Sex as a Gender in Sex and the City

 

Aditi Khajuria

 

Assistant Professor in English, GGM Science College, Canal Road, Jammu

This paper will be analysing on the theoretical formulations of Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf. It will study the contemporary modern urban woman, as the postfeminist chick lit woman, who is a singleton in her late twenties and thirties, and who is not only independent, but is the woman who has everything. It gives a brief description of the author Candance Bushnell and a survey to the novel Sex and the City.

 

This paper gives the description of the protagonist Carrie Bradshaw, who is a single and has experienced almost everything like a man. This will also focus on the celebration of girls who encounter each other in a spirit of competitiveness, sexual striving and anxiety.    The survey will be focussed on whether chick lit is the adequate reflector of the contemporary modern urban women or does we see chick lit in the paradoxes of time and society. Is it a repression on feminism as Faludi asserts or is it a forward movement of a new power feminism as Naomi Wolf insists. The study will also determine whether chick lit includes a shift from female sexual objectification to empowerment and subjectification.

 

 

The “commercial tsunami” of chick lit has not only created a global readership for novels such as The Diaries of Bridget Jones it has also spawned what is called a world-wide chick-lit “pandemic” of local versions. There does seem to be a difference between UK Chick Lit and US Chick Lit, like UK chick lit seems to rely much upon humour and less on emotions but US Chick Lit is definitely driven mainly by emotions.

 

Candance Bushnell is an American author and columnist based in New York City. She is best known for writing a column that was anthologized in a book, Sex and the City, which in turn became the basis for a popular television series and its subsequent film adaptations. In Bushnell’s view about women, she had said in one of her interviews to ‘The Guardian’ that, “the women are not looking for men, they're looking for themselves, looking for some kind of meaning, and their place in the world. She gives ‘place’ a good whipping. I think that's the hardest thing to find, your place in the world”

 

Sex and the City is the bestselling book in the feminine world. Of course, the question can be asked if it is due to the large popularity of the film series with the same title. The people presented in the book are rich New Yorkers, whose main task is visiting different parties and modern pubs. They live in a pure world of the meaningless relations and connections. The city, of course is no other than New York and the sex which is very catchy and captivating for the readers, actually is never really about intercourse. It could have been more accurately called as The Gender and the City, but to make it more revealing the word sex is used

It is celebrating the girls’ world staples of female friendship, strength and solidarity whilst interrogating male double standards but also female self-negation. Bushnell's characters are not a band of girlfriends linked in quipping mutual support but near-strangers who encounter each other in a spirit of competitiveness, sexual striving and anxiety. Her city doesn't provide endless opportunities for fashion, fun but constitutes a wasteland of toxic bachelors, bitter drinks and emotional dead ends. The sex, when it happens, is loveless or traitorous or mercenary - or all three.

 

The novel Sex and the City is a series of essays that works as a class study of the current Age of Non-Innocence. SATC is a sensuous and ironic book, about four young, desirable, virtually inseparable New York bachelorettes who lead and confide in each other their ever changing and confusing sex lives, as different as their natures. Carrie Bradshaw is a charming petite columnist of 34 years; she tries almost everything, is constantly disappointed, but always seems to return to a certain Mr. Big, for love and also looking for some big feelings. Mr. Big is the man whom Carrie loves and he is a successful bachelor who is afraid of commitments. Miranda Hobbes, 32 year old, is a red-hair cable executive, Sarah who is 38 runs her own Public Relation company and Belle, 34 years is a banker, the only married woman of the group. Samantha Jones, once Carrie’s best friend, is every feminist's hero in her late thirties, an acclaimed movie producer and unstoppable nymphomaniac man-eater, without a hint of commitment, claiming this is the age for woman to do what men always did to them.

 

Each one is beautiful and sexy in her own way – two blondes, a brunette, and a redhead.  They all have enormous amounts of money that allow multitudes of designer shoes, every night out to the trendiest restaurants and drinks with a variety of different men. But the beauty of SATC is there’s more to them than that.  Carrie, Miranda, Sarah and Belly aren’t catty, conniving women who are only interested in superficial financial and romantic successes.  They’re best friends and each others’ support system.  They’re family and they are sisters. Though SATC is a comedy but none of the situations feel silly or belittle the experiences of women.  In fact, it seems that many of our life choices are displayed in a positive and self-affirming manner.  Furthermore, the characters are both of bewilderment and of reason that come from strong, independent women.  These women seem to be at least one version of what well-off, white, heterosexual, feminist-minded women today strive to become – relatively emotionally solid, successful in career and finances. 

 

During the last third of the book, the voice shifts from the first person narrative to that of Carrie as her alter-ego (like the author, a blonde writer from Connecticut in her mid-30s), who is Bushnell’s friend.  The novel begins with an English journalist, friend of the author, Charlotte York who comes to New York and meets an eligible bachelor. She dates him for several weeks, sees a house with him and then never hears from him again. On this she is very disappointed and then the narrator who is friend to her thought, “Of course: She’s from London. No one’s told her about the End of Love in Manhattan. Then I thought: She’ll learn” (Sex and the City 2). The story takes its turn to the prowling over the modish clubs, party circuit and weekend getaways of rich and trendy New York society. There are so many side stories but then the story becomes of Carrie’s romance with the ‘perfect man’, Mr. Big, a rich businessman who turns out to be not so perfect.

