What Carrie
Could Learn From Mary
By Catherine
Orenstein
New York
Times Op-Ed
Copyright
2002 The New York Times Company
September 5,
2003
Thanks to
HBO's "Sex and the City," now wrapping up its sixth and final season,
female sensibility has a new face. Four faces, to be precise: prim Charlotte,
no-nonsense Miranda, slutty Samantha and every-girl Carrie, the sex columnist
played by Sarah Jessica Parker who is the show's thematic center. Perched on
Jimmy Choos and wrapped in Gucci, sipping pink
cosmopolitans with an assortment of handsome suitors, the women are witty,
glamorous, independent and sexually liberated in short, who wouldn't want to
be them?
Me,
for one. The show
may deserve a nod for spotlighting women's conversation, for treating sexuality
frankly and for rendering the traditionally stigmatized state of being a single
woman more acceptable indeed, chic. But under the guise of being salaciously
liberating and radically feminist, the vision of modern femininity in "Sex
and the City" is in fact surprisingly retrograde. The heroines spend most
of their time on shopping, cocktails and one-night stands. Charlotte dreams of
bridesmaids' dresses. Miranda frigidly "dates" her TiVo, while
nymphomaniac Samantha a blond bimbo who combines old-fashioned
objectification with postmodern "do me" feminism plows through the
Kama Sutra. And in one episode Carrie discovers that she has only $957 in
savings but $40,000 in designer shoes in her closet.
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 prκt-ΰ-porter men come
to eclipse all the other elements of independent womanhood?
As a single
writer living in New York City, I can't help but compare "Sex and the
City" to yesteryear's "Mary Tyler Moore Show," whose heroine
like Carrie, a 30-something single journalist had cool clothes and plenty of
suitors, but also story deadlines, a grouchy boss and male friends (not just
"gay boyfriends" as on "Sex"). The show, which had its
debut in 1970, was infused with the optimism and vigor of second-wave feminism.
It opened with Mary leaving a boyfriend for the big city Minneapolis and
landing a job as a television producer. She tackled substantial issues like
freedom of the press and sexism in the workplace. Sure, there were also jokes
about her single status. And she and sidekick Rhoda were once so desperate for
dates that they joined a club for divorcιes even though neither of them had
ever been married. But the jokes came with a light-hearted confidence in Mary's
future. Whether or not she married, her theme song promised, she would
"make it after all."
Other single
heroines of the past seem comparatively forward thinking today as well,
including Murphy Brown, the reporter and single mom played by Candace Bergen,
and even Helen Gurley Brown, whose 1962 best seller "Sex and the Single
Girl" was the titular and thematic foremother to "Sex and the
City." While Ms. Gurley Brown's flirt-to-get-what-you-want brand of
feminism seems quaint today, she never confused her means with her ends. She
didn't sit around sipping cosmopolitans, she became
editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine.
It's no coincidence
that these icons of single femininity are all journalists. In the early 20th
century, journalism was one of the few careers open to women, and the expanding
ranks of "girl reporters" inspired stereotype-defying single
heroines: Rosalind Russell as an ace reporter in 1940's "His Girl
Friday," Katharine Hepburn as a foreign correspondent in 1942's
"Woman of the Year," not to mention that famed comic-strip journalist
Brenda Starr.
By contrast,
the 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 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.
In part this
is what makes them popular. They're a caricature of a complicated generation of
women myself included now coming into our 30's:
the daughters of women's lib. Born in the years that the Ivy Leagues went co-ed
and abortion became legal, we've been raised on promises of equality, we've
been blessed with opportunities and we've delayed marriage and motherhood
longer than any other generation. We have the luxury, or so we may think, of
taking feminism's gains for granted.
"Sex and
the City" glamorizes this condition but to what end? Lacking substance
and dimension, defined by sex appeal and revolving around men, Carrie and her
friends are stuck in a surprisingly old-fashioned, Jane Austenian
trap: having failed to leverage youth and beauty into something more
substantial, they are now in danger of becoming spinsters. Indeed, they are
already there, according to a recent New York Times article that compared them
to the sexagenarians of "The Golden Girls."
Before the
series comes to an end, it would be gratifying to see Carrie and her friends
grow up into something more than restless partyers,
man-hunters and shoe-shoppers, and find something more enduring to glamorize: a
cause, a family, a career that is more than a backdrop for sex, or even just a
story worthy of the girl reporter's legacy. Something that
broadens our idea of what makes a woman sexy. Something worthy of the
feminism our mothers bequeathed us.
Catherine
Orenstein is author of "Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality
and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20D13FA3A5C0C768CDDA00894DB404482