The Inevitable Sex and the City Post

This show bothers me. Many women I know are obsessed with it. I can understand the appeal- women with indispensable incomes buy cool clothes, are seemingly “in control,” and fuck a lot of dudes. This is supposed to be liberating, because our Puritanical society historically stressed that women repress their urges to, as a shitty songwriter once put it, “get drunk and screw.”

I had seen only bits of the show here or there and was never impressed. Upon hearing about the anticipated movie, I decided to watch an episode On Demand to get a better understanding of the phenomenon. For the sake of simplicity, I will assume the writing style and overall theme of the episode to be representative of the entire series.

The episode chosen was "To Market, To Market."

Carrie opens the episode with a voice-over narration, "When you live in the city that never sleeps, it comes as a bit of a shock when somehow, you manage to, oversleep." I have a problem with this for three (3) reasons:

1. The delivery of the line, is punctuated like this, as to indicate some insightful and clever, statement.
2. As the opening line, it should be insightful, clever and funny. While insightful and funny, it is not clever.
3. It logically makes no sense. New York is not “the city that never oversleeps.” If we play the game “Fun with Logic” and take her sentence to a logical conclusion, wouldn’t she be surprised if she ever slept in the city that never sleeps. Dear SATC writer, let’s try this one again..."It would be a bit of a shock if you set three alarm clocks and overslept." While not clever or insightful, this sentence makes sense.

Then the girls go to lunch, where Samantha discusses a $20 hamburger and inflation: “Pathetic. When I moved to this neighborhood the only thing that cost $20 was a hand job from a tranny.” Hilarious.

Next Charlotte and her dude discuss converting to Judaism. The following scene opens with Miranda changing a diaper. Carrie narrates this transition: "And from Jewish to pooish." Again, hilarious.

Eventually we are treated to a sex scene. Nice, let’s see how they realistically portray this. After all, "It’s not TV...it’s HBO." Charlotte, my favorite character, is fucking her dude. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is provocative and progressive...wait...she's wearing a bra.

We soon get another sex scene, this time with the philandering Samantha and her new stockbroker neighbor. Samantha is supposed to be the really slutty one, right? So she’s giving him a blowjob, her head pops up and she says, "Now that’s what I call eating in!" Hil-ar-i-ous. Wait, what’s that, she’s also wearing a bra. Since it’s only a blowjob I’ll let this slide. But the scene serves no purpose to the narrative of the episode; it’s just gratuitous. So why not at least make it sexy? And did I mention that Kim Katrall is like 55 and gross.

The third and final sex scene of the episode is with Samantha and the stockbroker. He is handcuffed to the bed, and she’s riding him...with a bra on. Groundbreaking.

Carrie then makes her profound thesis statement:
“Later that day, I got to thinking about the stock market and dating. Are they really that different? If you have a bad stock, you can lose your shirt. If you have a bad date, you can lose your will to live. And if the date is good, the stakes get even higher. After weathering all the ups and downs...you could one day find yourself with nothing. When it comes to finance and dating...I couldn’t help but wonder- 'Why do we keep investing?'"

Let’s run this one through the Logictron 3000. Lots of churning. Ok done. Here’s what the machine tells me:

1. “And if the date is good, the stakes get even higher.” So then if the stock is good the stakes must get higher? False. If a stock you own rises, you do not assume any more liability or risk.
2. “After weathering all the ups and downs...you could one day find yourself with nothing.” Assuming the gains (ups) and losses (downs) are equal, they would cancel each other out and you are left with the original investment. Logictron 3000 has a built-in mathematical calculator function which tells me that a $10,000 investment with equal gains and losses would leave me with $10,000. $10,000 is not nothing.
3. "Why do we keep investing?" Because you will probably make money. In the last ten years, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up an aggregate of about 40%. A $10,000 investment would be worth $14,000.

At this point I lost interest and stopped watching. Final thoughts, Carrie-style:

If a show presents women as shallow and materialistic, why do women look up to these characters? And if the writing is neither funny nor logical, why do they keep watching?