[Marxism] Apropos Sex and the City

[eiza segal <eizeiza@xxxxxxxxx>]

Carlos,apropos Sex and the City:
it's indisputably true that the gals in Carrie
Bradshaw's picaresque tales of Manhattan, are somewhat
crippled by the great invisible, cast-iron corset of
repression which they all wear like  girdles of glory.
 But not only is that self-punishing trait apparent in
the way that Carrie B. deals with cigarettes (as you
point out) I think it also informs alot more besides
,including the attraction to cold, self-regarding men
that afflicts all these characters.

The big  problem for us outside the US is how to
handle the puritan streak in the characters (it's in
that tendency to define people via their social
size--mr. Big--or rank --"he was an investment banker
from out of town...".as if it were completely normal.)
I"ve noticed that puritan element in even the most
cheeky and irreverent of comedy series from the US and
to a lesser extent Britain.......it's there in
Seinfield as well as Will and Grace, the Golden Girls,
Queer as Folk..... for all their wild erotic escapades
and blunt talk, characters seem oddly horrified by
basic bodily functions and attributes.. fat, lapses of
hygiene, cheap apartments..baldness, false teeth,signs
of aging, poverty, failure.
 I still have not recovered from the episode where all
the women in SAC seemed equally as appalled as
Charlotte, by the idea of a man who is uncircumcised.
Charlotte's uncut partner eventually submits to the
chopper in order to please his future sexual partners.
Why bother? As I recall, there is not a glimmer of
consciousness evident anywhere in this episode , that
the prejudice against prepuce is peculiar. Where else
on earth would sassy, secular-minded, cosmopolitan
women of independent means, treat uncut men with such
disdain?

Mind you,I too (along with legions of gay men) often
watch this programme. I like the frankness, the witty,
bawdy repartee that passes for bonding between women.
It's both tonic and funny. But like you I find my
amusement too often tempered by disappointment. At the
oddest moments the characters just sink into the big ,
brown, bleary bog of conventional angst without a
fight. There is Samantha the libertine, our answer to
Don Giovanni, suddenly fretting  herself into a major
depression because menopause is imminent.What garbage.
Or worse still, following and spying on her wayward
lover like some besotted harpie. Is the great American
tradition of sexy female jesters so soon forgotten?
Mae West and Sophie Tucker, where are they now that we
really need them?? I cannot imagine Diamond Lil taking
these guys so seriously or giving a damn about the
onset of middle age. Didn't SHE leave any crumbs of
mockery for the current crop of funny girls?
I wish that an occasional episode of SAC  would
confront womens' problems with a bit more of that
defiant, bohemian audacity---sorry that's not quite
it(??)which Mae and Sophie embodied. Whatever you want
to call it, it was a great weapon in the war against
those legions of wowsers and sanctimonious hypocrites
that they waged to the end of their days.
Of course SAC does not pretend to have a leftish-slant
or an anti-authoritarian slant or a good old , robust,
working class slant on sex like the old music hall
comics and vaudevillians. It does not take a really
satirical approach to the Manhattan socialites and try
to puncture the pretensions of the rich and powerful,
but despite that, it could have at least once or
twice,posed a question about those awful petit
bourgeois assumptions that burden its characters -
their notions about borrowing money, mothers in law,
religion, bedding very young and very old men ,
notions about farting, flirting, being an artist,
privacy, bleeding, scolding domestic servants,
marrying, monogamy, jealousy  et al.
Maybe the real problem is that none of the characters
work at anything they take pride in.That would help
wouldn't it? You notice early on that the writer, the
lawyer, the P.R.dynamo and expert on modern art never
ever have serious conversations about their purported
areas of expertise. None of them are intellectually
engaged by what they do for a living. Why not?
 I'm sure it could be done. There was a movie years
ago, French Canadian called something like Decline of
the American Empire, full of bright (though serious)
discussion of road kill we meet via sex drive.
FABULOUS MOVIE full of troubled, though unrepentant
intellectuals. These people expressed ideas, argued,
remonstrated with each other, analysed things.They
talked about their work as academics. It was in the
end a marvellous homage to the abiding value of
friendship. See if you can get hold of it sometime,
Carlos.
.
 One day it will be possible for someone to make the
great feminist comedy that Sex and the City should
have been. It may even be set in the USA, after all
one of the best movies ever made about sex and death
was Harold and Maude. It had the ineffable Ruth Gordon
in the main role as a geriatric anarchist. (Gordon
made her name years before in writing great scripts
for Tracy and Hepburn).Harold and Maude, as I recall
was far more shocking in many ways than SAC and more
productively provocative. A chunk of it,namely the
wedding night scene, was sliced right out by the
puritan censor when it was shown here the first
time.The idea of intimacy between the 80 year old
woman and the 18 year old boy was just too,too
appalling to allow, for Harold (unlike Samantha) did
not recoil and flee from the old and dying person
beside him in the bed .
Butfinally,back to the point about women,
self-loathing , repression, Taylorism and Henry Ford:
If you are correct about Taylorism and the work ethic
as the unspoken ideology driving these episodes of Sex
and the City, why is it that we see just as much if
not more female masochism in the popular shows from
our non-protestant cousins?
    None of the self-repressing behaviour  in Carrie
Bradshaw's world even begins to compare with the
endless, silent, purgatorial pain, enjoyed by the
heroines of the popular Latin American and Middle
Eastern soap operas whichI've seen here. I remember 2
in particular that caught an enormous cult following
in the 1980's. Both "Rosa de Lejos" from Argentina
and "Cueva de Lobos" from Mexico , showed us simple,
trusting gals, seduced by handsome cads and wastrels
from the higher echelons of society.
 After having bastard children and realising that they
had been duped  by the scoundrels, the women slowly
(in  a somewhat bovine stupor)overcome adversity and
settle down triumphant in the end.
 Although the characters were not afflicted with the
traits of puritanism that we saw in Carrie's Manhattan
friends and lovers, both programmes taught us that it
took years (if not decades) of penance and exquisitely
borne humiliation to clear us of the stain of our sex.
They taught us that mature contentment with a sincere
though stolid man may one day be possible, if we are
lucky.We must endure patiently and forfeit ugly urges
we may feel toward those who exploit or injure us.
Part of the reason Rosa acquired a cult following here
was because people were stunned by the sheer
perversity of the virtuous characters , their
improbable dialogue, luminous imbecility and
unconcealed Oedipus complexes. Certain critics
speculated  about the connections between Argentina's
sadistic military junta ,which recycled propaganda
from the Third Reich , which  tortured young people
before hurling them alive out of aeroplanes .......and
the masochistic values extolled by soap operas like
Rosa de Lejos? Interesting stuff. I could never quite
work it out.

