The Sex and The City movie that premiered last week was the popcult objet du jour, and loosed a Tourette’s spasm of web commentary. Some was highbrow (“style-conscious mise en scene”), some lowbrow (“Sarah Jessica Parker Looks Like a Horse”). Most of it was pleasantly mindless. Writers normally devoted to other agenda, from science bloggers to the proprietor of “Binge Eating Disorder Help,” put aside their hobbyhorses for a moment to divert readers with the harmless subject.
Well, most of them did. A SATC review featuring a photo of “Cynthia Nixon (right) w/Lesbian Partner” alerted us that we’d stumbled into the land of the rightbloggers, where blockbuster movies are not mere entertainments, but fronts in the culture war.
In her epic “Hags And The City” tirade, TV commentator Debbie Schlussel told readers that the “sleazy and low-class” central characters “look like female impersonators in drag,” are “pigs in skirts” and, worst of all, serve as “Delphic oracles to far too many American women.”
While the Oracle at Delphi spoke for Apollo, apparently Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte speak for “America’s feminists and the phony mainstream media” who, Schlussel said, give their message “the kosher seal of approval,” thereby covering an extra theological base.
But what is their message? Schlussel didn’t focus long enough to inform us, but some clues could be gleaned from her ravings. “Because they dined in glamorous places, wore trapezoid shaped clothes and $1,000 fancy high heels,” wrote Schlussel, “this somehow made their low-brow, savage behavior, ‘classy.’” So perhaps the message is that the rich can get away with things that the rest of us can’t. Schlussel also said that the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson in the film was meant to “answer the complaints over the years by Black America, that there were no Black women in this fashionable pay cable TV gang of hos.” Add tokenism to the film’s sins. Finally, “If you’ve ever called men pigs or chauvinists or decried their alleged collective behavior toward women, but yet you like this movie, you’re a hypocrite.” SATC is an affront to feminism! Schlussel’s argument seems based on race, gender, and class issues normally addressed by Women’s Studies professors. We hope this doesn’t get around or Schlussel may never appear on Fox News again.
“That sleazy yet hallowed HBO television series ‘Sex and the City’ is now in theaters as a feature film,” wrote longtime culture scold Brent Bozell at Human Events, “and the cultural elites are having a religious experience.” Apparently having failed to score a ticket to this Black Mass, Bozell attacked the original series for its failure to promote marriage: “What this feminist phenomenon didn’t have and didn’t need, apparently, was a woman who would choose to marry young… The series could have been called ‘Sex and the Skittish’ for all the phobias about the boredom and lost independence of married life.” As if that weren’t bad enough, SATC also turned girls into sluts, as Bozell showed with an ABC News story about a 14-year-old who, influenced by the show, had sex and Cosmos till she saw the error of her ways and became Mormon. The precocious teen said, “It wasn’t Sex and the City’s fault,” but Bozell corrected her: “Hollywood can certainly argue that it didn’t make the naughty people act on their naughty impulses. It merely told them it would be glamorous and liberating to do so.” Personal responsibility, it would seem, stops at the cineplex’s edge.
Sex and the City – The Complete Series (Collector’s Giftset)
