Sex and The City 2: A Letter to Feminism’s Snuff Film

Posted in Badhostess Blog May 29, 2010

Dear Mrs Broderick,

First. You need to be told. Your movie is an abomination.

No. That just won’t do.

Let’s try again: Your movie is a cheerless, broken sham.

Not getting any closer.

One more time: Your movie has lain itself on the rock of female self-loathing, asked late-capitalism to gang-bang it, please, and then drown it in a bukkake-tsunami of product placement.

This is not a movie but an advertising medium strangely complicit in its own rape and murder.

I am witness to a brutal death. And I have your gift-bag to prove it.

On Friday, I attended the cinema for a “celebrity studded” premier of your terrible film.

This, of course, is Melbourne, Australia where “celebrity studded” has come to mean any woman working in the PR industry who has ever blown a footballer. So, I didn’t see any genuine celebrity. Then again, I was blinded by the desert nation that is your terrible movie.

Sarah. Sarah. Why did you do it?

After five bajillion years, and 146 minutes, I was gasping. Gasping like a woman of the Melbourne PR industry might as she sucks on a strapping midfielder. Thank goodness, then, a Proud Corporate Sponsor had thought to place branded water in my gift bag. Otherwise, my ovaries and hope would have shrivelled to resemble the tiny middle portion of you, Sarah Jessica Parker. You have never looked so much like a dead desert tree.

Your movie is set in Abu Dhabi where many of the trees are dead. A Gulf State? This is both (a) a shit idea for a franchise in which NYC has always figured as your ageless Fifth Lady (c) a gift to critics. They’ve all driven straight to Metaphor City. How could they resist the lure of comparing your parched old ladies to parched old landscapes? They couldn’t. Perhaps, they shouldn’t.

Normally, I loathe critique steeped in misogyny and I know you feel the same. On this occasion, I say to these critics: be my guest. Go to Menopause Town, Messrs. Anything you can do to stop the sisters from diving headfirst into this reeking pile of Shit by Ferragamo™ is fine by me. Girlfriend doesn’t need to see a snuff film with feminism as its object.

In fact, if Girlfriend is looking for a gender-affirming Night at the Movies she would be better to see Rocky. Or Rambo. Anything with Sly in it. He paints a more “empowering” portrait of What it Means to Be a Modern Woman in Her Forties than you do. And, while we’re at it, so does any Muslim cleric.

And, I’d like to tell you, Sarah, that if your movie wasn’t so crap, one of these clerics would be well within his rights to issue a Swarovski studded SJP fatwa. How dare you use your terrible movie to suggest that Islamic dress is oppressive and restrictive. On seven inch Diors you totter as you look at the Niqabi and say, “Poor women. Their dress is so uncomfortable. How do they even eat?” An odd question, Sarah, as clearly, in preparation for this movie, you haven’t eaten at all.

I could chastise you for your Islamophobia, Sarah, but I fear you’ve lost you patience.. For now, let’s examine the other and manifold ways in which you blow.

How much do you blow? You blow so hard that Us Magazine, one of your movie’s product placement principals, conducted a poll asking not “Do you LOVE it?” but “Is it Terrible?”. In an effort to nourish the desert in which it has taken root, the magazine boasts, “62 percent voted that the movie isn’t terrible!” Great. There’s some qualitative research for you, SJP. 62 percent also voted that they’d prefer to view this movie again than die after sucking off one of the camels featured in your desolate tract of talent.

You blow so hard, I’m afraid, that your girls are extinguished and will not themselves live to blow another New York City man again. And to those of us soothed by your chic, funny and often smart exegesis of bed-hopping As Seen on TV, this is nothing short of a disaster. I will miss my Four Winds.

Sarah, I pay tribute to them now.

Vale Miranda. Good-bye to the flinty, ambitious Harvard alum whose pointy head was always aimed toward the glass ceiling. After Friday night, she is dead. What have you made her do? Rather than man up against a partner whose impatience with her work is presumed to be sexist, Hobbes stops fighting and quits her gig to raise her irritating son and please her needy husband. What is it we say as we snap our fingers to praise female achievement? Oh. Yes. You Go Girl™.

Vale Charlotte. Good-bye to the prim, sweetly drawn New England eccentric whose beautifully kept Louboutins were always aimed toward great matrimonial sex. After Friday night, she is dead. What have you made her do? Rather than trust in her troth with Harry, she is now consumed with doubt and the vision of her nanny’s unrestrained bosom. I always loved Mrs Goldenblatt; I loved that she was besotted by Harry’s masculinity; I loved that she was so loving. But, you got her to cut off Harry’s balls and put them in a Kelly Bag . You’ve transformed her from a prize-winning Rules Girl into a sad and nervous loser.