 

Carrie is introduced in the book as, “Some sort of a journalist” (SATC 96) which devalues the work of a sex columnist. She is an irresponsible party animal with loose morals. She spends almost every night at the nightclubs, or smoking and doing drugs at parties. Her tough behaviour crumbles in her interaction with her boyfriend Mr. big. She is always insecure and dependent around him similar to the other homesick female reporters. By the end of the columns Carrie becomes aggressive on everything Mr. Big says or does. She starts having that feeling of insecurity and deep dependency which make her feels as if she is going insane. She admits that she needs an asylum for her depression. But later she realizes that her aggression is all due to the dependency which is taking away her freedom. Mr. Big tries to convince her and tells her that she has never talked about her feelings to him and whenever he asked her she went into her own cyborg or some kind of mesh in her mind. In the end of the book, Mr. Big is happily married, and Carrie is happily single. Though in her New York, locating and securing a powerful husband is, sadly, a woman's ultimate accomplishment, but ironically, Bushnell believes that women today are happily single. 

 

On the very onset of the novel, the author tries to convey her readers what exactly the text is about. In her introduction she is answering this burning question, “why are we still single?” and she safely concludes to this question, “that we are single because we want to be” (SATC introduction viii). The novel begin with the narration of the author herself and she describing her ideas as “I’d found myself saying I didn’t want a relationship because, at the end, unless you happened to get married, you were left with nothing” (SATC 6). She hands over the narration to her alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw, who is a semi-autobiographical character created by Bushnell, is too of the similar view, “All it means is that a man has a romanticized view of you, and as soon as you become real and stop playing into his fantasy, he gets turned off. That’s what makes romantics dangerous. Stay away” (SATC 7). She is of the view that:

 

If a woman has survived single in New York until her mid- to late thirties, chances are she knows a thing or two about how to get what she wants. So, when one of these New York women targets a man as a potential husband, there is usually very little he can do to get away. (SATC 177) 

 

No one captures the lives of the lovelorn and the love-seeking in New York City better than, the protagonist of the novel, columnist Carrie Bradshaw does. As fodder for her column, single and fabulous Carrie looks to the experiences of her best friends and her own. Never shying away from difficult or delicate subjects, Carrie has covered everything from emotional dependence to sexual independence. And somehow, through all her research and realizations, she's remained open to the possibility of finding love among the ruins. She begins to explore the difference between how women and men have sex and eventually tries to have sex like a man, without an emotional commitment. Carrie has many relationships with men but always has her heart set on Mr. Big.

 

Carrie is fearlessly fashionable as her style ranges from uptown chic to whimsy sex kitten. Stilettos are a staple for Carrie's unique look and she brought Manolo Blahnik to the masses, which is no small feature. Sex and the City presents women’s romantic and sexual misadventures as they attempt to find love and romance in a large, impersonal, status- and consumer- oriented world. But the most significant relationships in these women’s lives are those they have with each other. As Astrid Henry in ‘Orgasms and Empowerment: Sex and the City and the Third Wave Feminism’ notes, “The women’s relationships with each other – both as a group and individually – are continually depicted as these characters’ primary community and family, their source of love and care” (Henry 2004 67).

 

The relationship among the four friends regularly overshadows their various romantic entanglements. To Carrie, friends are like family and above all the relations in this world. The author herself has revealed in the book, “I was convinced that it should somehow be about me and my friends – a group of single women all of whom seemed to have had a never-ending series of freakish and horrifying experiences with men” (SATC Introduction vii). These friends share each and every experience they have with men or otherwise. Ann Patchett in “Friendship Envy”, New York Times Magazine noted, “I used to think that the core fantasy was that you could have your ultimate core bond in your friendships with women, while getting everything else you might need from a man I think the deeper fantasy is having such close women friends and having the time to actually spend with them” (Patchett 2003 9-10). They take meticulous care of their bodies. Shopping is indispensable, and fortunes are spent on designer labels not because the girls are oppressed by the tyranny of the fashion industry but because this gives them a sense of confidence and individual identity, and the competitive edge in a marketised arena of dating and working. Naomi Wolf in her 1991 book The Beauty Myth argues that despite of the gains made on account of the struggles of second wave feminists, women are still not as free as they want to be. She claims that as a result of the power women have gained politically, economically and legally the past decades, patriarchy needed another implement to eliminate women’s advancement: “the beauty myth”. Wolf provides this explanation by proclaiming, “In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves” (Wolf 1991, 12). Also, the beauty myth is linked with female sexuality, what Wolf terms “beauty pornography”, that is, linking beauty with sexuality and perceiving women as sex objects “to undermine women’s new and vulnerable sense of sexual self-worth.” (11).

