The new season of
Sex and the City
it seems doomed.
It's titled
And Just Like That
to emphasize that it's the same but it's not the same: only three of the four main characters return.
Nor will Chris Noth, that is, Mr, Big, nor David Eigenberg, that is, Steve, Miranda's husband, which already gives us an idea of in what situation we could find some of the protagonists.
But what is most talked about is the absence of Kim Cattrall (Samantha).
It is the symptom that the format itself could already be failed by failing in the endeavor to reunite the four actresses of the original series.
The actress has expressed openly and in public that she does not get along with Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon and that Sarah-Jessica Parker directly detests her.
Cattrall accused her colleagues of conspiring to marginalize her, turning the entire crew against her and turning her shooting experience into hell.
And Just Like That will
not only be a sequel to
Sex and the City
, but a memorial to the enmity between its actresses.
But what will make it impossible for this sequel to work is the role that
Sex and the City
has played, retroactively, in the fourth wave of feminism: it has often been used as an emblem of all that was wrong with the culture of change. century.
The series debuted in a different civilization: 1998. A world in which
Something Happens with Mary,
a rude comedy that laughed at all possible minorities, swept the box office, offending so many people that no one was offended;
The population forgave the President of the United States because, after all, a blowjob was not to be that way either;
and in Spain we transformed a grotesque imaginary episode (the urban legend of Ricky Martin, the dog and the jam) into a playful show to discuss as a family.
Sex in New York
was a celebration of that shamelessness, of that cultural moment in which hedonistic pleasure justified any decision: the four women in the series lived to consume (clothes, cocktails, men) for the simple reason that they felt like it.
And the public watched the series for the same reason.
But the sexual freedom of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, of course, came with a catch: the "you can have it all" that Barbie doll proclaimed in the 1980s evolved into the "you must have it all" that plagued Ally McBeal in the 1990s.
But in 1998 no one had noticed yet.
It all seemed too funny.
And their unlikely standard of living - their jobs were great, their friendships were strong, their family members didn't exist - allowed them to spend all their free time worrying about their relationships with men.
If it seemed that the girls in the series (
Sex in New York
was one of the first spaces in which "girl" was used for women over 30, something that now, Kardashian through, is a ubiquitous custom) had the good part of being a woman and the best part of being a man was because the characters were actually inspired by the gay friends of creator Darren Star and executive producer Michael Patrick-King.
Sex and the City
reformulated the concept of the American dream for women, fancifully equating it to that of men.
That New York, almost mythological, was a World of Oz where machismo, poverty, AIDS, racial diversity, homophobia, mental illness, labor exploitation or drugs did not exist.
Sex is back in New York
But neither Dorothy nor Alicia were asked for explanations of what they had been doing in Oz and in Wonderland, respectively.
Carrie yes.
After the end of the series in 2004, its popularity and influence continued to grow thanks to the successful editions on DVD, the constant rebroadcasting (in Spain, on Divinity and Cosmo) and the commercial success of its two films, released in 2008 and 2010. During the 2000s, the middle class wanted to experience their own
Sex in New York
: European capitals were filled with chic bars where the lighting was purple and tattooed bartenders served 14 euro cocktails, mileuristas got used to living above their possibilities and
millennials
entered adulthood as the most narcissistic generation ever, commenting on their emotional-erotic misadventures as if they were narrating their series, in which everyone else was mere minor characters.
But when in 2008 the crisis reminded fans of the series what social class they belonged to and in 2010 Instagram offered digital support to narcissism as a massive distraction maneuver,
Sex and the City began to
acquire a certain aura of the Book of Genesis of everything that it's wrong in the 21st century.
A wicked scale to begin with
For the past decade the series has been viewed as the emblem of pre-#MeToo culture.
She has been accused of romanticizing toxic relationships, frivolizing sexuality and female bodies, and being nothing more than an empty ode to the most dehumanized consumerism.
It has been branded as waving a cosmetic feminism, actually perpetuating macho precepts.
Ultimately, she has been blamed for betraying femininity.
Meanwhile, no one was demanding that
Mad Men
,
The Sopranos
or
Breaking Bad
do justice to masculinity.
Criticisms of
Sex and the City
often start from that perverse scale that stories about straight white men only represent themselves while any story about women, gays or ethnic minorities has a moral obligation to be exemplary.
The greatest triumph of the detractors of
Sex and the City
has been, without even bothering to watch the series, getting feminism to attack the series with virulence and that its viewers justify themselves by classifying it as "guilty pleasure."
Two years ago, in an article in the
New York Post
, columnist Julia Allison blamed
Sex and the City
for pushing her during her youth to pursue fame, date terrible men, and live beyond her means.
A life that, she explained, ended up ruining her reputation.
"Things as they are.
I wish I had never seen the series.
Sure there are worse role models but, in my case, it did permanent damage to my mind that I'm still cleaning up, ”Allison lamented.
Novelist Jami Attenberg reacted to this confession in a tweet: "My God, can you imagine blaming all your bad decisions in life on a television series?"
