Sex (Solipsism) and the City: Please Let the Girls Grow Up to Be Women

"It’s fascinating to watch a someone in their twenties try to figure it out. It’s not so interesting to watch a middle-aged person still trying to figure it out." It was a bit of wisdom someone in their fifties offered to me the other day (in reference to [Emily Gould's disappointing, self-absorbed New York Times Magazine story]), but it was also the line running through my head as I watched Sex and the City last night. Instead of adult women acting "adult"—making choices and reacting to situations with some amount of wisdom and dignity—the women of SATC are still so self-absorbed that, although they may no longer have the energy to chase men and gab about sex indiscriminately, they still appear to be little girls rather than women.

Perhaps it's a more realistic representation of New Yorkers in general. Even at the press screening last night, the “press” became pushy, shrill and obnoxious as they tried to ensure they had a prime seat in a theater full of “press.” Being self-obsessed is just the name of the game, and everyone was there to workout some sort of [Cinderella fantasy].

The movie is all the things that folks who love the show hoped for: it is indeed [the finale they should have had]. It can also be used as proof that women past 40 can indeed carry a summer blockbuster (it just takes four of them to do it). I was most disappointed in the fact that fortysomething (and one fiftysomething) women have to do it by acting like little girls—with Sarah Jessica Parker as the main offender.

I’ve watched my female friends switch gears from normal speak to a mousy whisper whenever a straight, available man is in the room, but the way Parker/Carrie moons over Big (Chris Noth), coos, meows and whispers, forever making little-girl eyes at him, you wonder how they’ll ever have a fulfilling relationship. And the more Carrie twitters with her little-girl affectation, Noth retreats into big, quiet (stiff) male-type.

Even when Carrie is supposed to be “real” (meaning, sans makeup)—during her “Mexicoma”—she’s coddled by her girlfriends as if she were a fragile bird. I finally reached my breaking point when Samantha (Kim Cattrall) actually feeds Carrie with a spoon, making the infantilization complete.

Don’t get me wrong: the movie’s a good time. I just worry about all those women who mimic the lifestyle of the glamour girls and how this will reinforce that inclination to keep your voice sweet, your manner light and conversation vapid.

The most subversive detail about the movie remains the way in which these women-as-gay surrogates have progressed into the current bourgie gay middle-aged male role: Instead of being promiscuous young gays, they are now aging gays interested in marriage, adoption and sex-starved relationships. Samantha’s tepid response to Carrie’s engagement reminded me of my own under-enthusiasm for friends’ gay wedding plans. And the complicated conversation Big and Carrie have about ritualizing their relationship is one that many men and women have been having since it's now possible in some states to have legal unions. The movie ends with an upbeat, empowered statement—"We write our own vows, why can't we write our own rules"—too bad they all decide on stereotypical couple choices (why can't Samantha have an open sexual relationship?), and when things get really horrible, there's the same balm for all problems: go shopping.