Sex and the City can be compared to previous examples of post feminist, woman-centered drama produced for prime-time network television in the US. These are dramas that in the wake of second-wave feminism selectively deploy feminist discourses as a response to cultural changes in the lives of their potential audience; an audience that is addressed as white, heterosexual, and relatively youthful and affluent. They emerged out of a hybridization of genres driven by a desire to maximize audiences by creating drama that appealed to both men and women. The feminization of crime genres such as cop shows (Cagney and Lacey) and legal dramas (LA Law, Ally McBeal) allowed for an exploitation of the generic pleasures associated with the masculine, public world of work and the feminized, private world of personal relationships. Their responsiveness to changes in the socio-political context had also allowed for an engagement with liberal feminist issues arising from women’s relation to the law and to work. A focus on women as protagonists, whose actions drive the narrative, replaced the marginal and narrow range of roles available previously to women characters in these genres. Although it shares their incorporation of feminist themes and their focus on the liberal, heterosexual, white, metropolitan, career- oriented woman, Sex and the City is very different from most dramas. It gives insight on how women are perceived in today’s society. They have, or want it all, are independent, and the show, Sex and the City, is used as a tool to correct most views about women. One of the consequences of the multiplication of channels has been a diversification in television’s address to audiences. Specialist channels catering to particular social groups or taste cultures have proliferated. It moves the television industry much closer to the magazine industry, which addresses niche markets and where there is very little overlap between men and women’s titles. This has a number of consequences. One is that it draws the audience into a different economic relation to the product, where the tastes of the audience-as- market, as direct purchasers of the channel, are not as obscured by the normalizing processes of the mass market. Sex and the City is addressed to affluent, white women as a segment of the market, in which it re-mediates the address developed in the established women’s media, namely glossy women’s magazines. This reverses the trend towards the hybridization of masculine and feminine genres that has characterized prime-time drama on network television. In the hybrid, women-centered, work-based drama characteristic of post Feminist television in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the main issues has been the division between the world of work and the private world of the domestic sphere that prevents women “having it all.” In Sex and the City, the world of work largely disappears from view as a distinct space and set of hierarchical relations, although the women’s autonomy from men is underwritten by their economic independence. For three of the four women who make up the main characters in the series, work is collapsed into the private sphere and becomes another form of self-expression, alongside consumption, thereby side-stepping the post feminist problematic. Carrie’s sex life and those of her friends act as research for her weekly newspaper column, which she writes from home. Samantha works in public relations, a job where her physical attractions and personal charm are intrinsic to her success. The women’s single state is rather a necessary precondition for their central preoccupation—sexual relationships and how to achieve sexual satisfaction—not previously considered a suitable topic for television drama. The series publicly repudiates the shame of being single and sexually active in defiance of the bourgeois codes that used to be demanded of respectable women. It self- reflexively interrogates media representations of the single woman although the emotional power of these residual stereotypes is acknowledged. For example, when Carrie appears looking haggard and smoking a cigarette on the front of a magazine under the strap line “Single and Fabulous?” it sparks a discussion amongst the four women about why the media want to persuade women to get married (Episode 16 “They Shoot Single People Don’t They?”). Feminist evaluations of Sex and the City have conflated it with other examples of post feminist culture in which comedy and satire has replaced any serious, ethical commitment to challenging the power relations of patriarchy, a challenge that they argue is undermined by complicit critique. The post feminist irony in texts such as Bridget Jones or Ally McBeal allows for a constant emphasis on women’s appearance and sexual desirability as a source of worth whilst simultaneously subjecting this attitude to ridicule (Germaine Greer 1999; Imelda Whelehan 2000). In this view, the ironic oscillations in our relation to the bourgeois women who people the fictional world of Sex and the City are complicit with the aestheticised values of consumer culture and its unequal structuring of the “look.” It assumes women in the audience are invited to share this male gaze to the extent that it is internalized in women’s narcissistic relation to their own bodies. This objectifies women’s bodies and renders them power- less. In a counter-argument, feminine cultures of consumerism and fashion have been considered as a source of pleasure and power that is potentially resistant to male control. Indeed they can offer women an alternative route to self-esteem and autonomy that overcomes the damaging division that second-wave feminism constructs between feminism and femininity. Sex and the City’s treatment of sexuality can be understood as a re-mediation of the content and address of women’s magazines for television. These women are updated versions of the “Cosmo” woman who is dedicated to self-improvement and economic independence. The function of sexual imagery and talk in Sex and the City is quite different from pornographic magazines and cable channels where sexual arousal is assumed as the purpose for consumption. Sex and the City dramatizes the kind of consumer and sexual advice offered by women’s magazines. This is a sphere of feminine expertise in which it has been argued that women are empowered to look—not only at consumer goods but also at their own bodies as sexual subjects (Radner 1995). Sexuality is presented in this context as a source of potential pleasure for which women should make themselves ready, whether