiots who were not so unlike drama queen gay men and permanently single women.
The show was entertaining and funny. I enjoyed it. That said it was ridiculous. They all ended up getting happily married in their late 30s or early 40s after working their way through 4-5 dudes (or more) per year.
Uhhhh sorry. No. That’s not what happens in the real world. Once they hit 30, women’s desirability in the dating market plummets. 30 is not the time for women to sorta maybe possibly start to think about settling down. Look up the percentage chance a never married 35 year old woman has of ever getting married. We’re talking “struck by lightning” odds.
We are biologically pre-programmed to like/be attracted to certain things. That’s not society. That’s not “images in the media” as feminists like to claim. That’s biology. It’s true all over the world and has been true throughout history. Men have a very strong preference for youth in a mate since that is most likely to produce healthy offspring.
Around 2000, I watched three episodes of the series. To be honest, I just didn’t see any great humor out of the series, and it was mostly about several NY City women who seemed ‘confused’.
It was like the Caveman series....maybe after two of those, I was finished. Doctor Ken was another loser series.
I've never watched this show because - well - I'm a man. But These quotes make it seem a celebration of narcissism. Which makes sense since that's much of what modern feminism is about.
“But nature has a way of having the last word over even the strongest of wills.”
Reality always gets its revenge.
Great article.
“I warn my teen Sunday School kids that what they see on TV and in the movies is NOT reality.”
That goes especially for the “news”.
Oh come on, now you’re going to tell me that the music people listen to for hours, weeks, months and years can have an impact on them, too.
/sarc
I was in grade school when I learned that fashion designers for women’s clothes are mostly faggies.
Their favorite saying, “Women don’t dress for men, they dress for other women” always had a queer ring to it.
Never watched SITC. Never watched Seinfeld for the same reason. Why waste time watching super sophisticated New Yorkers bemoan their ultra hip lives while living in the very center of the universe, itself?
I’d rather read the Farmers’ Almanac than watch that cr@p. At least I’d know more afterward.
Seinfield was _never_ sophisticated.
The stupidity was part of the fun of the show...
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