1 Avril Speaks 12/6/12 TC512-Theology & Media Culture Sex and the City and Girls: When Sexual

Revolution Walls Come Down When the television show Sex and the City made its debut on HBO in 1998, it was, generally speaking, a good time in history for women. Globally, women were making strides in politics and the workforce. In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act was passed, in 1997 Madeline Albright became the first female Secretary of State and the WNBA was established. By 1999, 60% of women worked outside of the home and made up almost half of the work force. 1 The world of television was no different. After decades of June Cleaver being the quintessentially skewed model for what it meant to be a woman in America, the 80s brought shows like Golden Girls, Designing Women, and Murphy Brown, all of which made a point of breaking certain barriers for women and providing a slightly more realistic slice of life. Designing Women featured four Southern women who ran their own interior design business, providing a glimpse of how they navigate through the workforce while raising families and holding their own. Murphy Brown set a precedence for this, eventually featuring a single woman making a decision to have a baby and raise it alone, even as a working mother. Golden Girls was even transformative in its own right, proving that older women still have value, humor, and active sex lives to share even in their golden years. Sex and the City came on the heels of these shows, but it had its own bridges to cross. Many of the former shows alluded to the romantic relationships of these women. They had boyfriends that the audience rarely, if ever, saw. Their sex lives were held at arms length. In the case of Golden Girls, Blanche Deveraux, the promiscuous one of the group, would constantly speak of and make jokes about her sexual exploits. Her bedroom was called The Boudoir and
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Discovery Education. http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/womenofthecentury/ decadebydecade/1990s.html

2 was never seen on the air. However, for the women of Sex and the City, all of those elements came center stage both in comedic and in dramatic ways. The difference between this show and the previous ones was that, according to writer L. S. Kim, the women in Sex and the City dont just fantasize in a surreal world. They dont just talk, they do; and they dont just think, they act. They also make mistakes and learn and move on and continue to make choices.2 With Sex and the City, we met four successful women in their 30s. There was Carrie Bradshaw, the writer who dreamed of not having to compromise career or love. She was the modern day version of the damsel in distress. Then there was Charlotte York, the art buyer with traditional values who wanted the June Cleaver life, but on her own terms. Samantha Jones was the sexually promiscuous publicist who seemed to enjoy having sex without emotions. She was once quoted on the show as saying: Women are for friendship. Men are for fucking.3 Lastly, there is Miranda Hobbes. Miranda was the feminist of the group, the one who valued her career as a lawyer and would not, under any circumstances allow men to define her life. One thing that is interesting about Mirandas character is that usually, female characters who are strong and intellectual are de-sexualized. They are usually the one who never goes on dates and they are the object of many jokes about undesirability (for example, Dorothy on Golden Girls). This is not the case with Miranda Hobbes. She is just as sexy and desirable as the other women on the show, which speaks to the fact that in the world created by Sex and the City, you can be sexual and successful. One does not have to cancel out the other. Together, these four women broke the last set of boundaries for women on television-the boundary of sex and the bedroom. Sex and the City shattered the myths that women were

Kim, L.S. Sex and the Single Girl in Postfeminism, Television and New Media, Vol. 2 No. 4 (November 2001): 319-333. 3 HBO, Sex and the City.

3 too emotional when it came to sex, or that women didnt crave sex as much as men. In the first episode of the series, the four women lament over the lack of quality men in New York City, then challenge themselves to see if they can have sex like men--without emotion and simply for pleasure. Carrie is the first to succeed at the challenge, and as she leaves the unsuspecting man, vulnerable and alone in his own bedroom, she walks confidently down the streets of New York, announcing via voice-over I realized I had done it. I had just had sex like a man. I left feeling powerful, potent and incredibly alive. I felt like I owned the city. Nothing or no one could get in my way...4 Even within its first episode, the series set a precedent for a sexual revolution among women. The show wasnt all about sex, however. The show was also about true friendship, community and acceptance. In Season 3 when Carries boyfriend Aiden breaks up with her after finding out about her affair with her ex, Mr. Big, Carrie already feels the remorse of what she has done. Her friends were wise enough to know when to lecture her, and when to give her a shoulder to cry on. During the time when she needed them the most, her friends were there for her, they were her family, in spite of her wrongdoing, for as she says in the closing of Episode 42, Its hard to find people who will love you no matter what. I was lucky enough to find three of them. 5 In Gordon Lynchs book, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, he discusses useful ways of defining the purpose of studying the theology behind popular culture. Quoting from the theologian Paul Tillich, Lynch states, religion could be understood as ultimate concern, that is our fundamental guiding beliefs and values about what is most important in life. Thus, in Tillichs view, any form of belief that genuinely provides the basis for a persons or communitys life could be understood as religious. Tillich went to argue that if religion is the search for and expression of ultimate concern, then culture is itself a manifestation of this fundamental religious orientation. In other words, the various forms that culture

4 5

HBO, Sex and the City. Season 1, Episode 1. HBO, Sex and the City. Season 3, Episode 42.

