Sex in the City: Reflecting Common Assumptions About Women, But Not Women's Real Lives
The popular HBO comedy series Sex in the City portrayed the fortunes of four upscale Manhattan women looking for love. The feminist or liberated nature of the show was much-debated, throughout its duration. On one hand, the close relationship of the protagonists -- Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte -- was the one constant amongst the sea of changes in all of the characters' lives. These changes encompassed marriages, births, cancer, and other life-altering events. However, on the other hand, the characters' relationships with men formed the primary focus of the series. Their sexual and romantic troubles drove the series' plots and were more important dramatically than the characters' work lives or even their hobbies. The cultural myth that women, no matter how successful, are obsessed with finding the right man, and are only fully 'female' when they have a relationship with a man impacts how all women in the media are portrayed. Furthermore, because elected policy-makers are chosen by the public, based upon the media perception generated of the candidate, television programs like Sex in the City can have a deeper, subliminal cultural impact upon politics and culture than might initially be suspected.
A powerful woman like Hillary Clinton, for example, is often demonized as sexless or 'ball-busting' because of her refusal to comply with feminine norms of submissiveness. Time and time again in the series, the serious lawyer Miranda was given her 'comeuppance' because of her autonomy and her unfeminine sarcasm. When Miranda bought her apartment as a single woman, the episode chronicled how many times she had to record that she was 'single' on legal documents, which she found upsetting. People's surprise that a woman would want to buy her own accommodations alone irritated Miranda, but also made her question her decision. Miranda became fearful of dying alone, even of being found 'eaten by her cat,' according to one urban myth.
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