A note on this essay. [1]

The pilot episode of Sex and the City situates itself at the close of an epoch, proclaiming the "end of love." This positioning is complicated in the last season as the finale depicts Miranda and Charlotte happily married, the 40-something Samantha in what is probably her first committed relationship, and Carrie reunited, yet again, with Big, her first-name-basis with "John" signifying a new relationship plateau and life stage. This happy coupling, in its replication of the romantic comedy ending, challenges the initial episode's pronouncement that "Cupid has flown the co-op." While the finale portrays then not a farewell to romantic love but a reinvestment in it, I wish to explore the pilot episode's declared state of endings. As Carrie's weekly column aspires to sexual anthropology, this essay attempts to present a field report on the series' treatment of heterosexuality for the purposes of delineating a sociological moment in American culture and feminist media studies that we may term "late heterosexuality."

Whereas Adrienne Rich's thesis in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is that heterosexuality operates as a nonchoice for women, functioning as an institution through which patriarchy is manifested and maintained, late heterosexuality ushers in a new stage of straight relations—postcompulsory heterosexuality, in which women question romance and often remain single—and marries it to a new phase of capitalism, compulsory style, wherein men are discussed in terms of accessories and courtship in the idiom of business. Judgments about sexual orientation are frequently image appraisals rather than political issues. This phenomenon, I acknowledge, is largely native to Sex and the City's Manhattan locale; yet the series' popularity and ability to generate op-ed journalism on style, courtship relations, and their nexus suggest that its representation, if not development, of late heterosexuality portrays a caricatured microcosm of new millennial social values and codes.

The series implies that, at least in Manhattan, being straight and having a Metrocard will get you on the bus: There is a 'right' but elusive heterosexuality, like securing the right Hamptons rental, the latter typically metonymical for the former. Owning a fabulous pair of Tiffany earrings earns Chivon a lay with Samantha; critics such as Susan Zieger have observed how that luxury accessory stands in for Chivon as the object of Samantha's desire ("No Ifs, Ands, or Butts," episode 35; Zieger 101–2). When Carrie discovers Aidan's purchase of a decidedly not Upper East Side engagement ring and confesses to the group that the ring "wasn't good," Samantha summarily arbitrates with a "wrong ring, wrong guy" ("Just Say Yes," episode 60). Charlotte terminates a relationship because of the suitor's mismatched taste in china patterns. She weeds out a date not up to par in floral sensibility: he brings her carnations, mere "filler flowers." Carrie, who actually likes pink carnations, toes a bottom line in the shoe department, confessing she'd "throw away" a guy if he dared to don "docksiders, topsiders, or any of the above" ("Hop, Skip, and a Week," episode 80). Charlotte finds her knight in shining armor in Harry Goldenblatt—a short, bald man with a hirsute back, who does not quite appear to be a likely marital contender. Any doubts about his merit as a catch, however, are dissolved with his selection of Charlotte's engagement ring, his 5.2 quality carats rendering Trey's 2.16-carat Tiffany ring impotent. Yet the right ring does not a Sunday New York Times engagement announcement make: Harry needs to pose a certain way, with his fiancée seated beside him on a Burberry blanket in Central Park, in order for the couple to make the cut.[2] These testing standards are not confined to the straight characters: Gay male friends, valued members of Carrie and Charlotte's urban family, are uniformly stylish and often professional stylists. We witness Stanford questioned and then commended in a gay underwear-only club on his brand selection. Conversely, lesbianism for Samantha is "just a label, like Gucci or Versace," but Carrie, knowing that some labels are more equal than others, ends Samantha's list with "Birkenstocks," equating lesbianism with fashion that is too pragmatic, specifically, shoes merely made for walking. The show decenters heterosexual privilege by including the gay "option" while reducing legitimate sexuality (straight or gay) to a commodity available to the gym fit, powerful, or well-heeled. It is the stylishness of one's execution of sexuality, not the sexuality one chooses, that matters in late heterosexuality. The implication that the right consumption supplants or competes with sexual-orientation choice is notable but hardly liberating, as late heterosexuality qualifies liberalism's tenets of self-fashioning and choice by narrowing the spectrum of acceptable "looks."[3]