through internalizing the beauty and fashion advice that will attract the right men, or through following advice on sexual technique. Carrie’s billboard slogan draws attention to this pedagogic function; “Carrie Bradshaw knows good sex” It is an expertise rooted in every- day life and experience. When called upon to give a lecture to a roomful of women on how to get a date, Carrie fails miserably. But she succeeds brilliantly the following week when she takes the women to a bar, where she guides them in how to work the room by reading the sexual signals, giving them the confidence and expertise to act on their desires. The advert for Bailey’s Cream, the corporate sponsors of Sex and the City, exemplifies how in consumer culture the body as the bearer of sensation replaces the ethical self as an ideal. It presents a sensuous image of swirling, creamy liquid with the slogan “Let your senses guide you.” Rachel Bowlby refers to the ideal modern consumer as, “a receptacle and bearer of sensations, poser and posed, with no consistent identity, no moral self” In this aestheticised culture the question has become, does it look good or feel good rather than, is this a good thing to do? Although Sex and the City rejects the traditional patriarchal dichotomy of virgin and whore, insisting in its explorations of the women’s multiple sexual experiences their rights to seek sexual satisfaction without shame, this doesn’t mean that there are no limits. Aesthetic boundaries replace moral boundaries so that men who can’t kiss very well, who smell, who are too short, or whose semen tastes peculiar, are rejected on those grounds. The program’s representation of the women’s dissatisfaction with their male lovers could be regarded as encouraging a rejection of men as a source of emotional and sexual satisfaction in favor of a feminine culture of gossip and shopping. It is the tight-knit relationship of the four women that is the only constant in the series. But they don’t live together as in the cozy but adolescent comedy series Friends. The recurring message that for grown ups living in Manhattan means living alone constructs the single household as the norm, a trend that has been cited as one of the major stimuli to consumption in modern cities (Lury 1996). Sex in this context becomes like shopping—a marker of identity, a source of pleasure—knowing how to choose the right goods is crucial. But men in Sex and the City are the only objects of desire that create consumer dissatisfaction. The women treat men as branded goods—the packaging has to be right but the difficulty is to find one whose use value lives up to the image. The quest becomes one in which they are looking for the phallus that would bring an end to a seemingly endless chain of desire. “In a city of infinite options there can be no better feeling than that you only have one,” is the aphorism Carrie offers at the end of one episode (Episode 7 “The Monogamists”). And yet there is a recognition that the phallus will never live up to its promise of satisfaction and fulfillment. “In a city of great expectations is it time to settle for what you can get?” wonders Carrie (Episode 9 “The Turtle and the Hare”). The women try men out to see if they “fit for size,” as Carrie tells a potential husband, but they never do. This is literally the case when promiscuous Samantha unexpectedly falls in love (Episode 12 “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”). When she has sex with her new lover after two weeks of uncharacteristic abstention, she is devastated. His dick is only three inches long! In Sex and the City size does matter. The fragmentation of the television market has allowed a sexually explicit and critical feminist discourse into television comedy, albeit within the parameters of a consumer culture and the limitations this imposes. This is a welcome innovation in women’s representation on television in that it assumes and promotes women’s right to sexual pleasure and validates women’s friendship and culture. At the same time the contradictions of its comedic and serial form exposes this culture to interrogation and critique, thereby encouraging intellectual analysis. The analytic approaches used in this article are not confined to an academic elite but are available to a broad segment of educated women, the bourgeois bohemians, who read the quality press alongside women’s magazines. An ability to see ourselves in these characters works not simply to confirm our sense of self but to question the costs as well as the benefits of living in a post feminist consumer culture. It is in the messy contingencies of the everyday that feminism is produced or inhibited in practice, and it is this quality that Sex and the City is able to capture. This establishes a space in popular culture for interrogation of our own complicity in the processes of commoditization—women’s narcissistic relation to the self, the production of fetishistic and alienated sexual relations—that continue to undermine our self-esteem and contentment. The program offers evidence of the deleterious effects of economic liberalism in a society where moral and religious values are in decline, with no alternatives to the hedonistic and selfish values of capitalism. What remains more hidden from view is the gap between the lifestyle depicted and the experience of the majority of the women in the world, who are often the most disadvantaged by the economic inequalities on which the freedom to pleasurable consumption rests (Klein 2000; McRobbie 1997; Willis 1991). Yet in a post September 11 context, the connotations of Sex and the City’s logo of the Manhattan skyline has changed. The guiltless triumph of consumer values no longer seems so secure.

Work Cited Arthurs, Jane. "Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama." EBSCO 3.1 (2003): 1-15. Print. Bowlby, Rachel. 1993. Shopping with Freud. London and New York: Routledge. Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo. London: Flamingo. Lury, Celia. 1996. Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. McRobbie, Angela. 1997. “Bridging the Gap: Feminism, Fashion and Consumption,” Feminist Review 55 (Spring): 73–89.New York: Routledge. Radner, Hilary. 1995. Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure. New York: Routledge. Willis, Susan. 1991. A Primer for Daily Life: Is there More to Life than Shopping? London: Flamingo.

Feminism in today’s television culture Sex and the city

Submitted by: Smriti Jasra (103127172) Submitted to: Prof. Boin Communication Studies Submission Date: Thursday, April 1st 2010