Female Chauvinist Pigs (16 page)

One seventeen-year-old girl I interviewed in Oakland (in the most legislatively progressive area in this country) said her mother “doesn’t really care how sexy we are. She was really involved in the women’s movement, so she thinks whatever you do to feel secure and confident is fine.” The tricky thing is that adolescents don’t automatically know what to do to make themselves feel sexy or secure or confident. They sometimes have “confused bodies” and they frequently have confused heads. Adolescent girls in particular—who are blitzed with cultural pressure to be hot, to
seem
sexy—have a very difficult time learning to recognize their own sexual desire, which would seem a critical component of
feeling
sexy.

Many of the issues confronting teenage girls are the same ones affecting grown women: the prioritizing of performance over pleasure; a lack of freedom to examine their own varied, internal desires; an obligation to look as lewd as possible. (A few days after the 2004 presidential election, Paris Hilton was on the red carpet at P. Diddy’s birthday party at Cipriani, lifting up the voluminous skirt of her pink gown and exposing her vagina to the paparazzi, thus outdoing her friend Tara Reid, who accidentally exposed a nipple to photographers at that same party. All I could think of was Anne’s comment: “To dress the skankiest…that would be the one way we all compete.”) But whereas older women were around for the women’s movement itself, or at least for the period when its lessons were still alive in the country’s collective memory, teenage girls have only the here and now. They have never known a time when “ho” wasn’t part of the lexicon, when sixteen-year-olds didn’t get breast implants, when porn stars weren’t topping the best-seller lists, when strippers weren’t mainstream. (The April 2005 issue of
Harper’s
magazine reported that a Palo Alto middle school had a career day in which a speaker touted stripping as a profession.) None of this can possibly be “ironic” for teens because it’s their whole truth—there’s no backdrop of idealism to temper these messages. If there’s a way in which grown women are appropriating raunch as a rebellion against the constraints of feminism, we can’t say the same for teens. They never had a feminism to rebel against.

*Pseudonyms are used for subjects under the age of eighteen.

One
of the earliest promos for the HBO series
Sex and the City
pictured Carrie, the bubbly protagonist played by Sarah Jessica Parker, in a postcoital flush next to a handsome guy in bed. He looked bewildered when she got up to go and told him, “I’ll give you a call…maybe we can do it again some time.” Another clip in that same promo showed Carrie drinking with her friends at a boisterous, brightly colored club. Samantha, the brassy sexual enthusiast played by Kim Cattrall, told them, “You can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say
screw it
and go out and have sex like a man.”

This promo amounted to
Sex and the City
’s thesis statement. Audiences were captivated. The show became a Sunday night ritual for 10.6 million Americans, and Carrie Bradshaw became a household name. The cast of
Sex and the City
appeared on the August 28, 2000, cover of
Time
magazine, staring out seductively above the words
Who Needs a Husband?
People were alternately thrilled and appalled to hear women talking about masturbation, female ejaculation, and the taste of sperm on a sitcom. The conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote in 2000, “This is not how women talk. This is how some men might talk—if women would let them.” Others complained that the casual sex the characters engaged in was really more representative of life in the gay community, of which
Sex and the City
’s creator, Darren Star, and executive producer, Michael Patrick King, are members. But to me,
Sex and the City
always felt like a pretty realistic reflection of heterosexual, recreational New York: cocktails, self-involvement, shagging.

Little by little, the show became less about women having “sex like men” and more about the characters trying to negotiate their independence as they pursued intimacy with lovers, husbands, children, and each other. That’s how the show grew and became so good. How many episodes could you really have watched about women using men for sex? It’s a narrative dead end. So the characters and their stories became increasingly layered, and there were subplots about cancer and abortion and divorce and religious conversion.

The spirit of the show remained consistent, however, because the truly defining pursuit of their world wasn’t sex so much as it was consumption.
Sex and the City
romanticized the weather in Manhattan, the offices of
Vogue
magazine, the disposable income of the average journalist, but what it romanticized the most was accumulation. There was as much focus on Manolo Blahniks and Birkin bags as there was on blow jobs. Buying things became a richly evocative experience as seen through the lens of
Sex and the City
…a feathery pair of mules became the linchpin of a glamorous, romantic evening in Central Park. It was as though without the shoes, everything else—the moonlight, the trees, the man—would dissolve into the night, leaving nothing but the bleak mundanity of regular life in its place.

