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Television

Journal sielwolf's Journal: Punnalingus 13

Journal by sielwolf

I'll cry for any girl who has to sit through a Sex and the City marathon. Really I guess I can kind of see 14 year old boys doing this: cheap excessible spank material when your parents have locked down the PC and Ryan won't come out of the bathroom with his Dad's stroke mags.

And I'll actually give SatC credit for being a somewhat funny (if repetitious) show. The characters were pretty well formed, they would always be able to work in an interesting punch line every few scenes while building parallel story arcs that fit together. Also putting emphasis on middle-aged women's sex lives was a point scored in some PC affirmative action score card.

But summed up Sex and the City was far from revolutionary, average as a sitcom and just another triumph of window hanging gash over content to cover for what is a traditionalist fable. If I had to find a genre that best fit the show, I'd say the Slasher Film.

Tell me, what is the general template of the Slasher? Well let's look at Halloween (the progenitor of the genre): gory and ruthless death sentences for teenagers who partake in sex even reluctantly while the virginal and pure (Jamie Lee Curtis who wore those butt-gripping flare jeans) are able to use their unconsumated love to defeat the monster... but for how long? Michael Myers isn't killed, he still lurks *out there* waiting to pounce at any moment you finally give into your carnal urges. And don't forget that Halloween proceeded the discovery of AIDS by a good handful of years. By then the genre was already off to the races.

I remember watching 700 Club Apocolypse videos next door as a kid that couldn't drive home the scared morality better. It was the perfect Hell House that kids could take home and spin tirelessly in their minds. What could be better?

Sex and the City removed of its R-rating would be some shortlived sitcom that bloomed between Seinfeld and Friends before it NBC moved it to a Friday 8:30 death sentence. The show wouldn't've even made it to sweeps.

Why? Well let's explore the characters. For one they never escape our expectations. Sure, every last girl I know has said "But I *totally* have friends like that!" (which is often said WRT Samantha and Miranda aka the Slut and the Ugly one. Those are two things no woman would ever call herself). You can even read off the characters as components of the feminine mind: her sex, her purity, her wit, her ego (I'll leave it to the audience to lay that out. Not hard). So the gang of four actually plays out like that Mr Show sketch: inside everyone are four distinct voices. Gay guy, Japanese businessman, etc. And there could be a lot done with this choice. Sadly the creators never let this play out to Four Daemons playing for a single soul (a kind of Paris at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis).

What the four characters become are shades of the same "but I'm a real boy too!" syndrome. None of them are really let to run to their logical conclusion. The death knell of any show, a conservative attachment to a fictional character The Way They Are, pulls heavily. But we'll get to that later.

First, let's even dispel the notion that SatC was some genre-redefying view of women's sexuality. Uh... huh? Ok, so women like sex. If this was 19th century England and we were shocked to find that women are less wellwaxed Greek status and sometimes come bearing a thick pelvic bush, then, yeah, this would be a stunning revelation for modern science. And maybe having women talk cheap and easy about it is something interesting... if we didn't have stacks of Belladonna screaming for her ass to be fucked harder.

Harder!

GOD SHE NEEDS IT IN THE SHITCHUTE RIGHT NOW!!!

And as an aside, can we agree that the content of our tattooed vixen is infinitely more satisfying?

On Sex and the City, the profanity comes with a juvenile anxiety. The sort of thing that accompanies stolen sips of your brother's Zima in junior high. Isn't it DELICIOUS how NAUGHTY we're being? AND I can stay up as LATE as I want and only eat ICE CREAM!!!

The vulgarity often lacked character, body and voice. It was usually just a gag in and of itself. Which is the level of a Rob Schneider film. If we're going to take pleasure in how decadent we are by having Samantha's sexual deviance of the week (pearl necklass, facial, teabagging, etc.), cut out the middle man, go to any of a dozen websites and print out a copy of that comprehensive list of sexual acts. The Cleveland Steamer, the Angry Dragon, the Dirty Sanchez... which, I might add, we never saw on the show. As close as we got was to some reaming.

Which leads to the obvious undertone of all the profanity: it was just a brash cover for underdeveloped minds embarassed by their adulthood. Really, what deviancy did any of them parttake in? A little oral? Maybe some anal (in one or two episodes and then never spoken of again?) Some light bondage? Exhibitionism?

