As an unrepentant actressexual, I've become increasingly crabby about the array of hostility toward the series/movie/phenomenon of
Sex and the City. It's tiresome and dismaying (especially when voiced by
bloggers and
radio progams I usually admire). As a late arrival to the
SATC phenom (I'm a reluctant aficionado by gaymarriage),
I mostly liked the film. And seeing those strange creatures named Miranda and Samantha and Big up on the big screen stomping around a "Magic Kingdom" version of New York City started me to thinking of the whole
SATC phenomenon as a
fotonovela (a soap opera in comic strip form).
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I'm now inclined to think of
SATC as a fantasy serial franchise that shares more with
The X-Men or
Harry Potter than it does with some putative post-feminist lodestone of female consciousness from which
dudes "might learn something". Indeed, the predisposition to critique
SATC as
"a beautiful lie" problematic for its shallow misrepresentations of real women (a snap that snarked even the excellent
"Vexed in the City" conversation over at Joe R's place) seems proof positive of
Rebecca Traister's supersmart riff on the backlash against Emily Gould. Traister writes, "Rather than being troubled by the fact that Gould -- or Bushnell, or Bradshaw, or whoever -- has the spotlight, why not question why so few other versions of femininity are allowed to share it?" All of which is to say, I'm thrilled for
SATC's
"surprising" milestone success, in the hopes that MORE astonishingly unapologetic, similarly imperfect and comparably enthralling big-screen-event treatments of women's relationships might soon crowd the multiplexes the same way such erratic idiocies as
Indiana Jones and
Spider-Man are wont to do.
Do YOU have a Sex and the City rant?
Let it rip in comments.
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