I couldn't help but wonder...

Well, I know you were waiting for it... the inevitable "I am a girl, I have a blog, therefore I have an opinion on the SATC movie" moment. I would resist, except I can't. Obviously GIANT SPOILER ALERT, in case you care.

I had the option to see the movie on Friday night, but instead chose to go with a bunch of my girlfriends (like every other woman in the country) on Saturday. After a pretty quick, though delicious, brunch of huevos rancheros at Laurel's house, Laurel and I rushed to the Century Cinemas to meet six other ladies for the insanity. We walked in and beelined to the only available set of 8 seats in the theatre that weren't in the very front row -- the 8 seats on the side in the second row. Yeah, not only did I see this movie, but I saw it REALLY CLOSE UP (things I observed: Steve has some kind of mole on his ass, Carrie had a stain on her dress in the scene where she told Samantha she was engaged, and Big has gray chest hair). I was armed with a Screwdriver and three cans of Sofia champagne. I knew that the movie was two and a half hours long and I was not sure I could take it.

Before I get into my actual criticism of the movie, let me just comment on one irrelevant thing. PREVIEW FOR SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS SEQUEL! It looks like they decided to skip books 2 and 3 and go straight for book 4, probably because America Ferrara or Blake Lively decided that they could/would only commit to one sequel given their new TV fame. Nevertheless, I am pretty damn jazzed.

Anyway, so then the movie itself. Aside from the gross product placement and totally gratuitous, unnecessary scenes (fashion week? Christie's auction?).... aside from the way that things seemed pretty damn abrupt most of the time, in order to cram into a movie the kind of things that normally would happen in a season... Did it strike anyone else as totally unfeminist? Or, if not unfeminist, then, didn't it just seem to you that it was ridiculous that after all that, Carrie still took Big back? That all the girls insisted that Miranda was wrong to leave Steve? I admitted yesterday to my friends that, had the latter event happened in a season, I could have accepted it. I've always loved Steve, and I can accept that one transgression need not be the end of one's marriage. But in the movie, Carrie and Charlotte couldn't seem to blame Steve for cheating, and it almost seemed like you could read into it that Miranda was to blame, for not recognizing the problem in her sex life, for loving her job to the point of distraction/destruction of her relationship. Then, to even act as though Miranda's angry outburst at the rehearsal dinner was remotely responsible for Big's entirely inexcusable freakout! Can we talk about blaming the victims here? Really?

I don't quite share Dodai's rage over Samantha in this movie. I felt as though she was the only person who really took charge. She managed Carrie's broken marriage/wedding. She held them together when it seemed like they would all fall apart. Her compassion was high, and it's irrational to hate her for breaking things off with Smith because she "loves herself more" -- the truth is that he had become the center of her life, and not just her personal life but her job, too, and who wants that? I will say again that the relative shortness of the movie (to an entire season of episodes) probably gave this plot short shrift as well. How did Samantha ever let Smith become the center, plastered photos of him all over her wall? And did she, like Steve, have to leave her relationship because Smith, like Miranda, was devoted to his job (I'm making a comparison for rhetorical purposes, not necessarily agreeing with this argument). Was Smith actually distant? Was he actually in any way aware that he was making her feel dependent on him when he bought her the brooch, and if he wasn't, does it matter?

Charlotte was the only one whose life was drama free in this movie. Ace, my roommate, wondered if that was some kind of message -- you will only be happy once you've settled down, and not just settled down, but settled -- for a man who is less attractive, but rich and giving and blah blah? I'm not entirely sure about that, but it's still worth wondering.

Another beef I had with the movie was the moment when Samantha has gained weight and the girls are absolutely horrified to see her little baby pooch. Seriously? Please kill me now. I believe it was that moment when I turned to Laurel and said "I can't believe that millions of women, including us, are paying for this." It's like being charged for the loss of your dignity.

