Reframing

by Shaker Ms. Poinsettia, a feminist blogger from New Zealand.

Over the years I've unfortunately had numerous conversations with men who bang on at me about how 'facile', 'shallow', 'juvenile' and even 'sexist' Sex and the City is and how 'horrible', 'selfish' and 'ugly' the characters are, often with said men even exhorting that I should 'know better' than to watch it. I've always found this reaction a little baffling—I saw the kneejerk sexism but couldn't satisfactorily articulate why the show elicited such over-the-top reactions. Until, that is, I saw coverage of the Sex and the City movie in this weekend's edition of the Christchurch Press and finally saw the sexism swirling around media coverage of Sex and the City within a larger context.

The front page banner 'Sexy Sarah? Or Is It Horsey-Face' alongside a picture of Sarah Jessica Parker made me frown, most unattractively probably, but my frown was slightly turned upside down by reading the corresponding article. The author pointed out how if Sarah Jessica Parker was playing some dude's wife in a sitcom it's unlikely anyone would be prattling on about how goddam ugly she is, suggesting criticisms of Sarah Jessica Parker's attractiveness are actually sublimated criticisms of her character Carrie Bradshaw.

Given the gist of the article, why such a nasty headline? Because sadly editors not authors generally choose headlines, and an editor's focus is often on the bottom line, not journalistic intent. And nothing draws the punters in like a bit of focusing on whether a woman makes this season's intangible grade of beauty or not. And why does Sarah Jessica Parker's appearance matter?

Because talking about Sarah Jessica Parker's actual reason for being everywhere in the media at the moment necessitates talking about a movie in which men's desires, opinions, and importance are only peripheral and women's are primary. The fact that so many women loved the Sex and the City TV show points to how fucking amazing it was to see female characters who, while in some ways were so one-dimensional (Where are their families? Why an almost myopic focus on their romantic lives? etc), were in other ways thrillingly three-dimensional.

The standard dramatic portrayal of women involves female characters who largely accept traditional gender roles. They may work/have careers but they are primarily male-focused—they want weddings, babies, and to emotionally support their husbands; they are conventionally attractive; their sexual focus is on pleasing their men rather than pursuing their own pleasure (their libido is helpfully always identical to that of the man they are dating/married to). Female characters who don't conform to gender conventions are often cast as unfeminine abberrations, as women who are unattractive, unsatisfied, too serious, unloving, shrill and so on...

So to see female characters on TV who weren't automatically satisfied by any guy who gave them the time of day and weren't afraid to keep looking, who weren't sure they wanted to get married, and who weren't sure they wanted to have babies—in short to find characters who think like many women actually think about relationships, marriage and babies—was immensely appealing to many women. And what was even more appealing was that despite their equivocation about traditional gender roles they were still into 'girly stuff'—the shoes, fashion, gossip, relationships—a charactersiation which disrupts the pervasive cultural casting of women as either feminine self-effacing manlovers or unfeminine selfish manhaters. Sex and the City highlights the fact that straight women can actually value their own sense of self and love men—all at once!

And how does the male-dominated media respond to this depiction of femininity as a continuum rather than an either/or? The media reframes the discussion so that what's really important is not the themes of this TV show and movie that women love, but the attractiveness of the starring actress and, by association, the show's fans.

I think this can be seen in Maxim's juvenile rating of her as #1 in their list of unsexiest women. What is with making a list of the unsexiest women? In ways seemingly intangible to many people, the sexiest lists are just as nasty but a list of the unsexiest is also unnecessarily mean and petty. However, it does helpfully make the point of 'sexiest' lists completely tangible: they exist to put women in their place—either sexy and therefore useful, or unsexy and not only unworthy of attention, but an affront to male sensibilities.

The implicit message in critiquing her appearance is 'Women might like her, but do men?' Any sense women may garner from this film that their desires are valuable is undermined by bringing women back to this culture's bottom line: it is a woman's role to meet men's desires, not the other way round.