Secondly, late heterosexuality highlights the growing challenge of separating considerations of heterosexuality in American culture from business-based rhetoric and theoretical frameworks.[4] This attribute is a concern not only for heterosexuality studies but also for economic theory.[5] For instance, Cameron and Collins acknowledge that commercial or market considerations have long been part of the partner-matching process in many cultures and societies through the ages, applying recent economic rubrics to the study and practice of partner search (170–71). In their analysis of British matchmaking services, relationship partners are theorized as "risky products" that require extensive search and evaluation before a decision is made, while matchmaking agencies serve as "risk reduction proxies" that alleviate anxiety aroused when initially encountering a stranger (107, 123). Such rhetoric animates much of the self-help genre, Rebecca Mead and others argue, as women's self-help books of the 1970s and 1980s, written by therapists, typically in an empathetic tone, have been replaced with a model drawn from business management theory (106). In her essay collection The Commercialization of Intimate Life (2003), sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild contends from a review of women's advice books that postfeminism is a manifestation of part of the spirit of capitalism being displaced to the intimate life: "Their activism, their belief in working hard and aiming high, the desire to go for it, to be saved, to win, to succeed, which the early capitalists used to build capitalism in a rough-and-tumble marketplace, many advice books urge women to transfer to love in a rapidly changing courtship scene" (24). For example, John Molloy's Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others: The Fascinating Research That Can Land You the Man of Your Dreams (2003) details relationship-stage schedules, offering quantitative benchmarks to measure if a courtship is progressing on schedule. Malloy, image consultant and New York Times best-selling author of the Dress for Success series, purports to offer dating dos and don'ts that insure an "up to 60 percent" increase in the odds of marital likelihood when modeled correctly. Featured guidelines specify that the shift from casual to monogamous dating should occur between the 1st and 4th month and that the 22nd month of dating marks a watershed moment as the statistical trend line for receiving a proposal begins to drop off. In late heterosexuality, capitalism levels heterosexuality's claim to naturalness in that successful heterosexuality is shown to be the product of labor or a resilient entrepreneurial esprit. (The series-inspired career guide Sexy Jobs in the City: How to Find Your Dream Job Using the Rules of Dating (2003), offers an inverted application of this thematic, connecting media-sector job hunting to dating savvy.) In sum, this form of what American sexologist Laura Kipnis has called "labor-intensive intimacy" circulates the idea that if we work hard and network enough in our soul-mate search, payoffs will yield, an idea touted by a self-help lecture program that Charlotte and Carrie are featured in season 5 as attending (Kipnis 18; "Unoriginal Sin," episode 68).[6]

Samantha's assertion that the new dating field is "all about multitasking" and that none of the group can afford to fall into a "one-man-at-a-time pattern" utilizes contemporary business metaphors to promote retrograde sexual politics. Playing the field is mandatory, according to Samantha's message, because the right men do exist but in sorely limited quantities.[7] Charlotte attempts to share her reading of Marriage Incorporated: How to Apply Successful Business Strategies to Finding a Husband, which "encourages professional women to approach finding a mate with the same kind of dedication and organization they bring to their careers" ("Drama Queens," episode 37). Perhaps Rachel Greenwald was inspired by this fictional self-help title as her Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School (2003) pitches the idea that with the right marketing and product development women can succeed at obtaining a marriage proposal even if they are chronologically challenged. Carrie, who likens first dates to "job interviews with cocktails" in "Luck Be an Old Lady" (episode 69), later in "To Market, to Market" (episode 75) ponders as she types on her Macintosh laptop the rationale behind speculative investment: "When it comes to finance and dating I couldn't help wonder why we keep investing." Choosing to keep her capital right where she can see it—hanging in her closet—she assesses that "after weathering all the ups and downs you could one day find yourself with nothing." Yet the possibility of no return, coming up empty, is not enough to fold her hand. Carrie, like the spirit of her book dedication, is hopeful, and, despite Carrie's labeling Charlotte in "Drama Queens" (episode 37) as a "professional husband hunter," the series portrays optimism and romance alongside of market considerations and dating venture capitalism. Late heterosexuality is then marked by a postmodern contradictoriness as to the function of romance, traditionally opposed to monetary gain[8]: Carrie deliberates as to whether to conclude her book on hope or despair, and while uncertain in her own mind about love, she opts to end her book on hope because she guesses correctly that hope sells.

