Sex and the Single Fart
Once a season or so, some piece of pop-cultural fluff that has hung around past its sell-by date--Forrest Gump, Twin Peaks, the Backstreet Boys--is declared an icon of our times. The newspapers run stories on how it has transformed the entertainment industry. Time and Newsweek place its stars on their covers, accompanied by earnest analyses of the social implications of its success. Producers of nostalgic documentaries make a mental note to include footage of it in their libraries of stock images.
Halfway into its third season, the HBO series Sex and the City is undergoing this process of canonization. A slight but charming farce featuring four superstylish single professional women in their 30s and a dreamily glamorized Manhattan has become the occasion for ponderous meditations on the state of American unions. More urban thirtysomething women than ever before are failing to marry, in the manner of the women on the show. In consequence, sociologists and family-values advocates must be interviewed in Time; a 32-year-old female TV anchor and her quest for a mate must be scrutinized in Talk. There are important questions to consider. Have American women given up on men, or is it the other way round? Does a woman's pursuit of liberty and a life preclude happiness? Are women happier because they're no longer forced to settle for men they don't really love, and where does that leave the guys? And off we go, leaving the show behind in our rush to answer the big question that every female-oriented entertainment product is for some reason expected to address nowadays: Has the liberation of women been good for us or bad for us?
But how relevant is feminism, really, when you're talking about Sex and the City? The show has as much to do with the actual women's movement or real women's lives as Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl did, which is to say, very little. It's true that there's something vaguely feminist about the stated premise of the show--that upper-class single women in their 30s aren't the pathetic losers everyone thinks they are but fabulous swingers instead--but once you've watched it for a while, you realize that that particular come-on is a bait-and-switch. Our heroines don't turn out to be Hugh Hefners for the new millennium. They're neither carefree nor sexually empowered. They're angst-ridden clotheshorses. They're not worrying about their careers, in which they appear to have little interest, except when work can serve as shtick. (With the exception of one who's a lawyer and has the hardest time getting a date, the protagonists have the usual girly jobs. Carrie, the narrator played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is a sexpert, a profession that seems to occupy the same cultural position as stewardess used to, at least in the sense of offering up bountiful opportunity for sexual experience and chitchat. Her other sidekicks are a publicist and an art gallery director.) Neither liberation nor self-actualization--the big issues of 1960s or 1970s feminism--enters their minds, except insofar as those things can be obtained through men. That, of course, is the answer to the question of what these women want--they want men, to date, to sleep with, or to marry, depending on which of the four you talk to. At least three of them turn out to be unreconstructed Rules girls. They'll play the game however they must to get what they want. You'd have a hard time distinguishing them from the kind of career girls offered up for our titillation in popular fiction, movies, television, and comic strips--think Brenda Starr--since the late 1910s and '20s. The main difference is that, since the show is on HBO, they talk a lot more frankly about bodily functions.
Actually, the dirty talk does more for this show than merely make it seem of the moment. To understand how cleverly the writers exploit the absence of censorship, you have to go back and watch an episode from late in the first season (the current season, sadly, is flaccid and soap-opera-ish and lacks comic specificity). The transgressive subject is a fart. It comes about like this: After weeks of sleeping with her new boyfriend, Carrie finally relaxes enough actually to sleep with him. One morning, though, while lying in bed, she farts. Mortified, she jumps up and runs out of his apartment and spends the rest of the day replaying the audio tape of the fart in her head. Miranda, the lawyer, laughs when Carrie confesses her worry that the fart has turned the boyfriend off sex forever. "You're only human!" she exclaims. But Samantha, the ultra-promiscuous publicist, who often seems like she wandered out of the 1970s soft-core classic Coffee Tea or Me, disagrees. "Huge mistake," she says.
"You think?" Carries says. "I mean I'm only human."
