Same Song, New Shoes: Sex & the City's Finale

Last night, under the watchful, and apparently teary, gaze of millions of women (and probably one or two men) around the country, the popular HBO series "Sex & the City" ended. For me, the series conclusion was just another routine removal of a season pass from my TiVO system; for others, the last episode of Sex & the City's long run was a heart-wrenching end to a love affair. I admit, with some amount of shame and disappointment in myself, that I did watch this show off and on for the last couple of years. I found the show occasionally funny, in a bawdy way, and sometimes even compelling. Its momentous finale was far less than momentous, as all such finales are, and cast the girls' lives in a frame that would sate the most romantic sentimentalists among us. To hear various commentators, including the writers and actors employed on the show, one would think that Sex & the City, drippy ending not withstanding, is not only the pinnacle of sitcom performance, but something entirely new, something...revolutionary. I would argue that Sex & the City is not only typical of today's thirty minute comedies, but is even more (dare I say) dangerous to the general happiness of women than shows like Friends and Will & Grace.

Sex & the City debuted innocently (though most would probably say provocatively), hoping perhaps to shed a favorable light on the new trend of upwardly mobile, urban single women who are allegedly choosing networks of friendships over the circa-1950's nuclear family. While I cannot be sure about the statistical data on professional, single women, I can say with some degree of certainty that not many similar gaggles exist in New York. In my experience, groupings, at least in this city, consist mostly of loose and fluid affiliations. People in New York are extremely busy, often frazzled and at wit's end with the complications and difficulties of living in the most expensive and dense city in the US. Above all, New York is a town of great mobility: hundreds of thousands of people leave apartments, neighborhoods, and finally the island of Manhattan itself, usually for more welcoming climes, every year. And every year hundreds of thousands come into our town as well. For some of us, this massive ebb and flow of humanity, this anonymity in a changing crowd of millions, is part of New York's charm. But a tight little clique of four gals who are not even college or work buddies? This is not only not representative, this is positively anti-NYC.

The small screen specializes in ludicrous fantasy, particularly when it comes to illustrating the character of the Big Apple, so the mere ridiculousness of the girls' relationships is not my chief complaint about the show. The more important and downright infuriating problem with Sex & the City is the very message - women love sex in the amount and even the way that men do. Furthermore, we can obtain equality with men by engaging in casual sex so long as we have fundamentally strong connections with people to whom we have no blood or legal relation. So in other words, we can be equal with men if we act like men, want the same ends as men, make no demands on men. That might be a nice theory except that women are not the same as men - whether for biological or sociological (or some combination of both) reasons, women generally are highly selective about their sexual partners, tend more toward monogamous relationships, and have some deeply programmed desire to have a family. Women, unlike men, do not have the luxury of waiting until our fifties to settle down. The biological clock is not a myth. But the transfer of a man's testosterone-driven sex drive to a psychologically healthy female is a myth (one that I suspect a man initially created).

On the one hand, the show claims to explode a stereotype - women need to get married and have children in order to be happy. But they wildly promote a much more diminishing stereotype - women are creatures of the physical and we live in a state of superficial materialism, where we constantly hanker for more useless stuff to improve our appearance. Though all of the women are college-educated and have solid, even creative, professional jobs, they never speak of literature, paintings, economics, politics, the performing arts, technology, or even movies. The standard fare for the foursome's weekly diner brunch is blow jobs, Manolo Blahnik, and the newest haute lounge (where they apparently go to pick up men). All four of them are quite svelte, only Miranda gained any appreciable weight during the show's six-year run (because she was actually pregnant). Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist, appears in the most silly, revealing, and clearly expensive couture. Here is a writer who has shelves of shoes and not books, who reads Vogue and not The New Yorker, who wants the latest Prada bag, not Paul Auster.

In the end of course, the women all have become part of spousal relationships that fulfill them not as much sexually but emotionally. So even the stereotype the show attempted to discard, they embraced, with gusto. The Carrie character is the worst abuser here - she winds up with Mr.Big, having finally forced the quintessential bad boy to quit his yo-yo like treatment of her and commit. How does she succeed in this seemingly impossible task? Why, through a simple application of The Rules - she does not return his calls, tells him that she is done with his wanton ways, and even flits off to Paris in the final coup de grace.

The real lesson of Sex & the City is that women need men, and we can get them by acting the way we are supposed to act, by denying them and giving in to eating disorders and shopping sprees. As far as I am concerned, the show's producers, writers, and actors have all conspired to help deliver another death blow to feminism. Is the show trying to tell us that this is all we can expect from our new-found and hard-won freedom - high-heeled shoes that break your feet and your bank account? In the end, Sex & the City just reinvented the same tired role of women serving men as the objects of desire, only now there is an expectation hanging in the air that our performances will be glad of heart, light of step.

Perfectly Legal

David Cay Johnston recently came out with "Perfectly Legal," yet another polemic about the politics of greed and the coming fiscal disaster created by a lethal combination of tax policies, the massive wave of Baby Boom retirees, and the demise of Social Security. John Gilbraith, in his New York Times review, dispatches the book easily - the rhetoric is aflame with liberal rage, but largely empty of real substance. More importantly perhaps, Johnston does not apparently deal with common conservative arguments and according to Gilbraith and others, will therefore appeal only to the converted and not the coveted "swing voters."

I have to admit that such rhetoric will not win any arguments with your typical fiscal conservative - who would calmly and rationally dispose of all such nonsense as liberal hysteria. But I do think that using this kind of argumentation with many voters would be effective, since they pretend to like Bush for the tax breaks they receive, but the real truth is that they like him and will vote for him because they have been propagandized. Although I am a big fan myself of pragmatic policy choices, I think many swing voters are more inclined toward emotional responses to candidates and platforms.

So number one if we're going to kick Dubya out, we need to motivate people to personally dislike him and personally like his opposition. People should want to play golf or have a beer with John Kerry - he needs to be a so-called "active positive" with a chummy persona. I think this is a silly way to vote but what can you do? People often have stupid reasons for their behaviors and I guess I would rather obtain a smart outcome, as opposed to a stupid outcome, no matter what the quality of the reasoning that produced the action.

Secondly, people apparently like to be swept up in an emotional tidal wave on issues, otherwise they seem to ignore the issue entirely. So to get people excited about giving up their wee tax breaks, I think David Cay Johnston's rhetoric might be successful. I'm not saying these voters will read this particular book, but I think perhaps the screaming within as channeled (perhaps less screechingly) through the media, candidates, and even the lowly leftist voter may win over even wealthier voters by making them feel guilty about their selfishness and materialism. Hey, it worked for the Catholic Church for a 1000 years, why not Election 2004?

I also think that liberals should leverage fear, though not in the same way the Republicans do. How about the fear of revolution? After all, the poor in France stormed the Bastille because the army was cut from the same cloth. Or how about the fear of a depression-era loss of wealth? If Republicans can motivate middle class voters to vote against their interests because these voters think they will be part of that mythical top 1% one day, then maybe we should appeal to the top 1% with the same, though, reversed idea. We could even use Mrs.Lay's antique store filled with her own furnishings as the backdrop for the appeal - "This could be you - make sure Social Security and Medicare are in your future when equity and inflated salaries are not!"

I have the feeling like the BIG LIE may be Dubya's undoing - the press has finally picked up the scent, so we can only hope they do to him what they did to Clinton. That of course is a faint whisper of a hope, fueled by mostly fantasy. These days, some of us need to cling to any glimmer of civic responsibility and integrity in the media and politics, as a survivor of the Titanic might have once desperately clawed at the icy wreckage of that giant ship.