One notable side-effect of postcompulsory heterosexuality is a humiliating displacement of the heterosexual male romantic hero. Few men are named, as other critics have observed, and are instead referred to in impersonal classifications (Akass and McCabe 7), sometimes blurring the boundaries between man and accessory. Males vie with products, and in rare instances the two coalesce to their advantage: sporting a vodka bottle between the legs of his nude body, raw food waiter-actor Smith Jerrod becomes a minor celebrity as the Absolut Hunk billboard sensation. He struggles with the phenomenology of becoming-commodity, and resists Samantha's efforts to contain him in a no-name identity as her role-playing partner and fuck buddy. He insists she learn his name, and once she does, she promptly changes it (from the inopportune Jerry Jerrod), merging the girlfriend role she resists with a more familiar and powerful position as public relations manager ("Lights, Camera, Relationship," episode 79). With the exception of Big, all of Carrie's dates compete, often unsuccessfully, with the omnipresent other man, i.e., the Manolo. It seems fitting that in the middle of the final season Carrie makes the single woman's ultimate declaration of independence and entitlement—"getting married" to herself and registering at the Manolo flagship store—and gives new meaning to the expression "soul mate."

More generally, suitors are frequently supplanted by the series' costume closet. The four women, Carrie in particular, embrace a type of female dandyism. For instance, viewers feel that Carrie is acting out of character when Aidan influences her to discard some of her 1980s digs. Resignedly attempting to make closet space for him, she throws the items to the floor with a wince, foreshadowing the union's doom. Big, whom the series connects with classic New York—its wealth, arrogance, and power, his tinted windows and driver imbuing him with glamour and mystery—is compared in Carrie's book to the city, his name the first half of a popular Manhattan icon. It is not insignificant that his one-time rival, Aidan, cherishes the country, and the series arguably depicts his modest cabin and resident squirrels as annoyingly rustic, two-bit alongside Big's black Jaguar, which he drives up from the city to the phonemically appropriate Suffren. Once again, the men are less significant as individual heroes or romantic partners than as markers and bearers of style. Carrie's one-bedroom apartment serves as a private city, equal parts fashion house, Manolo showroom, and publishing company in miniature. When Aidan purchases the adjacent unit and begins to break down an adjoining brick wall, the effect is one of violation, as if bodily harm is inflicted on Carrie's person. She sinks to the floor in a full-blown panic attack ("Change of a Dress," episode 63). A better-fitting union is witnessed in the next season when Carrie descends a white-flower-laden staircase to the accompaniment of processional music ("Plus One Is the Loneliest Number," episode 71). She enters not a nuptial ceremony but her book launch party, as the voice-over compares finding a publisher to becoming a bride. The series' withholding of a definite ending for Carrie and Big coupled with Carrie's success as a writer reaffirms narrative as Carrie's proper groom. The series creates a mythos of feminine angst as it chronicles the difficulty for Carrie to reconcile her love for the city and its sense of limitless possibility with that of mortal man.