In fact the show time and time again had all four of the major characters avoid any of the common sexual oddities it brought up. More so it taunted them, humiliated them and then had the four girls say snarky shit while eating creme brule for lunch. A few: Miranda having some guy eating her ass out only to blanche and be so hideously disturbed to not return the favor, Carrie unwilling to kiss Alanis Morrisette during some hipster spin the bottle (which I can agree with. I don't kiss dudes either), and finally Carrie being unwilling to urinate on her Staten Island politico and then, for a punchline, outing his sexual fetish for her column.

Bonus! The only woman more sexual hidebound than these women is Andrea Dworkin (and she be dead). But even better they are small and petty when excepting others in the very exposed arena of sexuality (to the point of publically humiliating a character who Carrie decided wasn't up to her high standards). It seems we're the only normal here and everyone else are unreconcileable FREAKS. Even Charlotte's Harry is a nudist which she is so fucking godly to tolerate (even beyond that... he's UGLY!)

Fuck that shit. Dan Savage has an acronym, GGG, for being "good, giving and game". For all of their elitism and sexual empowerment, none of the characters in Sex and the City are any of those three. Their men were always either deserving or pitiful enough to earn advance sexual favors. And even those were plain jane enough to not make it to the exciting and bizarre corners of the sexual sphere. These girls, in the Chris Rock sense, might not be Betamax but the are some old school remote-tethered-to-the-VCR VHS shit in our DVD and On Demand world.

And if you just happen to fall short of their interest, the show has no problem pointing and laughing. Which might make good television on CBS but doesn't sound like the hallmark of a show expanding sexual boundaries.

Through all of these sexual escapades, the show, following the Death Sentence to the T, has all wonderful things close the following way:

  • Carrie: set to marry Mr Big.
  • Miranda: married with kids.
  • Charlotte: married with soon to be adopted kid.
  • Samantha: in a long term relationship.

The technicalities of the institutions they are part of (married or not) is less the issue than all of them are in LOVE. The sort of love written fifty times on the last page of a notebook in four color inks with concentric circles around the letters. They are all manogomous, living moving on up to that townhouse, cashing in on the dream. For a show about celebrating the single life, the last season sure puts a bullet in that very notion. At least you could expect one Nietzsche to rise up and battle on alone through their last curtain fall. The show's moral is the reverse of that: Miranda can't cope alone, she will have to make a choice between her child and her career or find a husband, they can't live in the city and hope to raise their kids, etc.

Powerful shit, doggie.

Powerful.

And so that's been the solution up to this point? At least we would have some revelations on the way, right? Well that might be the case if any of the character's showed a reasonable capacity for human spirit. Other than working as the vehicles for plots, none of the characters showed individual flaws or imperfections worthy of realist drama. Everything was perfect or a Big Cataclysmic Event. Cancer, Infidelity, INFERTILITY!!!

None of which had any lasting effect on any of them. Charlotte still ended up with a beautiful child to go with her worshipful husband and endless riches. Sleeping with a married Big did nothing but have him chase Carrie to France and beg for her.

And other than their being a definite beauty order (Miranda, Carrie, Sam, and Charlotte) no one was without any want. Really, for a show exploring the world of consumate mores, why not actually have characters who would breathe some life into this?

Let's compare this to Seinfeld, a definite PG-13 to the satisfying bouncing titties of Sex but superior in every other fashion, including that of relationships. Elaine was one of the guys but definitely seperated by her own circumstances. She cycled with Putty often for the sex but really for the lack in her life of any other real alternative. She had "settled". She masturbated, she thirsted for casual sex.

If given the leeway of HBO, what could be done with this character? Shit, you only need to look as far as film. The Secretary, Body Heat, Pretty Persuasion, Breathless. There are about a half-billion examples of interesting takes of feminine sexuality in a broader context. Given the exposure of a five or so seasons they really could've done something. What if one of their Fetish to Mock of the Week turned out to be the flaw of one of the primaries? That it made her a part of a culture both outside her circle of friends but inseperable from them? Sure, they could tolerate Samantha as a lesbian but what if Miranda turned out to be a belt around the neck girl? Or could only get wet when watching gays trawl through gloryholes in the park? Sex isn't a constant, it ebbs and flows. It deforms with you as we pass through time and space. The race isn't just monotonically always forward. And it would make for fascinating television as it makes for one of the fucking confusing, contradictory, damnable but oh so unforgettable bedrocks of our lives.