4 takes arise out of the fundamental beliefs and values of that culture.6 If popular culture is a manifestation of cultural concern, then it is interesting to evaluate the concerns of women as it relates to two of the issues that Sex and the City addresses: sexuality and friendship. The show aired during an era that many writers and critics would label as postfeminist, or the time when feminist rhetoric should cease because equality had already been reached. Equality (or a semblance of it) may have been reached in the boardroom as we can see from the growing trend of women in leadership in the 90s. Television reflected this through shows like Murphy Brown and Ally McBeal. However, equality had not been reached in the bedroom, which was a role that Sex and the City fulfilled. This show allowed women to talk about their conquests and their failures in the bedroom, thus breaking down the last wall of liberation. The show counter-balanced this view of liberation with strong friendships that were non-judgemental. Their sexual exploits, as numerous and graphic as they might have been, were not a free-for-all. They still had rules of decorum about them as women, even though those rules were somewhat flexible. For example, when Charlottes boyfriend wants to have a threesome, the episode focuses on the idea of threesomes in other characters such as Carrie and Big, which brings the topic to the forefront. However, Charlotte later decides that she does not want to be a part of this activity and she sets a boundary there for her love life. The success of the show points to a desire among women to be honest and feel powerful about their sexuality without feeling judged. This makes Sex and the City an interesting precursor to a show like Girls, which also features four girls living in New York City. These girls, however, are much younger and are still trying to find their place in life. The similarities between the characters on both shows are striking. Hannah wants to be a writer, Carrie was a writer. Marnie works at an art gallery, Charlotte worked at an art gallery. Jessa has had several boyfriends in her life, so has Samantha. The characters in Girls could be described as Sex and
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Lynch, Gordon. Understanding Theology and Popular Culture. (Blackwell, 2004) 29.

5 the City 2.0; however, the leaps that Girls takes far out-run the ladies in the 1998 series. If Sex and the City tore down the last boundary of sexual discretion, Girls is the result of a world where there are no more rules or boundaries regarding sexual behavior at all. In Sex and the City, the women find intrigue in the discovery that they can have sex like men. However, in Girls, sexual acts exist as a mundane, matter-of-fact form of everyday interaction. As Frank Bruni, columnist for the New York Times states, The first time you see Lena Dunhams character having sex in the new HBO series Girls, her back is to her boyfriend, who seems to regard her as an inconveniently loquacious halfway point between partner and prop, and her concern is whether shes correctly following instructions. Bruni goes on to say, Are young women who think that they should be more like men willing themselves into a casual attitude toward sex thats an awkward emotional fit?7 Sexual encounters are no longer even experienced in context of relationships in the world of Girls but rather a means to an end--in some cases pleasure, in other cases convenience. There is also a very stylistic difference with Girls. While Sex and the City often drew criticism for its highly glamorized view of Manhattan, New York, complete with fashionable clothes and fancy nightclubs, Girls does not glamorize the gritty streets of Brooklyn, NY. It is no secret that the characters on this show are striving to make ends meet, particularly since the show premieres with Hannah getting cut off from her parents financial support and must now figure out how to make it in New York on her own. Bruni agrees: The gloss of Manhattan is traded for the mild grit of Brooklyns more affordable neighborhoods. The anxieties are as much economic as erotic. The colors are duller, the mood is dourer and the clothes arent much. Its Sex and the City in a charcoal gray Salvation Army overcoat. Girls presents a stark reality of what it means to be a woman in recession-era New York, circa 2012. And while the girls in Girls are all friends, the tight bonds of friendship are not quite as familial as they were in Sex and the City, although
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Bruni, Frank. The Bleaker Sex. The New York Times, 31 March 2012.

6 moral judgement of behavior is still eliminated from social norms. From a theological perspective, the pendulum has swung far into the opposite direction with the show Girls. These two shows provide an interesting backdrop to the fact that many churches shy away from talking about sexual matters, yet 80% of young adults and 88% of adults within the church have admitted to having sex outside of marriage.8 Again, if popular culture is the manifestation of cultural concern, it is worth taking a look at the fact that society now has such a casual view of sexuality. A phenomenon that began as something very liberating in Sex and the City has become something ordinary in Girls. Bruni seems to suggest that the rise in internet pornography is to blame for the cavalier attitudes toward sex, quoting an article from a female writer in GQ: the buffet of fetishistic porn available 24/7 had created very particular and sometimes very peculiar, ratcheted-up desires. To compare it to another genre of online video, she wrote, why watch a clip of one puppy frolicking in a field when you can watch eight different puppies cuddling with a sweet-faced baby armadillo tickling a panda bear? And after seeing that, why ever settle for a boring ol puppy frolicking in a field again? Lena Dunham, creator of Girls agrees in her interview with Bruni, Guys my age watch so much pornography, to which Bruni writes, These experiences inform her Girls sex scenes, which have a depersonalized aspect.9 Whatever the reason, the evolution from Sex and the City to Girls can teach us important important lessons about what it means to be female and sexual in the 21st century. It can also speak volumes about the loss of intimate connection between humans as the walls of judgement and decorum are broken down.

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Blake, John. Why Young Christians Arent Waiting Anymore CNN Belief Blog, 27 September 2011. Bruni.