Sex & the City: The Movie (II)

So we covered sexual liberation – definitely good. Samantha not considering her 49 years as a factor when deciding to abandon an unfulfilling relationship -excellent. I mean, I am all for wanting and seeking out long term companionship with that perfect someone or whatever but if that isn’t really you or if you haven’t found that person, why settle just for the sake of it? You make compromises in any relationship, no doubt, but that doesn’t necessarily have to mean having to change your preferences or lower your expectations (when reasonable, of course). It simply means being able to navigate through the potential pitfalls of proximity and the normal wear and tear that ensues when two adults live together. Too often people confuse settling for self-centred or immature behaviour or even reconciling with the fundamental lack of compatibility with their partner, with acceptable compromise. It’s called short-changing yourself, and it takes courage and intelligence not to, so much props to Samantha exhibiting generous amounts of both.

**plot spoilers ahead (in case you care)**

And now, for the the things that have been grating on my nerves. I cannot imagine how or why Carrie would go ahead and marry Big at the end of all that. I mean, you expect a little more wisdom than this from allegedly smart people with like 20 plus years of relationship experience under their shiny Prada belts. So let’s dissect this travesty of true love into its fundamental flaws:

FF #1: They’ve been together TEN YEARS. It’s not too much to ask for them to know by this time how they want their relationship to be, i.e. if they want to get married or just simply cruise along happily as they have so far. Instead they have this awkward, tepid discussion about marriage, and almost on a whim, decide in favour of it.

FF #2: If someone could be so unsure of marrying you after supposedly loving you for most of their adult life that they would be swayed by your recently betrayed friend and, heeding their ill-placed advice, metaphorically de-entrail you by standing you up on your wedding day, it is a definite deal breaker. The closest you could ever get to a relationship with them again, if at all, is civil exchange of pleasantries at the occasional awkward run-in at the supermarket.

FF #3: Instead, after almost a year of not speaking to each other at all (I’m just going to go ahead and ignore the lame poem crap Big emailed her), they suddenly decide to take another stab at a stroll down the aisle again when, in what I presume was intended to be a poetic gesture, Big proposes with a (HER!) diamond studded shoe, she gleefully accepts. Because according to Carrie:

FF #4: “Sometimes decisions about relationships cannot be logical”. Like hell they can’t. Sure you might fall for someone because there was like, I dunno, a shooting star in the heavens when you first saw him or something, but how can a decision about loving and spending your entire lifetime with a person be anything but soundly anchored by logic? I mean, this is the kind of flimsy rationalisation that makes me retch at tamil movies and now I get this same crap flung at my face by a supposedly progressive, thinking woman?

FF #5: Carrie holds Miranda (at least) partly responsible for Mr. Big’s lack of decency. There is just so much wrong and sad about this that I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s just make this quick and painless then. Miranda, best friend, in bad place, hasty, angry, bitter when she told Mr. Big they were crazy to marry. Mr. Big, dumbass, dbag extraordinaire, what happened to his judgement, love for Carrie? Carrie, unbelievably retarded.

URGH. There. I’m done.

Sex & the City: The Movie. (I)

I know, I know. At this point it’s like, at the risk of conjuring the nasty mental image, flogging a dead horse. But I’ll add my 2 cents to the cacophony anyway, because I’ve been reading reviews and such on the matter and no one really seems to have mentioned a few things that have gnawed away to the depths of my soul ever since I saw them on the big screen. But let the formalities not go unobserved – I’ll first do the whole stating my stance on the overall series thing and talk a little about the things I did actually like.

I never really saw the TV series. Well, I have watched the occasional episode here and there and also, I have not resided beneath a rock anytime these last 10 years. So I kind of get the general idea – Four different caricatures of women coming together in a flashy, if unrealistic, vision of an inordinately white New York City (a fairly grave sin for a show that purports to be at least 50% City). So as far as I can tell, we have Miranda as the brainy one, Charlotte’s the dopey romantic, Samantha luurves the sexy times and Carrie, oh Carrie – a pseudo intellectual who incorporates all the aforementioned caricatures into her own.

So the good: I do love the premise, even if perhaps only an ostensible one, of sexual liberation for women. I mean come on, it was (quite literally too), about fucking time. Women have always been made to feel awkward about our bodies, what with all the unpleasant connotations attached to female sexuality. Those of us from cultures which place an especially huge premium on something as meaningless as virginity, that supposed holy grail of virtues, will certainly attest to it. We’ve grown up told that it’s wrong to do it, talk about it or even think of it until we’re married and even after that, we know the closest we’re ever going to get to a discussion is hushed whispers and childish giggles at the mention of a penis.