In its graphic catalog of straight sex's themes and variations, from "tea bagging" to the "to pee or not to pee" question, Sex and the City discloses private conduct as eclectic as the series' costume closet. Viewers receive 30-minute education sessions in straight diversity, wherein aspects of heterosexuality are revealed as constructed and frequently accompanied by their own set of perversities, a principle utilized by much of feminist media studies and queer theory. Yet, for some viewers, the sense of shock or amusement began to coexist with an "Is this all?" feeling, a Friedanesque (though not suburban) malaise, ameliorated by the series' nonstop succession of vibrant surfaces. A colleague of mine and out owner of several complete-season DVDs did not especially mourn the show's finale on HBO, half-asking, half-shrugging, "What are they supposed to do? Have some more sex?" Similarly, Miranda in season 2's launch interrogated the group's limited brunch discussion parameters: "All we talk about anymore is big balls or small dicks. How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about except boyfriends? Does it always have to be about them?" ("Take Me Out to the Ballgame," episode 13). Such reflexive utterances presciently acknowledged that the series' risqué dialogue and undercover treatment of sexual trends du jour would not always safeguard against redundancy. As the series boldly depicted the spectrum of contemporary heterosexual mating rituals, judging some more acceptable than others, the characters' talk about men, however frank, became obligatory, if not monotonous. The limits of the series seem to indicate the worn quality of the defamiliarizing approach, reminding the feminist critic that such a methodology, however thorough, does not necessarily unmask a subversive politics.

Sex and the City's unapologetic taxonomy of sex about town, full of style and humor, frequently served as a vehicle for the reconsolidation of heterosexual norms. Samantha in season 1 offers something close to a Naomi Wolf–type critique of the beauty industry when she states that we reside in a culture that promotes its impossible standards, yet season 5 reveals her as no stranger to Botox and depicts her chemical peel's scorched aftereffect. Carrie appraises her two-minute foray into bisexuality as a "game" that she "was too old to play," presenting this sexual orientation as not quite adult, after Samantha, calling it a "layover on the way to gaytown," thus dismisses it as a geographically undesirable dead-end ("Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl," episode 34).

To return once again to the pilot episode, when Carrie's voice-over welcomes us to the "age of un-innocence" she attempts to prepare the viewer for its nudity and adult content, as well as the series' revisiting of Edith Wharton's preoccupation with women on the market. Yet, the legacy of Sex and the City has taught us that more sexual positions do not always make for better sex or sustained audience engagement. Its humor and effervescence ironically leave the feminist critic face-to-face with a more serious methodological issue. Is the "Is this all feeling" the feminist media critic may feel toward the series itself symptomatic of a moment within her discipline? To what extent is this "age of un-innocence" also a methodological one? Watching the show and reading existing commentary on it may indeed leave the feminist scholar with a vague morning-after effect. The luxe surfaces, like a dexterous conference paper, produce pleasure in the audience but don't really shake things up in any substantial way. This pleasure in the stylishness of sexual representation in feminist media studies can seem transient. Indeed, feminist theory risks running too close to the fashion pages of the average women's magazine, offering a knowing self-reflexivity along with the latest styles to bolster its glossy surfaces, but lacking sufficient critique.

Maybe the real un-innocence is that such critique has come to feel too strident and unplayful. Late heterosexuality's emphasis on style dovetails with postfeminism's move away from the more polemical, humorless aspects of the second wave. Just as Charlotte's 1950s image of marriage and home is out of date, so too is the dismantling hierarchies trend, but unlike the former this is not necessarily something to celebrate.

Works Cited

Akass, Kim and Janet McCabe. Introduction. Reading Sex and the City: Critical Approaches. By Akass and McCabe, 1–14. London: I. B. Tauris, 2004.

Blau, Peter M. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964.

Cameron, Samuel and Alan Collins. Playing the Love Market: Dating, Romance, and the Real World. London: Free Association, 2000.

Egan, Jennifer. "Love in the Time of No Time." New York Times Magazine, November 23, 2003, 66–71, 124.

Greenwald, Rachel. Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School. New York: Ballantine, 2003.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Homans, George Caspar. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961.

Illouz, Eva. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Pantheon, 2003.

Lee, John Alan. "Ideologies of Lovestyle and Sexstyle." In Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, edited by Victor C. de Munck, 33–76. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

Mead, Rebecca. "Love for Sale." Review of Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, by Rachel Greenwald. New Yorker, November 24, 2003, 104–7.

Melamed, Samantha. "A Decent Proposal." Bucks, May/June 2004, 116.

