I watched Memoirs of a Geisha the other day and as with all Hollywood movies pretending to be something other than the end product of a cliché blender, all cultural themes in the film were hammered on the audience’s heads sometimes by a mad narrator carpenter. In Memoirs of a Geisha the narrator/carpenter continually reminded us that the best hope a Geisha had of happiness and success was to attach herself to a wealthy powerful married man and live as his personal concubine. The audience oos and awes over how terribly unfair 20th century gender dynamics in Japan were and then knowingly concludes things aren’t so different here—are they?
To answer that question, I submit Sex in the City. It’s the same show narrator and all. In both shows women need men. Women spend all day talking about men and bitching each other in attempts to acquire men—almost entrap them if needed. And all my sophisticated female friends love the show. Does a smugly self aware red headed character somehow make reinforcing a male dominated world okay? What I hate most about Sex in the City has little to do with it’s anti-feminism I must admit. What I really hate is the contrived cuteness of it all. They’re glamorous and they know it, but everything is expressed with little diminutives, “on a tiny little island we call Manhattan I met my little friends for brunchie,” or “in the tiny cutesy Soho club scene bla, bla, bla…” You are cool, just admit it. Anything else is a modesty so false I may puke.
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