not the motorcycle diaries

Oh Lauren Berlant, you dreamy dream woman. On Sex & the City The Movie:

“It’s a good thing that they have each other … as they are incapable of talking about sex with their lovers. If any of these women had ever even walked by feminism on the sidewalk they would have learned that one of the points of sexual liberation was to put your mouth where your mouth is. Sex talk was to be part of sex, part of sex pedagogy, part of allowing fantasy and desire to produce creativity and improvisation in the now of the event. Sexual liberation culture gave skills and permission for not just resorting to reenacting the default expectation out of fear that sex talk would make sex disappear.(…). These women are so frightened of what’s uncontrollable and uncomfortable about sex that, rather than to talk well about it to lovers, they prefer to laugh and complain to each other about it.”

After Lady K and I went to see the film we (once we had wiped the tears from our eyes and ditched the 2 metre tall Coke that had been foisted upon us by the all-acne-and-dexamphetamines teenagers at the confectionary counter) giggled ourselves stupid about its hilariously transparent “race and consumer politics”, as Berlant puts it. Louise, like Magda before her, is just made for an ‘Introduction to First World Feminism’ lecture (oh, and we loved the anti-fur protesters. No-one seems to have talked about them yet).

It was for reasons like this that our respective boyfriends were absolutely appalled at our going to see the film. It is a lay-it-all-down-flat representation of the lives and aspirations of/to monied, white, straight women, how could we give our money to it etc. Well, exactly. Because it’s not a positioning that we escape entirely, much to the mystification of the profeminist gentlemen in our lives. Well, I won’t speak for LK but certainly I, in conversation with lady friends, historically worry about putting on weight and being sexy enough; about having professional fulfillment and avoiding sexually transmitted debt. As these are gendered peculiarities, they are classed and raced too.

In this sense, as delightfully surreal as it felt sitting in that theatre with all the other girlfriends, there’s also something I really like about the literalness of a text like SATC; perhaps more so since I started having to come up with ways to teach social and cultural analysis. This isn’t really because of wafer thin characters like Louise and Magda but because of the patterns that they reveal so bluntly. The film brazenly walks us through the pathology of western womanhood (ladies bred by and for modernity, the price of getting to live past forty is the circular babble of the repression hypothesis coming to believe its own hype). In Berlant’s words:

“… don’t believe it when people tell you that Sex in the City is fantasy: it is realism. Not in its racial and consumer politics, which are execrable and ridiculous. But because its protagonists are terrible at talking about sex, really talking. They track the effects of their failure but absolutely refuse to take the cure, which is risking eloquence and ineloquence where they are intimate.”

Further:

“Everything they do aims to keep them from confronting one more time the fear they will never be loved if they are actually seen in the whole range of who they are, a mess of incoherent desires.”

And finally:

“Sex and the City is just one more faux camp film about being clothed, not naked; sheathed, not exposed; tender and enraged that romantic risk feels like risk. Romantic love is supposed to protect you from feeling the risk that you know that it is. In the beginning of the film Carrie borrows Big’s glasses because she doesn’t want to admit that she’s ageing; at the end, she’s wearing glasses of her own, signifying her greater depth of soul and knowledge. She is wearing a conservative suit and giving a reading from her new book. The message she wants to spread is that, in love “we should make our own rules.”

What she means by this is that women should stop wanting greedily all of the conventional romantic trappings and invent better institutions and situations for the feeling of love. There was nothing manifestly queer or feminist about this, but as a message, it could be worse. In context what she meant, though, was that “we” should be less demanding and more forgiving, so that we can continue to live in proximity to the dream. The standing ovation and tears in the audience were its confirmation of the unfairness and terrible, romantic beauty of that exhortation.”

In the immortal words of Margaret Cho…. I’m the One that I Want.