The world today is a harsh place…it’s like follow the flow and live a shallow life or get depressed and negative….the red or blue pill.

I don’t know anythin about you or your site yet, but you seem to live in the real world and still be optimistic and happy about it, thats great! gonna browse your site now.

Thumbs up Madeleine!!!

Joe

I think Older and Wiser sounds angrier about it than you are, to be honest. Just a tad bit defensive, maybe?

I think don’t like, don’t watch applies, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still voice our opinions of it.

i think my favorite assement of Sex and the City comes from ‘Family Guy’. One of the characters said “Isn’t that the show about three hookers and their mom?”

And we really need to talk about your “five reasons why I think no one (no one? no one at all? not even one person? should watch Sex And The City.”

#1. Rampant materialism.
One of the main tenets of this series is Carrie’s obsession with fashion. Carrie’s closet is a fantasy character all on its own. It just keeps spewing out amazing, outlandish, gorgeous, unattainable outfits; with shoes to match. Sex and the City is all about fashion - big name fashion - big name fashion magazines - “sexy, urban, and wild” fashion - because this is New York City - the fashion capital of North America. And Carrie, the narrator, writes for Vogue.
Reality check: women like looking at fashion, Mad - particularly, extravagant, over-the-top, “sexy, urban and wild” fashion - that’s why this series was so popular and, incidently, why there are sooooo many fashion magazines.
Carrie’s obsession with shoes actually serves a purpose - it is used as a vehicle (a fun vehicle, I think) to initiate events that become increasingly less frivolous. Nor do the shoes, themselves, represent happiness - just the opposite, in fact. Many of the stories end with Carrie wryly conceding that at the end of the day she is left with just another new pair of shoes - and by the end of the series, she realizes that she has “$40,000 dollars worth of shoes and nowhere to live”.
So, the “rampant materialism” serves two purposes. It drives the main character and it provides eye candy for the audience. And what’s wrong with an occasional fantasy about “buying shoes and wearing fancy dresses…[and] drinking cosmopolitans at trendy nightclubs”? Surely, we can fit it in somewhere - along with our other fantasies.
#2. There’s more to life than getting a man.
This really is just ranting, Mad. Firstly, these women all have high powered careers - a lawyer, an art gallery director, a journalist, and a public relations manager. Their lives hardly revolve around getting a man or they would all be looking for work. Secondly, males and females are hard-wired to get out there and hunt for a likely partner - for an hour, a day, a month , a life-time - unless they have taken a vow of celibacy.
As for the ladies, when the four of them are together for drinks, dinner, breakfast, walkies, talkies, or whatever, - you bet, men are the main topic of conversation. This is a fun, girlie television series. The audience really isn’t tuning in to hear Samantha’s views on the plunging American dollar, or Miranda’s views on Iraq, or Charlotte’s ideas on world peace, or who Carrie thinks the next president should be - that’s what news programs are for. This is a comedy.
And FYI - men do sit around talking about women, about finding women, and about “getting lucky” - in fact, men think about sex approximately every 30 seconds. However, like women, they do also go to work, play sports, write books, cook, fix cars, drink coffee, go to movies, travel, listen to music, play music, clean the bathtub, etc., etc., etc. Yup, last time I looked, men and women were both out there “doing stuff”.
#3. Because as women we deserve something other than one-dimensional stereotypes.
Mad, I have to say that you get pretty offensive here. Arguments - like revenge - are best served cold. You are positively vitriolic and hideously misogynistic. Samantha is a “slut”, Miranda is a “bitch”, Charlotte is a “nitwit”, Carrie is a “whiner” - your words, your perceptions.
Samantha is not a slut nor is she meant to represent “sexual liberation” (a somewhat outdated term in 21st century North America). To claim that her character is “seeking sex as a means of proving something to [her]self or others” is not only trite and jejeune - it simply is not true. Nothing in the series suggests that. Samantha likes sex and she doesn’t like commitment. She is aggressive and manipulative and sexy - that’s why she is so good at her job - public relations. The character of Samantha, in fact, has many of the qualities of the stereotypical male.
Miranda is not a bitch, she is a lawyer who has worked hard to achieve her goal and wants to make it to the top - to be a full partner in her law firm. Her career is her life, men are secondary. To claim that “[h]er character is doing nothing more than perpetuating the myth that a successful, intelligent woman has to be a “bitch” is ridiculous. As the series progresses, Miranda becomes pregnant, struggles with the decision to have the baby, gives up the longed-for partnership, struggles through single motherhood, marries the baby’s bar tender father, and finally leaves New York for Brooklyn where her child can grow up in a family community. In one of the final episodes of the series, we see Miranda bathing her mother-in-law who has dementia - hardly the portrayal of a bitch, dear.
