living viCarrieously
It's around 9pm on Tuesday night. I'm midway though the second season of
Sex and the City right now. I mean,
right now right now, like, as I type this, Big just held up a piece of veal and asked Carrie, "Is this a piece of veal or is this a piece of veal" and then she invited him to have dinner with all her friends for the first time on Saturday night at a hot new restaurant called Denial ("Apparently, everyone in Manhattan wanted to be in Denial." Ha ha.) I'm in kind of a weird headspace.
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living viCarrieously
Editor's note: Remember how I said I was going to watch every episode of 'Sex and the City' between April 1 and the May 23 premiere of the film? Well, for reasons of time, energy, and impending marriage, I didn't do it. What I did do, however, is pawn the task off on someone else: Emily Gould, Jezebel contributor and coiner of my favorite 'SATC'-related phrase, "Scary Sadshaws". Between today and Thursday, Emily will be watching all 94 episodes of the HBO series — that's 36 hours' worth! — and report back with her findings. A stunt? Yes. Insane? Probably. Wish her luck.
Last night, Anna and I were sitting in a chic little winebar in Queens sipping adorably-pink glasses of rosé when she announced that she had a present for me. The present was pink, too! And it came in a case made of sensuous faux-suede!
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scary sadshaws
One of the things that stuck in my craw about the Sarah Jessica Parker
profile in
New York Mag was when SJP claimed that Carrie didn't care about
Big's money. "I really don't think that money was a criteria," Parker told writer Emily Nussbaum. "It never would have occurred to her to take money from a man." British writer and
Candace Bushnell buddy argues that Carrie does indeed care about money. In fact, she and the other
SatC heroines care
so much about money that, Young writes, "once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those depicted in the novels of Jane Austen."
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scary sadshaws
There's an article in today's
Guardian asking
Can a feminist really love Sex and the City? The short answer: yes. A woman's pop cultural affections often have very little to do with her belief system. But the other question implicit in this article would be "Is Carrie Bradshaw a proper feminist icon?" That question is more difficult to answer. One passage, where author Alice Wignall is making the argument against Bradshaw's feminist status, stood out to me: "[The] central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak." In some ways, Carrie's "problematic" love for a terminally egotistical man makes her very similar to a lot of the women in the feminist pantheon, specifically Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, and Rebecca West.
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the bushnell administration
When I began conceiving of Jezebel, one of the first "Don'ts" on my list concerned one Julia Allison, sex columnist, media figure and self-promoter extraordinaire. Not only was Julia amply covered by Jezebel's big brother site Gawker, to me, she represented everything that was wrong with young women in the 00's. Called "
Scary Sadshaws" by former Gawker editor
Emily Gould, these ladies worship at the altar of Manolo Blahnik, regard writer Candace Bushnell as some sort of saint, and, of course, take instruction from a certain HBO series that bore no similarity to how life is lived by the majority of single women. Scary Sadshaws are NYC's version of the stars of
Girls Gone Wild, except that Patrick McMullan is their Joe Francis, and they substitute luxury goods for bare breasts. In my mind, they were not only ruining New York, but ruining what it means to be a serious young woman with ambition in the turn-of-the-century America. They were ruining
everything for all of us.
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Jezebel