I hate to hate on things I used to like, but I reserve the right to have a split opinion. In some ways, I was satisfied with the movie, mostly just because it had some funny moments, and it was kind of fun to see the ladies a little further on in their lives. I kind of liked to see Carrie confronted with the fact that she was forty, seeing Brady and Lily (Charlotte's adopted daughter) grown up, seeing all of the women living at least a slightly different lifestyle than they did in the show. But in other ways I felt like it was shoddily made, far, far too capitalistic, and frankly it did not give me, as an American woman, the endings or lessons (or whatever you want to call them) that I feel like I deserve. These women are, and always have been, not exactly archetypes so much as a representation of the split personalities that so many of us have in us. There is a bit of each of the women in each of us, at least there is in me (although I don't want to sell myself short by saying that that is all I am, shudder). How could the producers, the writers, whoever, let them down like that and let them lose themselves, when the entire goodness of the old show was the idea that above all it was yourself and your friends to whom you should be true?

One final note. I read Dodai's rant about the movie with interest. It has always been obvious to me that the SATC girls are incredibly flawed. Materialistic, obviously. Self-absorbed? Obviously. Incredibly privileged and whitewashed? Yes. Yes. Yes. (The moment where Charlotte said she wouldn't eat anything because she was in Mexico was perfectly in character and I didn't take offense because of course Charlotte would say shit like that. Miranda's "Look! A white guy with a baby" I was more iffy about, just because I'd hope Miranda would be more wise than that, but it's not hard for me to accept that she isn't. Louise from St. Louis was really hard for me to take, since she was all of a sudden the only non-white -- or adopted, sweet, dressed in pink Asian four year old -- character in the movie and represented some terrible kind of sweet, down-home innocence that I couldn't help [ACK] but take in a bad way. Oh, those clueless black folks from the middle of the country.) It's one of those cases where I was not at all disillusioned by those aspects of their characters, because they have been there all along. Instead, the question is: do the writers/producers know that about the characters, and more importantly, do the millions of women paying to see this shit in the theatres know that? And do the masses that watched this movie this weekend realize that in many ways, their heroes in Blahniks let them down and are leading them on the wrong path? Are those viewers going to fight back, or continue to be misled? I hate to start judging media (it reeks of Tipper Gore to me), or suggesting that producers have some kind of moral right to tell a properly empowering story, but I am also pretty damn convinced that this stuff is poisonous to women.

Grr. All I know is, I yelled a lot at the screen on Saturday. So much so that I got shushed. I don't really regret it, either. Now I'm just trying to forget all this hoopla and find something else to think about.

On Tina Fey being "curvy" (or not)

Since I had lost my April 28 New Yorker, it took me a while to actually read the Anthony Lane review that had people pissed off back in, well, April. Here's the part in question:

Angie is skinny to Kate's curves, loose-tongued to her zipped-up sense of fun, fertile to her barren jealousy. Angie wears pedal pushers and tank tops, whereas Kate stalks around bare-legged in skirts that lurch to a halt two inches above the knee, which is a length that Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off. It's possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, thought in complete command of her deliver -- dry, spiky, but unthreatening -- she hasn't yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn't big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she's no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball -- a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

Alright, so obviously* this is annoying, but besides being sexist, it's also inaccurate. Tina Fey isn't big at all, nor is she curvy to Amy Poehler's skinny. Hello? Look at them here. I always thought -- and think -- that Tina Fey is kinda bony -- her body and her attitude/delivery are sort of the same -- "spiky," wry, laidback. She's not ripe at all, and in this movie she's the opposite of ripe because she is, oh that's right, unable to have children of her own. If anything it's Amy Poehler who is ripe -- and she shows off what "curves" (I fucking hate that word**) she has way more than Tina does because she dresses kind of skanky. Tina's skirts that "Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off" actually professional on her, which, hello, dumbass, is part of her character. (She is just a little tightly wound.) Plus, they actually look pretty good most of the time.

So in other words, not only are you apparently kinda sexist, Anthony Lane, but you kind of sucked at reviewing this movie. (Which, for interested parties, was actually pretty good.)

