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 Just as Charlotte’s 1950s image of marriage and home is out of date, so too is the dismantling hierarchies trend, but unlike the former this is not necessarily something to celebrate.
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