Barbara Kay on Sex and the City: “SATC projects an ideological fantasy rather than a probing exploration of modern courtship. The framing notion is that women are in every important way the same as men, that serial relationships -- with no permanent commitment in view -- are an end in themselves, and that intimacy is a fungible accessory to a sexual hook-up. Most of all, this subversive ideology implies that marriage is no better than other sexually-motivated relationship contracts, willfully ignoring persuasive counterclaims for marriage's unique power to enrich relationship quality, arguments from tradition, sociological research, and plain common sense.”
Sex and the City
Catherine Orenstein, on why Sex and the City is a feminist's worst nightmare:
More dated still, especially for a show that supposedly celebrates the joys of single life and female friendship, is its preoccupation with snagging a man. The characters are a walking compendium of modern female angst — the quest for a relationship, the ticking of the biological clock, the fear of aging out of the marriage market. Not that these aren't sometimes true and even potentially funny themes of single life. But when did haute couture fashion and prêt-à-porter men come to eclipse all the other elements of independent womanhood?
Later:
[T]he heroines of "Sex and the City" are vapid, materialistic and hysterical. The show makes short shrift of their intellect, they have no causes, no families #&212; with the exception of Miranda, who has a son — and their jobs (what little we see of them) seem to exist to enable office trysts. Like Candace Bushnell's columns in The New York Observer upon which the show was based, their lives are flattened backdrops for their dates, and their dates, like their shoes, are accessories — nice looking, often uncomfortable, and seasonal.
Echoes of Danielle Crittenden. See also: Sex and the City Sucks.
Lee Siegel: “[S]ex and the City is so much the creature of its fantasy of New York that its characters do not resemble any actual person who lives in New York. The four women never, until a couple of spats in the later seasons, fight with each other; and never express jealousy of each other; and never—except for Miranda when she is pregnant—collapse from exhaustion or work late. It is not even clear how the four of them—a scattered socialite, a workaholic and ambitious corporate lawyer, a power-hungry nymphomaniac, a newspaper columnist so narcissistic that she is hooked up mainly with her own clothes—would ever have become friends.”
Pretty much like any sitcom/drama based in New York City, the show is not about the characters' lives so much as about the myth and fantasy people have about New York City itself. I watched an episode the other day where Carrie and Samantha were on a train to San Francisco, and were so desperately horny that that they mistook committed, married men watching the game in one car for a bachelor party. Also, an ugly man who has no business getting laid gets laid, simply because he admited to her that he was obsessed with the woman's lips. The bachelor pad atmosphere they found themselves in—despite the fact that she even said out loud it was tacky—seemed to have helped.
Yeah, okay, sure.
(link via cheesedip.com)