 

Sexual identities is focussed almost exclusively on making sense of “sex” and the “city” by focussing on the creation, maintenance, and often the conclusion of multiple sexual relationships; is spite of the fact that the title tells us about the identity of gender and not the sexuality of the women. Jane Arthurs in ‘Sex and the City and Consumer Culture: Remediating Postfeminist Drama’ noted that, “Sex in this context becomes like shopping – a marker of identity, a source of pleasure- knowing how to choose the right goods is crucial …The women treat men as branded goods-the packaging has to be right but the difficulty is to find one whose use value lives up to the image. The quest becomes one in which they are looking for the phallus that would bring an end to a seemingly endless chain of desire” (Arthurs 2008 327). This is a site of power for feminist discourse since the girls control their own identity and sexuality. In another event, Carrie and Magda were discussing about the feelings with men after sex and they were having the feeling as if they are the members of some special club, on which Bushnell shares her views:

 

We were hard and proud of it, and it hadn’t been easy to get to this point – this place of complete independence where we had the luxury of treating men like sex objects. It had taken hard work, loneliness, and the realization that, since there might never be anyone there for you, you had to take care of yourself in every sense of the world. (STAC 50).

 

The characters see the sexual freedom in relationships which is illustrated by Samantha’s promiscuity and Carrie’s brief encounter with lesbianism. Author reveals Samantha’s view about men and sex as, “if you’re a successful single woman in this city, you have two choices: You can beat your head against the wall trying to find a relationship, or you can say “screw it” and just go out and have sex like a man” (49). American women found themselves caught somewhere between the rigid nuclear families resulting in showing women who “have it all” (family and career), but whose domestic roles are highlighted since the books on these themes have come to show the homes. Faludi believes that “Women are unhappy precisely because they are free. Women are enslaved by their own liberation” (Faludi 1991, 2). Most single women enjoy being single and many of them believe that they can have a happy and complete life, even if they never marry, “In lieu of marriage, women were choosing to live with their loved ones The more women are paid, the less eager they are to marry” (31). But Naomi Wolf argues that this creates hostility towards individual achievements. Power feminism, on the other hand, is based on the notion that women can achieve as much as men and that women can be aggressive and require autonomy. Most importantly, it focuses on women’s individual achievements, “Power feminism: …encourages a woman to claim her individual voice rather than merging her voice in a collective identity, for only strong individuals can create a just community” (Wolf 1993, 137). It accepts that women are individuals and that “what every woman does with her body and in her bed is her own business” (137).

 

Sex and the associated topics like love, gender roles, and relations are central to each chick lit novel as is a desire for other things such as wealth, beauty, independence and happiness. In Sex and the City, this dualism of sexuality identity occurs which is a hallmark of establishing identity as a particular lifestyle. To support this view, Ginia Bellafante  in her famous Time article called this kind of false consciousness a symptom of the “Camille Paglia syndrome,” who “argue[s] that it is men who are the weaker sex because they have remained eternally powerless over their desire for the female body. It is female sexuality that is humanity’s greatest force” (1998, 58). As author puts it for the single women in Manhattan, she says, “For the first time in Manhattan history, many women in their thirties to early forties have as much money and power as men – or at least enough to feel like they don’t need a man, except for sex” (SATC 49). It is significant to consider the space of pleasure that the women in Sex and the City occupy.

Sex and the City focuses on the women’s experiences and voices. Its theme is just like any conventional themes of the earlier novels for women, but it turns them into something unmistakably contemporary and arguably feminist. The theme of Sex and the City includes a shift from female sexual objectification to empowerment and subjectification. The central theme of chick lit revolves around the whole novel that is the modern woman has a free choice whether to marry or not, with the answer most likely to be ‘no’.

 

Sex and the City should be seen by the feminist movement as a legitimate voice, because though it does not address political issues or academic discourse as feminism stereotypically has in the past, it is positively influencing the lives of women today.  It serves to connect with and empower women to overcome the boundaries that “sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” have set for us in the areas of sex and relationships.  The women in it defy expectation at every turn, instead challenging their own roles as women and, in turn, challenging its readers to do the same.

 

In the world of postfeminism, where the role of women, men, feminism and anti-feminism is so prominently displayed, where our shared values as a nation are presented, it is important that feminists seek out and acknowledge those that further the movement.  Sex and the City is a powerful statement to America – that feminist women are here to stay.  Feminism is not dead, but you may see her wearing Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals and chatting with her girlfriends over coffee.

 

REFERENCES:

1.        Braithwaite, Ann. (2004). ‘Politics of/and Backlash’. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 5(5) 2004. (18-33)

2.        Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc 1991.

3.        Ferriss, Suzanne, Mallory Young, (eds). (2006). Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. New York: Routledge 2006.

4.        Genz, Stephanie, Benjamin A. Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Great Britain: Edinburgh 2009. 

5.        McRobbie, Angela. ‘Post-feminism and popular culture’. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3) 2004. (255-264)

6.        Whelehan, Imelda. Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism. London: Women’s Press 2000.

7.        Whelehan, Imelda. The Feminist Bestseller: From ‘Sex and the Single Girl’ to ‘Sex and the City’. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005.

8.        Wolf, Naomi. Fire with Fire. New York: Random House 1993.

9.        Bushnell, Candance. Sex and the City. New York: Grand Central Publishing 1996.