Can you see a connection here with Henry Ford and
Taylorism or the dictates of Friedman and  the Chicago
school of economists? If so, do tell.

--- Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> > Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:52:56 -0500
> > From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> > Subject: [Marxism] Sex and the City
> > I would also have to confess that I became a big
> fan of this show over
> > the past few months.
>
> I too, Louis, I too...But in my case that had
> perhaps more to do with the
> fact that I begen watching the show justly after I
> had watched my last Xena
> episode, therefore I had some kind of a craving for
> a women-centered show.
> Well, I believe S& TC fares badly in comparision.
>
> Since I wrote I whole book on Mass Culture centered
> on Xena, I think I
> should be able to explain the reasons for my
> particular preferences. What
> made for me the charm of Xena was its unbalenced
> character, the fact that
> the abduction of the heroine as a lesbian icon  by
> the show's fandom left
> its writers and producers threading on very thin ice
> in their attitude
> towards postmodern petit-bourgeois radicalism,
> eventually failing to justify
> their (conventional)closing of the show by making
> Xena dye for the Greater
> Good - and heterosexual morals.
>
> Nothing of this kind is to be found in Sex and the
> City, which is the usual
> portraying of the _via crucis_ of four dysfunctional
> females struggling
> towards their final - and  willingly - acceptance of
> monogamy and family
> values, admittedly with some good jokes in-between
> (most of them, by the
> way, vernacular and leaving me somwhat at a loss as
> far as prompt
> understanding is concerned). As far as I'm
> concerned, my interst in S & TC
> began to flag somewhere during the third season,
> when character Carrie
> Bradshaw decided to quit smoking in order to get
> back her romantic interest
> Aidan ( a good decision prompted by the most
> obnoxious, priggish reasons, to
> say the least).
>
> Those who, like Adorno & Horkheimer,  resume Mass
> Culture under the notion
> of "mindless entertainment", seem to me to be
> unaware of the element of the
> pedagogics of suffering that's to be found in it, or
> better, what Gramsci
> called the ethics of Fordism, that's to say the huge
> amount of _internalized
> repression_ the lead-characters must self-inflict in
> order to arrive at the
> happy ending - the same pedagogy of suffering that
> seems at work in Mel
> Gibson's late cinematic rendering of Ultramontane
> Catholicism. As carrie
> Bradshaw must renounce tabagism for romantic love's
> sake, and Xena renounce
> Gabrielle for the Greater Good's, so Gibson's Christ
> must willingly embrace
> the most senseless torture in order to redeem
> Mankind (remember, by the way,
> that there were some very popular early heresies
> who, opposedly, made the
> Passion a sham by proposing that what had been
> crucified was Christ's ghost,
> and not the real Christ, as God cannot possibly
> suffer physical pain). It's
> in this pedagogy of suffering, perhaps, that reside
> the most obnoxiously
> reactionary traits of Mass Culture; as there is
> something akin in it to the
> acceptance of Taylorism and Henry Ford's social
> experiments by the working
> classes...
>
> Carlos Rebello
>
>
>
>
>
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