So as a young Indian woman of suffocatingly conservative upbringing, it’s really refreshing, seeing confident, successful women unafraid to want or ask for sex, without necessarily attaching emotional strings to the man in question. I mean honestly, if you think about it, there is really no logical basis for being this averse to solely lust driven or out-of-wedlock sex. As long as it’s safe and consensual, what’s the problem? Why does culture ramble on in nauseating hypocritical fashion about loss of self-respect and dignity associated with promiscuity, when such a huge part of the world does not even have the decency to treat each other with kindness and common sense regardless of race, religious beliefs, social status or sexual orientation? I may be oversimplifying (and being quite cliche) here but the world would seriously be a far happier place if people got laid more. Who thinks of bombing stuff or being mean after a mind numbingly spectacular orgasm?

Ok, so I drifted off a bit there with my live and let live rant and it’s gotten kind of long. So I’m gonna break this up and put up the second part in the next post. Stay tuned.

The M word

A commercial I saw recently leads me to pick up (though somewhat tangentially) from where I left off the last time. I ended that post with a link to the ever eloquent Tamil Punkster’s post on Hindu culture’s attitude towards menstruation and menstruating women, which if you haven’t read already, you should.

Anyway, things on this side of the world aren’t much different. I saw a Midol commercial a few days back and okay, have you heard their tagline? It’s ‘Reverse the Curse’. Really. ‘The Curse’. You’d think we women spent 3 (or more) days every month incarcerated in a windowless room forced to listen to Bryan Adams. ON-REPEAT. And at the end of all that the men had the babies anyway. I mean, ‘The Curse’? Come on. At first I wasn’t paying much to attention to the voice-over, or even the actual commercial though I vaguely perceived a woman skipping along the shore of a beach all giggly because, well yeah, that is exactly what us chicks like to do when we’re not menstruating. And then – “Midol, Reverse the Curse!”, proclaims a disembodied voice.

I don’t get it. I mean, yes it’s not exactly rainbows and butterflies when the womb is all crampy and spewing out blood but what is so “The Curse” about it? It’s just as natural and essential a process as any of women’s other bodily functions and well, no menstrual cycle = no mankind. So then maybe our wombs are a bad thing after all, seeing as how most of mankind is so sexist, racist and homophobic. But that’s besides the point.

So why the wrinkled noses at the very mention of periods? Why the immature whining and name calling?

The Status Quo

Why do some women go out of their way to accommodate the most unreasonable expectations when it’s clear how unfair it is? I once had a friend who, in the months leading up to her wedding, had little or no contact with her fiancé. It was a long distance relationship as it was and it was, for reasons I cannot understand (given the abject lack of communication), heading towards a marriage. She wasn’t vocal about it but her frustration was palpable. Everyone kept telling her to hang on just a few more months and then she’d get to be with him. And she did. I’m not in a position to comment on their marriage today but I can bet anything she’s putting in much more than her fair share to keep that happily ever after going.

I once asked her why she tolerated this. In a matter-of-fact tone which belied the egregiousness of her statement, she remarked that this was just how it was with men in general, especially so in our culture (referring to how we’re Indian women and all) and that our needs would just have to be sidelined for theirs. It wasn’t fair, she admitted when I pressed her out of both disbelief and concern for her. “But that’s just how it’s always been- Might as well just accept it and make the best of it.” She also said that she used to question this but has now learnt to accept the status quo for the sake of the smooth running of the marriage. She spoke of this acceptance as if it were a mark of the maturity she’d acquired through the difficulties of the relationship. “I have learnt the hard way that demanding equality with a man is impractical. I’ve understood the differences now and I’m really happy, especially now that we’re married and together. More than I’ve ever been”.

I don’t know about you but this attitude, coming from such an educated and otherwise intelligent young woman, scares me. Worse still, she is not alone. I have heard many young women take the same stance, passively accepting the inequalities in their relationships, because well, they’re not the only ones. Male supremacy has been so deeply institutionalized in our culture that anything other than quiet deference to your husband’s priorities is tantamount to blasphemy.

But why are we clinging on so desperately to a culture that so blatantly discriminates between the sexes? I mean, this is a culture that has, for thousands of years till today, deemed women unclean and unfit to be in the company of during something so natural and normal as menstrual periods, when there is absolutely no scientific or logical basis for such a stigma. Why are so many thinking women even today, so reluctant to change the status quo that they would rather let such hateful behaviour pass for cultural norms?