Sex and the City revisited

Recently I wrote on two different (Catholic) perspectives on Sex and the City discussed on Vox-Nova. Katerina believed that the show and movie were inconsistent with Catholic/ Christian life and damaging to culture by promoting and sensationalizing immoral actions and attitudes. Radical Catholic Mom, however, that the show was an exaggerated glimpse into the struggles we all have and was indicative of our need for more than selfish desires in order to find fulfillment. Over at Catholic Educator's Resource, Colleen Campbell argues that the show is problematic to say the least. She concludes:

For all their pretensions to envelope-pushing, the movie's producers apparently could not improve on the age-old answer to a woman's romantic yearnings: the very ideal of traditional marriage so often disparaged by the series. Even the promiscuous, materialistic fashion plates of Sex and the City ultimately succumb to the desire to direct their erotic energies into something more enduring than one-night stands and shopping sprees. They want, as most women do, the kind of lifelong love that can survive wrinkles and stretch marks and the dowdier duds of old age.

Of course, such happy endings may prove more elusive for viewers. Decades of bed-hopping and gold-digging look glamorous on television, but in real life, a woman who sleeps with scores of men is more likely to wind up with a sexually transmitted disease and an attachment disorder than a doting husband and storybook marriage. And in real life, a woman who postpones motherhood until well into her forties faces the very real chance that she never will conceive.

The popularity of Sex and the City suggests that many women accept the show's premise that a woman can spend decades treating people like things and things like people without compromising her future prospects for marriage and motherhood. That one TV show could sell that canard to so many women indicates that Sex and the City is more subversive than either its fans or its fiercest critics imagine.

My inclination is to side with Colleen and Katerina. Although I understand RCM's point, I think the majority of the people who watch the show/movie are not as savvy in reading and interpretating media as she is. I think most just see, they are doing it, so can I. Some of the statistics quoted by Colleen in her article bear this out.