The Sex And The City Wars

For weeks the phone has been ringing incessantly.

Sometimes the enquiries are polite; “Have you seen Sex And The City yet?” Sometimes they are rather more direct or just plain giddy gibberish.
With each SATC related communiqué, I die a little inside.
I know I’m supposed to be happy. I know I’m supposed to have embraced the New Enslavement with all the other girls. But I also know a lame duck when I see one and if it has feathers and waddles inordinately…
There are any number of reasons to despise the new Sex And The City movie. A triumph of empty-headed style over soapy substance, it exists as the eye in a hurricane of aggressive avarice. Spreading the slightest of premises – Mr. Big jilts Carrie; then he doesn’t – over two-and-a-half hours, even hardcore fans are questioning the label porn that fills up 99% of the film’s running time.
“What happened to the characters that I used to love and know??” writes an irate SATC diehard on the internet movie database. “Somehow on my screen instead of seeing the girls and the men… I had come to love… over the years, I found… a bunch of screaming idiots wearing expensive clothing and carrying around over the top accessories.”
We should have guessed as much. From the outset the movie has been a smash-and-grab enterprise. Kim Cattrall, we are told, held out for $6 million before she could bring herself to stomp across Manhattan with co-stars Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon. Sarah Jessica Parker, meanwhile, will take home $10 million for starring and $5 million for producing. Additionally, all merchandise will come through her fashion label, Bitten.
This collective greed is writ large in the bling-obsessed, big screen outing, most of which plays like a barely animated fashion shoot. Prominent marketing partners, including Skyy vodka, Mercedes-Benz, Glaceau Vitaminwater, and SJP’s “Lovely” fragrance, all get their fifteen seconds.
“Oscar De La Renta, Vivienne Westwood”, purrs SJP over one of the film’s many, many dressing room montages.
If things don’t work out with this bloated extravagance, a career in sex chat lines surely awaits.
It hardly matters. Female fifty-somethings, who account for most of SATC’s advance sales, are proving a lucrative demographic. The movie can afford to be terrible. It has no need to court the average 23-year-old male cinemagoer, let alone the critics.
But there’s something more interesting going on than gender division.
Like most romantic comedies, it was always assumed that men would hate it and women would love it. Things haven’t worked out quite so neatly.
Among the film reviewing community, the most strident criticism has, quite noticeably, been emanating from SATC’s target gender. Female bloggers, meanwhile, are currently fighting furious flame wars among themselves.
In a twist so ironic it might have been devised for The Twilight Zone, Sex And The City – the show that likes to depict post-feminist woman as a twitty shoe fetishist who only really wants a husband – have become a hub of post-feminist activity.
Many are objecting to the movie’s embarrassingly racist, white girl’s club subtext. In one scene a panicked Cynthia Nixon finds herself in one of Manhattan’s culturally richer nooks. “Follow the white man with the baby,” she shrieks. Elsewhere, the Academy Award winning African American actress Jennifer Hudson is cast as the help.
More pertinently, many women are simply hijacking SATC as a testing ground for what may become the Raunch Wars, named for Catharine MacKinnon’s book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women And The Rise Of Raunch Culture.
In the pink corner, we find girls who lapdance for fitness, swoon over ridiculously impractical footwear and mistake equality for the right to eyeball passing gentlemen and make comments about their buttocks. In the opposing quarter we find a grassroots swell that boycotts products using St. Stephen’s Green dollybirds and loathes the flim-flam faux-feminism peddled by Carrie Bradshaw’s queenly quartet.
SATC on the big screen ought to have been a cathedral for the Raunch girls; instead, it has coalesced the women who hate the show into a vocal online presence. Messageboards all over the blogosphere are buzzing with disgruntled female chatter. Over at craigslist, there’s even an anti- <1>SATC support group. Like the TV show it despises, the portal plays on female bonding instincts: “Let’s band together!” it trumpets. “Strength in numbers! Let’s go out tonight and NOT see Sex And The City.”
It’s a date.

Sex And The City is on general release