In her essay Difficult Women, Pulitzer-winning television critic Emily Nussbaum explains that prior to
Sex and the City,
single girls in fiction - from
Mary Tyler Moore's
cheeky
Girl on TV
to the poor, endearing, hilarious spinster Bridget Jones) “gave women the representation they craved and were also, crucially, lovable to men;
they fulfilled the cultural requirement that women applaud other women shouting 'it happens to me too!'
"By contrast, Carrie and her friends were much stranger birds," continues Nussbaum.
“Rough, aggressive and sometimes terrifying figures.
They were simultaneously real and abstract.
Women identified with them ('I'm Carrie!'), But then they got angry when they showed flaws. "
According to Nussbaum,
Sex and the City
has been relegated to a condescending footnote when analyzing the transformation of television fiction at the turn of the century led by
The Sopranos
.
This disparagement was contributed by the two films, which fell into self-parody by becoming what everyone who has not seen
Sex and the City
thinks is
Sex and the City
: fabulous clothes, crude jokes and women obsessed with men.
The cultural conversation became so obsessed with what
Sex and the City
meant that it forgot what
Sex and the City
was.
A mistake right at the end
In its penultimate scene, the series made a final concession to the fairy tales that is still paying dearly: Mr. Big rescued Carrie (in Paris, no less), who was dressed as a princess in a tulle dress in a version hyperbolic of the tutu she wore in the credits.
In this way, her transformation into a full woman was complete, right after a metaphor as unsubtle as finding the necklace with her name that she believed she had lost.
But until those final minutes, in which she allowed herself a homage to romantic comedies, the series was always a romantic-sexual satire.
During its 88 episodes,
Sex and the City
broke taboos around female sexuality by showing debates between women, pointing out men's awkwardness in bed, and exploring what exactly many men called (or still call) "women. hysterical ”, giving them the role of narrators.
Carrie was the only one who represented retrograde sentimental ideologies and Judeo-Christian: her suffering has a final reward.
Of course, that was a mine to attack the series in its entirety.
For internet feminism, Carrie's story arc is intolerable.
“Mr Big is a man practically made up of red flags.
He was not there to rescue her, but that 'great love' was a slow poisoning.
Carrie lost control, suffered anxiety, became obsessive and, despite her charm, wildly self-centered.
In her own words, she became 'the terrifying woman whose fear has eaten up her sanity'.
And her friends are concerned about that relationship, ”says Nussbaum.
I mean, both Carrie and the show were fully aware of the toxicity of their relationship with Mr Big.
"When I'm with him I'm not myself," explained Carrie in a conversation with Miranda.
“I am the Carrie as a couple.
I wear little dresses: Sexy Carrie, Casual Carrie.
Sometimes I find myself literally posing.
I'm exhausted".
The third time Carrie fell into Big's nets she didn't directly tell her friends, a feeling of shame that anyone who has been the victim of a toxic relationship will recognize.
Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda were under pressure from a rigged system against them.
Yes, they would be privileged, but not unconscious.
"I've been dating since I was 15, I'm exhausted," Charlotte lamented, "Where is
he
?"
But they hardly invested energy in questioning this patriarchal system, much less trying to overthrow it.
And they didn't because during the 1980s they had been educated not to complain in general and to please in particular: when the politician Bill, played by John Slattery, asked Carrie to urinate on him, her instinct was to offer him alternatives such as pour boiling tea on it or leave the tap running during intercourse.
Therefore, the obstinacy of these four women to be pleased was a radical attitude.
Better fabulous than complaining
Foolish as it sounds today, the system of the late 1990s convinced women that they had already conquered as much ground as possible.
That you had to accept the glass ceiling that still oppressed them because, simply, there were things that were as they were.
That it was not necessary to continue advancing ("I'm exhausted") but rather to enjoy what was conquered: capitalism had crowned women (followed by gays and their straight imitators, the metrosexuals) as its right eye and it was more convenient to be fabulous how complaining.
They also belonged to the first generation of economically independent women and preferred to devote their time and energy to enjoying that status.
But
Sex in New York
has been contaminating the collective imagination, as if to advance the feminist cause it was essential to destroy all the defective feminisms of the past: if feminism were a human being,
Sex in New York
would be those years of lack of control and unconsciousness of those who today are ashamed.
In an audiovisual panorama in which the public only seems to want to consume different versions of things that they have already seen, the only way for a platform to finance a series about 50-year-old women is if it is backed by nostalgia and intellectual property.
The
Sex in New York
brand will
promote the launch of
And Just Like That
, but at the same time it could end up weighing it down.
You will be required to be a feminist, but appealing to the lowest common denominator of feminism and therefore renouncing the slightest complexity.
Every misstep of the characters will be condemned.
And she will be expected to evoke
Sex and the City
(or, more difficult still, the public memory of
Sex and the City
), but of course without the hedonistic political incorrectness that was rampant in 1998.
You will receive criticism whether you are too feminist or not feminist enough.
Whether it is fanciful or plausible.
"I can't help but wonder" - Carrie typed at the beginning of the third season - can there be sex without politics? "
At the time, the answer was, "No, but it's fun to pretend it is."
Today the answer is “No, and I am going to explain why.
I open thread ”.
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