Vale Samantha. Good-bye to the confident cougar whose impeccably waxed vagina was always pointed toward quality cock. After Friday night, she is dead. What have you made her do, Sarah? Rather than do, as she’s always done, what-comes-naturally, she decides to take a pill. Now, she’s doing what comes pharmaceutically. I loved the way Miss Jones chose to always satisfy herself. Now, she’s satisfying someone else. To wit: you; a woman-hating producer who’s hell-bent on drawing shrewish caricatures; not the fun female archetypes we loved.

What happened to you, Sarah? And what, moreover, happened to our beautiful Carrie.

Finally. Vale Carrie. Good-bye to the writer whose big, messy heart was always pointed toward real love. The woman who observed, Season One, Episode One, that, “cupid has flown the co-op” has taken a hatchet to her own longing. Cupid has visited the co-op and, for reasons only known to you and the Barbie Doll collector who wrote this pile of crap, she’s chopped off all his limbs and spat into his wounds screaming, “Why don’t we go out to dinner anymore, Big?”

“Am I just a bitch wife who nags?” your Carrie asks Big. The answer is: yes. You, just like your friends, have become a terminally insatiable, under-employed husk who can only be appeased as wads of money and praise are stuffed with force into all of your needy holes.

This is one of the central problems with your terrible movie. Every time one of your ladies is denied the instant rogering she craves, she blames it on “sexism”. To wit: your Carrie Bradshaw-Preston, always portrayed as a delightfully, happily low-brow writer is reviewed in the New Yorker. Which is odd for a writer who DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO USE AN APOSTROPHE. (Sarah. You never use an apostrophe for a plural. Ever.) Anyhow, Carrie doesn’t get a rave. Samantha blames it on “sexism” and all the girls agree, yes Carrie. You were not reviewed poorly because you leave your modifiers dangling, have nothing left to say and overuse the phrase “I couldn’t help but wonder”. You were reviewed poorly because, “Men just can’t handle women with a strong voice.”

Having been crushed by the oppressive, phallocentric world of literary magazines, Carrie then does what any newly oppressed maiden might. She does not hopefully send a review copy to Granta but puts on two pounds of eyeliner, a sparkly skirt with a split to her mons pubis and snogs her old boyfriend. You Go Girl™.

Bleugh.

I am sad to tell you, Sarah, most of the PR ladies in Melbourne ate up your bulimic purge with a spoon.

Hurt about Having No Voice as a Woman, your Carrie gives Aidan a glimpse of thigh and a yard of tongue. She’s married. He’s married. Clearly, she’s seeking the unhealthiest reprieve possible from her terrible review. But, all the Melbourne footy molls applauded. As you probably knew they would.

What are you telling us, Sarah? Are you saying when we’re beaten down by sexism, we should dress in couture and have sex with a man who sells high-end furniture? Are you saying liberation inheres in accessories, seven star restaurants and cock that appears at the moment we want it? I’m not saying these things aren’t enormous fun, Sarah. I’d love a Kate Spade purse crammed full with amuse bouche and penis to-go. Who wouldn’t?

But, in the end, these are not the rewards of liberation, Sarah. I want to be sick in your handbag of hate just to show you that designer hard goods and the hard goods of those poor men who barely exist in your brittle universe are NOT the site of insurgency. They are just a way to fill your needy, needy holes, Sarah.

Sarah. What have you done?

This morning I saw you on the television. We’re back to season one and you are in a cab with the girls you would, twelve years later, dress in hideous drag. It’s a transcendent TV moment. You have gathered, like a coven who specialises in advice to the newly sodomized, to talk to Charlotte about anal sex. My partner and I couldn’t believe that women were talking about such things on the telly. It was frothy, wonderful and the way I would thereafter secretly spent my every Monday night.

Charlotte says that she’d quite like to try it, but what if she was thereafter known as the Up The Butt girl. You and your cohorts tell her that what anyone thinks doesn’t matter; that virtue, being a dangerous myth, couldn’t be taken from her or her butt.

What happened, Sarah. After last Friday night, I can only think of you as the Up The Butt Girl who confused freedom and pleasure for capital and greed. My boxed set is on eBay. My hope was left, with my gift bag, in a cinema seat. I walked out when Samantha was throwing condoms all over an Arab state, and I Couldn’t Help But Wonder if, in Sex and the City 3, Carrie will not be played by you but an enormous tube of product placement lubricant dressed in Alexander McQueeen.

Yours,

Miss Helen Razer

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This post was written by Helen Razer