Molloy, John. Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others: The Fascinating Research That Can Land You the Man of Your Dreams. New York: Warner Books, 2003.

Moore, Myreah and Jodie Gould. Date Like a Man to Get the Man You Want. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Murstein, Bernard I. Who Will Marry Whom?: Theories and Research in Marital Choice. New York: Springer, 1976.

Parker, Sarah Jessica and Oprah Winfrey. "Oprah Talks to Sarah Jessica Parker." O, The Oprah Magazine, March 2004, 186–89, 240.

Parsons, Deborah. L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Rich, Adrienne. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." In Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, 203–24. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1993. Originally published in Signs 5.4 (Summer 1980): 631–60.

Sex and the City. Created by Darren Star. HBO. 1998–2004.

Straker, Wendy. Sexy Jobs in the City: How to Find Your Dream Job Using the Rules of Dating. New York: Hangover Productions, 2003.

Thibaut, John W. and Harold H. Kelly. The Social Psychology of Groups. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1959.

Zieger, Susan. "Sex and the Citizen in Sex and the City's New York." In Akass and McCabe, Reading Sex and the City, 96–111.

Zernike, Kate. "Just Saying No to the Dating Industry." New York Times, November 30, 2003, Fashion and Style sec. http://www.nytimes.com.

Endnotes

1. Portions of this essay were originally presented at the Second Annual Cultural Studies Association Conference at Northeastern University on May 8, 2004. [Return to text]

2. To note an analogous real-life case, Philadelphia wedding planner Mark Kingsdorf who runs the Queen of Hearts Wedding Consultants alleges to have found an increased market among men who want a romantic way to propose but need guidance and anxiety assuaged. The process usually begins with an hour-long interview for Kingsdorf, possessed with what he playfully dubs, an "all-around clear eye for the straight guy," to learn about the client and his soon-to-be fiancé in order to proceed with proposal strategy and logistics (Melamed 116). [Return to text]

3. Concurrent media phenomena such as reality TV and Internet matchmaking are evidence of the rising standards for straight attractiveness. Shows such as Extreme Makeover and The Swan employ full-fledged surgical methods, while Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's "Fab Five" act as image consultants commissioned to upgrade and polish self-volunteered subjects. Cyberdating agencies offer for a fee "professional" profile consultation to daters seeking to spruce up their online image. E-Cyrano.com, founded by Evan Marc Katz, a screenwriter and veteran online dater, will compose someone's personal profile in his or her own voice after a lengthy interview (Egan 69). [Return to text]

4. I do not mean to imply that such models are new but instead increasingly prominent. According to the psychologist and marital choice theoretician Bernard Murstein, the "exchange model of interpersonal transactions," articulated by sociologists Thibaut and Kelly, Homans, and Blau, applies some elementary economic concepts—rewards, costs, assets, liabilities—to maintain that individuals attempt to make social interaction as profitable as possible (108-9). [Return to text]

5. For example, in her analysis of the early history of the "commodification of romance," Illouz draws on a diverse sample of texts from 1900 to the 1930s to investigate not only the role that the cultural motive of romance played in the construction of consumer mass markets, but also how romantic ritual incorporated economic practices of the market (11, 25). [Return to text]

6. Though Kipnis focuses her analysis on marriage, conceptualized metaphorically as a "domestic factory," I wish to appropriate her larger point that the rhetoric of the factory has noticeably filtered into the language of love (19). [Return to text]

7. Samantha's perspective on hetero-exchange seems to have grown narrower from her appraisal of the sexes as "equal opportunity exploiters" in season 1. Here, though, her assertion echoes those of sought-after dating coaches such as Myreah Moore, dubbed the "Diva of Dating," who advocates a "Pair and Spare" philosophy of dating at least three men at once. [Return to text]

8. See also Illouz who maintains that romantic love both links and condenses the contradictions in late capitalist culture: Romance has become entwined not only with "the pleasures, images, and dreams of the sphere of consumption," but also with "the economic rationality of entrepreneurial capitalism" (11, 188). [Return to text]