This is an extension of a vlog I posted on my You Tube channel with extra links and videos.

I know its no surpise but I hated the Sex and the City movie. That’s right world come get me. I’m ready to do battle with any acid tongued cyber attack dog who says otherwise.

I think the movie will survive as a cultural artifact. Before enviromental and economic disasters, this movie symbolizes the times we’re living in now, it arrives on the precipice, if you like, of rampant consumer culture.

Identified by the videos added to this post, the biggest problems of the Sex and the City movie are the underwitten screenplay and an over long running time.

The screenwriter has given his four heroines nothing to do but dump their partners, buy handbags and shit their pants.

I read a lot of critical material before and after seeing the movie. One post that stuck out to me was Sex and the City: Girls do poop! posted by Jim Emerson on the Scanners blog. And he asks, he was quoting Sheila Benson’s review of Thelma and Louise, but he asks anyway

Are we so starved for “strong” women’s roles that this… fits anyone’s definition of… neo-feminism?

Sex and the City offers all the ideas of neo feminism. It is something for everybody. Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing. Its why the characters have huge blockbuster followings.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Sex and the City isn’t about real women at all. Its about gay men in drag.

This was suggested to me by Manohla Dargis of the New York Times. Her article Is There a Real Women in this multiplex?

The cast from “Sex and the City” hits the big screen, though as that HBO show’s fans know, its four bosomy buddies are really gay men in drag.

After all, the original HBO show was an outsider show. It did not represent typical ideas of heteronormativity, or sexuality as straight monogamous, private and for procreation.

Gay audiences found solidarity with the characters because they represented a complex, fluid idea of sexuality.

Resulting in a large gay following of both the film and the show and a marketing campaign with a gay audience in mind, not to mention the upcoming Disaster Movie pokes fun at the gay audience.

If we recognize Sex and the City as a gay film the ideas become much more relevant. Because the heroines represent post modern queers better than post modern feminists.

But the movie doesn’t just exclude a credible representation of gay men but exaggerates the women in grotesque fashions that either repulses or makes you want to buy.

If we subscribe to Manohla Dargis’ idea that the women are not real women but gay men in drag, then is the movie suggesting that gay men are shallow consumers who are greedy for high fashion?

And, if we agree with Marcia from Reel Geezers that these women make you ashamed to be a women, then perhaps they are stereotypes, or a
reappearance of the ugly sissy stereotype.

In the film, Miranda complains that a costume store offers too stereotypical images of women, the sex kitten and the witch, sadly she doesn’t realize that she’s in a movie which does the same thing, except it doesn’t disguise women, it disguises gay men in the same tacky costumes.

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