By Stephanie Goldberg
I’m starting to think something’s really wrong with me. First, I dared to back Hillary while living in the land of Lincoln – a choice I’d encourage only if you have a burning desire to know who your real friends are. And, now, it’s my utter indifference to the Sex and the City movie, which almost all of my women friends seem to care deeply about, that’s made me an outcast. All weekend I’ve managed to avoid the issue by hiding out in my apartment but who knows how many more days I can hold out? Sooner or later, I’ll have to see the movie that everyone from Roger Ebert to the Times’s Manohla Dargis has slagged or else be shut out of conversations about Big as father figure or Carrie as modern-day Barbie doll.
It’s not that I didn’t like the series. I did, for a long time, until Carrie’s calculated cuteness, Samantha’s feverish acrobatics and the other two’s kvetching wore me out. But I never felt, as many apparently do, that either Candace Bushnell or Sarah Jessica Parker had captured what it’s like to be a single woman in post-Millennium America. Like the women in the series, I’m devoted to my girlfriends and my romantic relationships with men go south more frequently than not. But there the resemblance ends. I have no Manolos, no convenient, acerbic gay sidekicks, no editor to put me on the cover of Vogue nor anyone else willing to pay me great sums of money for writing thinly disguised accounts of my sex life. My life is one of counting calories and watching my blood pressure and the margins of my mutual fund fluctuate. Carefree, it isn’t. But then, how often does either TV or the movies hold up a mirror to our lives? And who’d want to see it if it did?
That’s why I am so surprised that women from 18-55 seem to connect with Carrie and company. I’ve given the matter some thought and have come up with two reasons why. First, it extends the myth created by How to Marry a Millionaire and That Girl that New York is a single woman’s paradise where great clothes, great jobs and great men are yours for the taking. Second, I think most women are so dazzled by the glitz and wisecracks that they fail to realize that SATC is actually a grim fable about settling for men who are less than the total package – either they adore you and they’re ugly or they’re too young or too uneducated to be really interesting or they’re sex on a stick but emotionally unavailable. Now that’s a lesson that would make any girl’s tutu wilt.
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Stephanie B. Goldberg is a Chicago writer and adjunct instructor in the Journalism department of Columbia College Chicago.
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Posted on June 5, 2008