Which Sex and the City banged off the rim. Sure, you can sit there, wait for the 22nd minute where Carrie will announce in narration "But later that night in my apartment I got to thinking..." as we cut to her opening up her iBook, typing some smart shit and having the dialogue and the text meet at a wonderfully moronic pun. Moronic in the sense that one would use the word 'punny'. Moronic to the point where punny doesn't even cover it so you have to James Lipton the bounds of Her Magesty's English with shit like 'puntastic', 'puntacular' and 'make your punt-hairs stick up on end'.

But there is nothing to see here. Only a subtle message to all you young girls that you are never complete as long as you are alone, that understanding is just muttering your malice under your breath and people only want to see themselves glorified in popular culture. For the first time in recorded history, go and buy the DVD and have the pictures on the scene jerk off on YOU.

A very a Yakov Smirnov moment.

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Punnalingus More

Punnalingus

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  • i've never liked that show. i tried to watch it once when it first came out and just imagined how tiresome watching another episode would be. i even caught bits and pieces of other episodes after that by mistake when flipping through channels or being at someone else's house. i never bothered to examine why in any detail, but you're right about sex and the city and why it sucks.
    • I try to provide a public service. Like when people might actually think Troy would be half enjoyable.

      They've got to be warned.

      Keep watching the skies!
  • (too bad I wasn't on an iBook while typing that. C'est la vie.)

    First off, very entertaining rant. What you have crafted is exactly the same old, same old rant that I have seen a thousand times on the internet; but you've given it a fresh twist. You've done it differently. Be it the combination of your humor and insightful comparisons, I think you've nudged things just enough to have a work that you should be proud of.

    In a similar vein, I don't think the point of SATC was to break down social mores and ge
    • I'll accept the criticism on my non-Vogue reading ass. If half the reason of Jimmy Choo's is to make a woman love her feet, the other half is me not caring. I go on the "looks good/not so good" and "matches/doesn't match a lick" school but then that's an entirely a male perspective from our four color world (gray, brown, blue and black).

      And if Mr Big was so great, why didn't he have a bespoke suit?
      • And if Mr Big was so great, why didn't he have a bespoke suit?

        Most people know Armani, but they don't know Anderson and Sheppard or other Savile Row tailors. Hell, I didn't either, until I started reading the english cut.
        • I must admit the only reason I knew about the Savile Row is from watching docs on Fred Astaire. But even the old school Italian designers do a mean cut. Esquire had a great feature on some of these men in its last fashion issue. The sort of real hand crafted finese that 20k can buy you.
        • Hell, I didn't either, until I started reading the english cut.

          You and me both.

          As for Big, well... he's a strictly off the rack, read-to-wear sort of guy. Sure, his tailor fixes it up here and there, but No real class. I mean, he's with Carrie!!!
          • No real class. I mean, he's with Carrie!!!

            Jesus, for real. Was here entire character supposed to placate the entire gyno-audience? She was third best looking ("beak" and "shrivelled" are two adjectives that could be used), had no exceptional... personality to offset it and we are supposed to believe that A. he falls for her and B. has this crazy torrid affair with her when his wife is a 9, about 20 years younger than her and doesn't have the bad habit of breaking into exposition?

            In conclusion I think Big
      • I go on the "looks good/not so good" and "matches/doesn't match a lick" school but then that's an entirely a male perspective from our four color world (gray, brown, blue and black).

        Considering "Fashion forward" to me is wearing brown shoes instead of black, you know I'm down with you, dawg.

        Just know that this isn't product FOR us. This is one of those Women are from Mars, Men have a penis sort of things.
  • So I've ended up watching a few episodes.

    Although they occassionaly do put together a decent joke or punchline, overall I come away from the show feeling that it is representative of everything that is wrong with the USA today.

    And the characters are frankly stupid and ugly (well, the one brunette is ok, but nothing overly special) and the main character is a smoker, which is revolting in the extreme.

    I've come to not just hate the show, but loathe it. It's dreadful and repulsive. Now when the wife turns it
  • I always wondered why I didn't enjoy the show as much as I thought I did. I'd always classified it internally as a show I really liked and respected, but it seemed I always caught a bad episode.

    Now I know why. Thanks.
  • Those are two things no woman would ever call herself.

    Blah blah... you are implying a woman who would call oneself "slut" or "ugly" is not really a woman... blah blah... quite rude... blah blah...

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