Contra Carrie

Okay, I have a confession to make: I watched all six seasons of Sex and the City.

And yet, I hate Carrie Bradshaw with a passion.

How does this compute? The more I've thought about it, I watched mostly out of pure schadenfreude. When Aiden broke up with Carrie after he found out she'd cheated on him with Big, I let out a giant hurrah. I let out and even bigger one when Big Nose came close to losing her rent-controlled one-bedroom in the East Seventies, because she had spent all her moolah on Manolos. Carrie Bradshaw was one character I loved to hate.

When I've tried to explain this in online discussion forums, people have accused me of being "obsessed" with my hatred of Carrie. It's not really Carrie I hate; it's everything that Carrie represents. Carrie to me represents two equally repulsive things to me:

1) A certain kind of upper class mentality that only exists in New York. I call this the black Cadillac Escallade mentality, because one of the things I used to hate the most about walking the streets in New York was being prevented from crossing a street by--invariably--a black Cadillac Escallade barreling through the streets oblivious to the existence of anything in its path. Rich people exist everywhere, but in New York I think they have taken inability to acknowledge even the existence of people outside their tax bracket to new depths.

2) A peculiar kind of distortion of feminism--what I call Madonna feminism, because the Material Girl used to do it so well back before she started pretending to be an M.O.T.

Madonna feminism, to take a metaphor straight from Sex and the City, is the ultimate fake Fendi. It's feminism as fig leaf for behavior that would be utterly unacceptable under any other circumstances. Dress like a hooker just for the hell of it? You're just being a tramp. Make a dubious claim that you're doing it "because women have been ashamed of their bodies for too long?" That's feminism--Madonna feminism.

I think every character on Sex and the City, with the exception of Charlotte when she's not primed in Park Avenue mode, is really at heart a Madonna feminist. The overall message of the show amounts to:

"Well, society thinks it's okay for men to behave this way, so I will, too."

Generally speaking, when someone says this to me nowadays, somehow the behavior in question is never having a career, or waiting until 30 (or whenever) to marry the right person, or anything that my mother, the feminist par excellence in my life, would call a feminist issue. It's always something that smacks not of women's liberation, but of pure egotism--behavior that strikes me as just as disgusting when men do it. Oddly, I don't particularly care for it when men put money, sex, and power above every other good in life. When a woman claims it's okay for her to act this way "because men do it," I really don't have much sympathy for her. The simple fact that men--or, rather, some men with more money than sense--currently do something is not proof that anyone should do it, female or otherwise.

I'm always suspicious of claims that "society" thinks a certain way, or "approves of" certain behavior. Modern Western Society is too complex for that. There is no "society" that wink-winks when men sleep around but condemns women to the stock when they do it. There's the law, which has nothing much to say about the matter. There's religion, which in America is so diverse that it can't be said that it presents one vision of human sexual relations. There's modern feminism, in all of its various permutaitons, which says something else yet again. So which of these opinions represents the opinion of "society"?