*Emily Gould comments that Tina Fey is "normal-sized," but I have to say that the women of the Gawker blogosphere (by which I mean the Jezebel girls and then Emily Gould), for all their more-mainstream-than-Feministing championship of women and all that, still totally suck at perceiving "normal" women's bodies. For them "normal" seems to be "unfamous," but still thin as shit. Perhaps that is because they are all some kind of pseudocelebrity themselves (case in point), and therefore have skewed perceptions. At any rate, I think Tina Fey is pretty hot.

**Every single magazine that has a "size" issue or a "body" issue or who wants to show you jeans or swimsuits or what-have-you "for your body type" always labels one type "curvy." That is their PC word for "fat," and they never actually have clothes for real people who are overweight and not like big boned or whatever. I want clothes for people who are supposed to be kinda skinny with not a lot of waist, but who have managed to add on 20 pounds at some point and therefore are "curvy." Not to go off on a rant but one good thing about Self magazine (besides everything) is that when they do a body breakdown, they actually do it by shapes, like "bigger in the middle" or "bigger on top" and shit like that. Anyway, just a thought.

"the next Hillary"

I have a friend who is working on the Clinton campaign. She's actually working, not just volunteering, as it's part of her regular job (she works for a small, Emily's List type place). We have had a few diplomatic conversations about the campaign and I respect the reasons she's supporting Clinton (basically it seems to boil down to the "Day One" experience argument, plus feminism). One thing we talked about this morning, in the middle of her Election Day madness (she is on the ground in Pittsburgh this week), was how, win or lose, what we'd like to take from this election is this idea that we are the next powerful women in this country. As she put it: "what I realized last night was that if Hillary doesn't get this I think that as a young woman and a feminist this is our wakeup call, this is our launching ground. It will be up to our generation to produce the next Hillary."

I'm not supporting Clinton, but that is not to say I don't incredibly sympathize with her. I do agree that she is in a tough spot, and a lot of the reasons she is disliked and forced into corners and coming out to "twist the knife" as Obama put it is because things are not easy for her as a powerful woman in a male-dominated field, or even a male-dominated world. She is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn't. And I don't like the way that makes her behave (and I also don't think that her personality is entirely a product of the way our society treats women, but it's a significant part of it), and I want Obama to win because I want fresh blood and I believe in his movement and I think it's amazing that someone has gotten the whole country excited, and for a lot of reasons. But I do want a woman president someday, sooner rather than later, and I think that my friend is right about this being a wake-up call. We have to be able to find another way to be a woman in this country, to embrace our femininity and our strength, to be powerful without being or being called bitchy or shrewish, to show weakness from time to time without losing our footing and the respect of others. I hope we can do that, and I believe we can. (Yes, we can!)

On that note, I've got my fingers crossed for Obama in Pennsylvania today. Polls are all over the place and there's no way to predict, I'm just hoping for something good.

Settling

Do you sometimes get to the bottom of the first page of an online article and think to yourself, shit, I have THREE MORE (or one more, or four more, or in the case of Sunday Times articles, eight or eleven more) PAGES OF THIS??

That is what happened to me wen I read this ridiculous article in the Atlantic Monthly (via Bookslut and a bunch of other blogs written by feminists of one creed or another) about how women should get married to the first man they meet, or at least the last one they meet before they turn that evil age of thirty. I can't even express my emotions at the bottom of page one of this one. (It's like, is it satire? If it is, it's bad satire.) Here's a good clip:

So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?

Oy.

Feministing

I am a big fan of the Feministing blog. Sometimes I disagree with the folks on there, but usually not, and of all the blogs I read this is one of the most interesting and educational. (A true example of a "good" blog that actually functions as a form of citizen journalism -- here I guess it's not so much breaking stories as pointing out the times when mainstream journalism fails to tell a story, so it's more like citizen editorials or something -- as well as a great forum for discussion.) Last week they reviewed Robert Jensen's book about porn and masculinity and such, and the result was a pretty captivating debate. I know where I stand on it, but it was still good to skim through.