Charlotte is not a nitwit. Nitwits don’t usually run art galleries or have degrees in Fine Arts. Charlotte is meant to characterize that rare person - a genuinely nice human being. The fact that she wants to get married and have children and doesn’t want to have sex on the first date hardly makes her pathetic. There are actually intelligent women who want to get married and have children and and as for not having sex on the first date - isn’t that a personal, rather than a pathetic, choice?
You claim that “Her character only exists so that the other characters seem empowered when they ridicule her”. Assuming for a moment that they are ridiculing her, in what way are they empowered by doing so?
In fact, they aren’t ridiculing her. They are lovingly teasing her. They have a great deal of protective affection for gentle Charlotte. You are describing a bully/victim scenario that exists only in your mind; that is, you interpret the women’s interactions with Charlotte as ridicule. Further you see this alleged ridicule as empowering for Samantha, Carrie, and Miranda.
Carrie is not presented as the most normal of the four characters but she is the narrator, which might be the basis of your confusion.
You say her character “dresses like a whore, pouts like a five year-old to get what she wants, chain smokes, drinks nightly, and shoe shops herself into massive debt? This is a girl who cheats on her loving live-in boyfriend with a married man and still manages to make that all about her. Wow! How many of these episodes have you actually seen?
She doesn’t dress like a whore sorry, but you have obviously never seen a sex-trade worker. She pouts? Not that I noticed. She smokes, yes - she doesn’t chain smoke. Not that it matters either way. She drinks nightly? Well, yes - if she goes out or has friends over - don’t most people? Shoes shops herself into massive debt? Not in any episode I saw. She cheated on her “loving” (your word) live-in boyfriend with her old lover - not great, but not unknown - and it does make her realize that no matter how”loving” he may be - nor how much she likes and admire him - she isn’t in love with him - another not great, but not unknown. She isn’t perfect, she makes mistakes, in fact, Carrie makes the biggest mistakes. But she doesn’t whine; she writes - about relationships, about friendships, about life.
Once more, I draw your attention to the fact that this is what Sex and the City is about: a writer who writes a column about sex and relationships in the city of New York - from the perspective of a single woman.
#4 Sex And The City demonstrates a sense of entitlement that ruins relationships.
Sorry, what sense of entitlement? Entitled to find someone to love them for themselves? (A “mantra”, by the way, that I have never heard expressed in any of the scripts) And if so, how would this need to be loved for oneself ruin relationships? Should women aspire to make men love them for what they are not? Should women pretend to be other than they are?
As for talking about a “man’s package, bank account, hometown” - you might rather hear them debate global warming but it sure wouldn’t draw much of an audience. Remember when we discussed what this series is actually about?
#5 “It’s just a hollow version of the same old “rescue me” fairy tale”. Well, not quite. Neither Snow White nor Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty had interesting, fullfilling, well-paying jobs and they didn’t live in their own apartments in New York, either. Nor are two of the characters, Samantha and Miranda, the least bit interested in being “rescued”.
“This is a show about women who define themselves by the men they pursue, women who occupy their time with shoe shopping, meaningless sex, and trite superficial conversation. ” No, this is a show about single women with excellent careers, who like men, and shopping. Some of them have meaningless sex and some of them don’t. Their conversation is anything but trite and superficial - I have never heard them discuss the weather or the latest Oprah. The scripts focus on talk about men, shopping, and sex BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT THE SERIES IS ABOUT. As mentioned above, the audience does not tune in to hear Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, or Samantha give us their opinions on politics, ecology, the next election, or drug running in Columbia.
How do your friends’ “shallow and unhappy lives” (have you told them that you think their lives are shallow?) emulate the characters on Sex and the City? By having great careers and their own apartments or by liking men and sometimes having their hearts broken and sometimes breaking hearts, by liking pretty clothes, and crazy shoes, sex, and silly talk with their friends?
“I don’t know about you, but I think there is a lot more to life than what Sex And The City offers us”. Well, yeah, no kidding. How profound - except that Sex and the City is not pretending to offer you anything more than a little escapism, a little entertainment, a look at New York, and a chance to see some fabulous and fantastical clothes.
You need to ask yourself why you are so angry over something so unimportant. And then you need to ask yourself why you think that all women should be like you.