Another episode was devoted to the reclamation of a lost pair of silver stilettos that represented, to Carrie, her freedom and worth as a single person. The shoes were accidentally or intentionally taken from Carrie at a friend’s baby shower. When that friend balked at replacing the $485 sandals, the episode became not about etiquette or excess but about “choice.” Was Carrie’s choice to be single—and inextricably, somehow, to wear $485 shoes—less meaningful than her friend’s choice to be a wife and mother? In that episode, titled “A Woman’s Right to Shoes,” as in many others, acquisition was the ultimate act of independence. One of the reasons the series was such a big hit was that it accurately reflected the vertiginous gobbling—of cocktails, of clothing, of sex—that was the status quo for American women of means by the turn of the millennium. Carrie sailed around town with shopping bags on her arm, a condom in her purse, and a little gold Playboy bunny pendant twinkling on her neck.

The ethos of the show was all about women getting themselves the best and the most, sexually and materially. They were unapologetically selfish, and civic-mindedness was scoffed at. Carrie didn’t vote; in one episode Samantha told another character, “I don’t believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party…I just believe in parties.” The only time in the series Carrie was confronted with the prospect of doing something for charity, she dismissed the idea as ludicrous. (A do-gooder asked if Carrie would consider teaching writing to disadvantaged students and Carrie snapped, “I write about sex. Is that something they’d like to learn, these kids, writing about blow jobs?”)
Sex and the City
’s idea of giving back was more in line with the Bush Administration’s prescription to the nation after 9/11: The best thing you can do for your fellow man and your country is to shop till you drop.

Sex and the City
told a hugely influential story about women, with every bit as much cultural power as shows like
That Girl
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
The opening sequence culminated with Carrie twirling on the street, much like Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore had before her, and she became a similar kind of pop role model.
Sex and the City
offered a complete lifestyle package—what to wear, where to eat, when to drink (always), who to have sex with—for the high-end, urban liberated woman. But if
Sex and the City
was a deeply seductive feminist narrative, it was also a deeply problematic one, one that articulated many of the corruptions of feminism we have been contemplating.

Like Female Chauvinist Pigs,
Sex and the City
divided human behavior into like a man’s or like a woman’s. Instead of being a confident woman, Samantha had the “ego of a man.” When Charlotte decided to make two dates in one night she was “turning into a man,” but when she worried whether she would be able to eat two meals in a row, “just like that, she was a woman again.” As is the case within the scene of young New York and San Francisco lesbians, the fantasy Manhattan of
Sex and the City
was a sphere in which sex was just another commodity, something to be acquired rather than shared, so sexual encounters often ended with someone feeling like a conqueror and someone feeling compromised. Rather than the egalitarianism and satisfaction that was feminism’s initial promise, these sexual marketplaces offer a kind of limitless tally. Like the teenagers who put the cart before the horse and want to “get” sex before they feel desire, the protagonist of
Sex and the City
often thought more about the way she was experienced than about what she was experiencing. She usually “couldn’t help but wonder” what was going on in the head of the man she was seeing, and rarely evaluated her own happiness as such. In an early episode she said, “I actually catch myself
posing”
around her love interest, Mr. Big; “it’s exhausting.” The idea of women measuring men’s interest instead of thinking about their own satisfaction lived on after
Sex and the City
went off the air in a best-selling self-help book called
He’s Just Not That Into You
(2004), authored by a former writer and consultant of the show. This book, which Oprah Winfrey called “true liberation” and felt “should be on every woman’s night table,” displayed in its very title a prioritizing of mind-reading over feeling. “Many women have said to me, ‘Greg, men run the world,’ ” writes author Greg Behrendt. “Wow. That makes us sound pretty capable. So tell me, why would you think we were incapable of something as simple as picking up the phone and asking you out? You seem to think at times that we’re ‘too shy’ or we ‘just got out of something.’ Let me remind you: Men find it very satisfying to get what they want. (Particularly after a difficult day of running the world.) If we want you, we will find you.” Women generally find it pretty satisfying to get what they want too, but
He’s Just Not That Into You
is not about what women want. It’s about becoming better discerners of what men want. (And somehow that is true women’s liberation.)
Sex and the City
was great entertainment, but it was a
flawed guide to empowerment, which is how many women viewed it.

