Love it or hate it as they say, Sex & The City wasn't just a television show. It was a lifestyle. It was a movement. It was a vodka-fueled engine of demand for name necklaces, absurd stilettos, brightly-colored baubles and other accessories that theretofore might have been considered too frivolous/tacky/infantile to ever comprise a serious industry, nevertheless an economic wave, an entire worldview, which is what it has now, according to a new theory called the New Girl Order, which apparently arose from the "Bridget Jones Economy" and yesterday made its way to the wonky quarters of the Nation magazine. Which is interesting because, before all this, Sex & The City was, of course, just a curious little weekly newspaper column full of retardedly-written exchanges between inane made-up people doing blah blah blah Hamptons, that we revisit once a week because the New York Observer reprints it for some reason, I think it may be "to torment us with its crapness." But yesterday's column was different. It was actually about the sort of people who write for The Nation. And it was not very nice.
James and Winnie agree on just about everything. They have definite opinions. "There's something wrong with people who don't have informed opinions about things," Winnie said to James, when they met for the first time, at a party in an apartment on the Upper West Side. Everyone at the party was "in publishing" and under 35. Most of the women (like Winnie), were working at women's magazines (something Winnie never talks about now)...
Here are a few of the things Winnie and James agree on: They hate anyone who isn't like them. They hate anyone who is wealthy and gets press. They hate trendy people and things (but James just bought a pair of Dakota Smith sunglasses, and they drive a BMW). They hate anyone who has appeared on TV, with the exception of Michael Kinsley and Ted Koppel (everyone else is a "lightweight").
They believe in the poor. (They do not know anyone who is poor, except their Jamaican nanny, who is not exactly poor.) They believe in black writers. (They know two, and Winnie is working on becoming friends with a third—whom she met at a convention.) They hate music. They think fashion is silly (but secretly identify with the people in Dewar's ads). They believe in women writers (as long as the women do not become too successful or get too much attention or write about things the Diekes do not approve of, like sex—unless it's lesbian sex).
James says he is a feminist, but always puts down women who are not like Winnie (including her sister). They put down women who do not have children. Who are not married. Winnie gets sick at the sight of a woman she considers a slut, a gold digger, a whore.
Okay, anyway, James wants to do Winnie's dilettante sister because she has implants, and the whole thing is "To Be Continued," and yeah they're pretentious and don't drink enough but they are definitely the most finely-drawn and least reprehensible people ever to appear in one of her columns. I mean, I know couples like this; everyone in New York knows couples like this although they're a dying breed, and yes, they can be tiresome but Jesus Christ they are sooooooooo highly preferable to the Bitchlorette publicist Scoop-shopping Scary Sadshaw crap Candace Bushnell ushered in.
Which is, obviously, why Her Heinousness decided to render them extinct.
And to think this whole "New Girl Order" thing was just a fluke enabled by strong actresses and good writers with a backdrop of a booming economy and post-Starr Report era of sexual frankness!
Yeah, she must die.
Sex Lives Of Serious Journalists [Observer]