For a few months when I was nine years old, in 1978, my pride
and joy was inside a large cardboard box that had originally held a
pair of sexy knee-high tan leather boots belonging to my divorced
mom.
Within was my collection of Charlie’s Angels bubblegum
cards, separated into rubber-banded sets so I could easily locate
duplicates with which to trade, usually in hope of the prized
Farrah cards. Farrahs were the rarest because they were
discontinued after the first season, when Mrs. Fawcett-Majors
departed the show.
It wasn’t that I was a fan of the TV show; in fact, I hardly
ever watched it. What I liked were the images of the show’s stars,
especially the close-ups that offered their physical stats on the
back. My body was beginning to sprout curves, and I hoped against
hope that one day I could be beautiful like the Angels, or at least
pretty enough to model.
One thing holding me back in that department was height. Models,
I knew, were tall, and none of the women in my family made it up to
five-and-a-half feet.
The Cheryl Ladd card gave me encouragement; it said the
blue-eyed blonde was just 5-foot-4, my mom’s height. I had blue
eyes and blonde hair, and my dad used to tell me that after my
braces were off I would have a shot at being Miss America.
TODAY’S YOUNG GIRLS have their own dreamgirls — the ladies of
Sex and the City. Glamorous protagonist Carrie Bradshaw,
played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is just 5-foot-4, though her
character’s signature Manolo heels seem to raise her into the
stratosphere.
Although SATC in its original HBO incarnation abounded
in profanity and exposed flesh, for the past four years a
“cleaned-up” version has aired in syndication, gaining an audience
of girls too young to legally drink its protagonists’ beloved
Cosmopolitans.
The fact that Parker and her co-stars are old enough to be their
mothers doesn’t quell teens’ enthusiasm for the show. If anything,
it seems to give the Sex characters’ actions an imprimatur,
fulfilling the sort of elder-stateswoman role that Betty Friedan
fulfilled for baby-boom feminists.
“It’s my favorite show! I love it,” gushes 15-year-old Hannah Montana star
Miley Cyrus in this month’s Vanity Fair — the same issue
in which she caused an uproar with her backless photo session.
Her SATC obsession helps explain why she was
“embarrassed” at the reaction to a shoot she had thought was
“artistic.” After all, Samantha Jones, the show’s most “sexually
liberated” character, played by Kim Cattrall, posed nude, and if
glamorous, self-assured Samantha could do it, why couldn’t she at
least show some skin?
As her love of SATC made headlines, Cyrus’s flacks went
into damage-control mode, claiming she was referring to the
syndicated version. “The show she watches is completely sanitized,”
a source told People.
WELL, YES AND NO. The syndicated show is indeed missing many of the
original’s profanities and its X-rated sex talk. But no one would
confuse it with Anne of Green Gables.
While the four-letter words are gone, the acts for which they
stand remain, replaced with dubbed “clean” dialogue. The gals’
“f—-” buddies become “sex buddies.” Samantha’s war cry, “You gotta
f—- me” is replaced with the so-much-better “You gotta bang me.”
When the syndicated episodes debuted, Kristin Davis, who plays
Charlotte, observed, “[Watching the new version], I was
sitting there trying to figure out what they left out!”
One of the most talked-about scenes in the SATC film
that opened last Friday is a thinly veiled satire on how the TV
show has attained an under-18 audience without losing its X-rated
themes. The four female stars are sitting around the brunch table
at their favorite restaurant, where they usually dish salacious
bedroom stories, only now Charlotte’s 3-year-old daughter is
present as well, working on a coloring book.
When Miranda brings up their favorite topic, Charlotte urges her
to watch her language around the child. Carrie saves the day by
suggesting they substitute the word “coloring” for “sex.”
Discussing the scene on NBC’s Today show last week,
Michael Patrick King, who directed and wrote both the film and the
TV series, noted with pride, “That’s as dirty as you can get and
still be clean.”
The real dirty little secret of SATC is that the little
girls understand. “Sex and the City changed everything for
me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people.”
Lindsay Lohan told a reporter in 2006. The Parent
Trap star was only 11 years old when the show premiered.
The show inspired Lohan to create a sexual double standard for
herself: She would have sex with whomever she chose, but would draw
the line at sharing her male companions. “If I’m going to give my
body to someone, I’d rather them not be with other people,” she
explained. “But I want to be able to if I like someone else.”
That’s not exactly the freedom Betty Friedan envisioned when she
called upon women to escape the “comfortable concentration camp” of
marriage and family.
But it is precisely the lifestyle SATC producer Darren
Star, who is, like King, an out-and-proud gay man, sought to
promote in creating the show. As he told Entertainment Weekly, “I really wanted to
do a show that objectified men.”
WHILE CHARLIE’S ANGELS gave me an unattainable ideal of
beauty that, had I been more vulnerable, could have caused
emotional problems, I believe SATC poses a far more
insidious danger to young fans.
To understand the difference, realize that SATC is a
fairy tale, and children are naturally drawn to fairy tales. More
than that, as Carrie says in the film, it is a fairy tale with
“a twist.”
SATC’s fantasy quality comes from its cultivation of
the most essential aspect of fairy tales — what G.K. Chesterton
called “elementary wonder.” For New Yorkers especially, it’s the
wonder at how Carrie could afford her Upper East Side apartment and
designer wardrobe on a freelance writer’s salary.
But the fairy tale fractures when it breaks what Chesterton
called the “second great principleof the fairy philosophy … the
Doctrine of Conditional Joy.” He explained that “The note of the
fairy utterance always is, ‘You may live in a palace of gold and
sapphire,if you do not say the word “cow”’ … All the wild and
whirling things that are let loose depend upon one thing that is
forbidden.”
Sex and the City turns the Doctrine of Conditional Joy
on its head. Instead of saying, “All this can be yours, if you
do not do X,” it says, “All this can be yours if you
do X.” All the pleasures of the SATC gals’
lifestyle depend upon that X-factor, literally — they must have
sex, or they will lose all hope of happiness. Sex first, love
afterwards. Good sex may not lead to love, but sex is a door
through which all must pass in order to receive the love that
lasts.
That is the message that “changed everything” for Lohan. And
that is the message young girls are absorbing as I write, as older
siblings and friends sneak them into this R-rated film.
It’s also the message children receive from grown-ups who act
immature — and SATC inspires random acts of Teh Stupid
like The Rocky Horror Picture Show times infinity.
National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, who
admires SATC’s “honesty,” was shocked when women stumbling
out of an after-midnight showing of the film cussed out the
theatergoer who beat them to a cab.
“Here’s a movie with suffering and joy and life and cultural
lessons,” she wrote, “but some of the people I heard leaving
the theater didn’t seem to have been affected.”
I believe they were affected — and that’s why they
swore at a total stranger. That, in a nutshell, is the magic of
SATC: It makes children act like jaded whores, and it
makes adults act like spoiled children.