O
n the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking collection of women’s sexual fantasies,
My Secret Garden,
there was a panel discussion called “Sex and What Women Want Now” at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City. The event was moderated by Friday’s husband, Norman Pearlstein, the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc.; and besides Friday herself, the other panelists included Candace Bushnell, the author of the book
Sex and the City,
on which the HBO series was based; Candida Royalle; and Faye Wattleton, president of the Center for the Advancement of Women (and formerly the first African-American head of Planned Parenthood). The tone of their conversation was sassy and flip.

“I always tell people, if you have this marvelous sexual fantasy, think twice before you tell your partner,” said Friday, who had a devilish cosmetic glow that evening with her red lips, red nails, and reddish-hued eye shadow. “If you care this much about them, you should know if they really want to hear that your great fantasy is to have three men take you at one time!”

“All I can say is I hope you can, because when you do it really bonds you,” said Royalle.

“That’s the person you should marry!” said the recently married Bushnell. “In terms of my fantasies, they always have little stories and, like, dialogue. There’s actually not that much sex, but there’s a lot of dialogue.”

“Foreplay!” shrieked a woman from the audience.

“I put the partner in the fantasy,” offered Royalle, “but I might have him doing something different, or…or in funny hats.”

“Doesn’t everyone here agree that it doesn’t really matter?” Friday asked. “If it takes you where you want to go, if it helps you reach orgasm, does it matter who you’re thinking about?”

Wattleton said, “I’d rather like to know that he’s thinking about
me
when he’s having an orgasm.”

“Oh, Faye, you’re kidding yourself,” said Friday with a snort.

Wattleton used a long-nailed finger to flip her dyed blonde hair out of her face and said, “Or maybe I just think I’m that good.”

Pearlstein said, “Faye, the Center for the Advancement of Women just interviewed over three thousand women about gender roles. I was interested that in your study, you asked a question about women’s feelings about having a man in their lives, and you asked how important is it to have a man to do the following: be your companion, give you love and affection, to have a family with, to give you physical protection, to do physically demanding work around the house, to support you financially, to make major household decisions. But you didn’t ask ‘to have sex with,’ and I’m curious why.”

Wattleton smiled, as if it were no big deal, and said, “Maybe our very own questionnaire reflects the limitations of how far we have gone.”

About a year later, Wattleton was a talking head on an HBO documentary called
Thinking XXX,
about the making of photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s book
XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits.
She declared, “The fantasy of the porn star is the ultimate fantasy because it’s a sexual fantasy. I think that’s why it’s so disturbing to people, because it really does defy our capacity to control it.”

I find it interesting that a person who didn’t ask a single question about sex in the “first comprehensive study ever conducted of women’s opinions across the board” (as her publicist billed it) feels qualified to make a pronouncement on our “ultimate fantasy.” (I am also baffled by the explanation that what qualifies the “fantasy of the porn star” as the “ultimate fantasy” is that it is a “sexual fantasy.” There are lots of sexual fantasies; they can’t
all
be the ultimate.) But mostly I am disturbed, to use Wattleton’s word, by the assertion—from a career feminist—that the only problem with the cultural dominance of the porn-star fantasy is that it defies control.

Porn stars are quite firmly under various controls. Most obviously, they are under corporate control. The adult entertainment industry is valued at between $8 billion and $15 billion, and the bulk of the profits go to the mainstream corporate hosts of whatever service is being provided—Time Warner makes money off of pay-per-view porn, as do hotel giants like Marriott and Hilton; phone companies profit from explicit chat lines; and so on. Any porn star will tell you she doesn’t get a fair share of the money her body makes. Of course, lots of people who make popular culture don’t feel they get a big enough piece of the pie, from the cast of
Friends
(who famously demanded $1 million, per actor, per episode, because, after all, without them there was no show) on down to me (
I
write
the articles; without me the pages of the magazine would be
blank!). But the stakes are very different for a porn star than for an actor or a journalist, because porn stars are selling something more than a skill: They are giving up the most private part of their being for public consumption.

Sex workers are
workers.
They are having sex, just as strippers are stripping and centerfolds are posing, because they are paid to, not because they are in the mood to. The vast majority of women who enter the field do so because they are poor and have no more attractive alternative. (In fact, the vast majority of women in the field
stay
poor.) For the rest of us who are lucky or industrious enough to make a living doing other things, sex is supposed to be something we do for pleasure or as an expression of love. The best erotic role models, then, would seem to be the women who get the most pleasure out of sex, not the women who get the most money for it. Is a person who has sex or acts sexy because it’s her job to really living out our “ultimate fantasy”?