I’m watching “Sex and the City”. Yes, at first it felt like my brain was being slowly poisoned with some sort of insidious paralyzing agent, but I persevered, since in this age of societal decline the most disheartening aspects of popular culture are often the ones that can tell us the most about it.
The girls who grew up watching Sex and the City during those crucial teenage years of looking for role models and examples of what a grown-up woman is supposed to be like are now approaching their 30th birthdays, closing in on the age of the show’s characters.
And they have learned well, at least judging by the words of former teen icon Lindsay Lohan:
“Sex and the City changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people.”
Herself an idol and a role model for a younger generation of girls, Lohan, to most men another pointless celebrity among a sea of irrelevant celebrities, is to me more of a tragic figure very symbolic of our times:
Cast in her breakout Hollywood role at the age of 11 or so, she outshone established star Dennis Quaid in 1998′s “The Parent Trap”, completely carrying the family comedy from beginning to end in a demanding dual role as a pair of identical twins. Her charisma and talent at such a young age impressed all and sundry – she was heralded as the next big star, and audiences everywhere waited eagerly for her to grow up to be one of Hollywood’s biggest names.
By 2003-04, she had grown all the body parts that any Hollywood actress, no matter how talented, needs in order to pull in the big bucks, and nothing more stood in her way: 2003′s “Freaky Friday” and 2004′s “Mean Girls” took the box office by storm and put her firmly on that predicted trajectory to fame, riches and everlasting glory.
Then… then something seemed to go wrong. The media outlets that had previously sung her praises as the next big thing were suddenly only reporting arrests for drunk driving and visits to rehab. In the span of the next five or so years, her career prospects dwindled as Hollywood came to see her as unreliable, and that crucial ingredient of success – her more-than-fair share of natural beauty – entered an equally steep decline. I don’t know if the rumors of drug use were ever officially confirmed, but let’s just agree that whatever does this to a person in the span of a few years probably didn’t come from the supermarket:
What’s left for Lindsay now? A romantic lead in a summer blockbuster as a sweet thing for audiences to lust after for decades to come? If I had to take a guess, I’d check the box that says “no”. You’re free to make your own predictions…
More likely, she’ll end up something like her role models from Sex and the City, jumping from bed to bed, pipe dream to pipe dream, wondering why nothing sticks and blaming alternatively herself and everyone else. If she didn’t see it watching the show as an adoring teenager, she’ll probably see in her own life what the rest of us can see in Sex and the City: those women don’t seem to be very happy very much of the time. The reason seems to be obvious: the Sex and the City gang of women has two major problems which they keep putting in their own way.
First of all, they think they should be able to behave like men and enjoy it. They can’t, of course, but they never seem to learn. Modeling their own sexual behavior on that of the men around them whom it works fine for results, time and time again, in unhappiness. These women just don’t seem to get that they are never going to feel the same way about sex as men do. And all the while, the audience is being told that they should be able to.
Secondly, the entitlement mentality pervading the show defies measure: none of the women stop for a second to consider what might be wrong with them that they should fix in order to improve their relationship prospects. It’s just “I’m perfect so why doesn’t anyone want me?” all day every day. All the 1.2 million single men in New York must just have something wrong with them, plain and simple, or else they would jump at the chance of a catch like these frequently intolerable, over-the-hill women who seem to think that their lucrative careers somehow make them the hottest thing on the block – another classic projection of “what works for men must work for women”.
What’s in store for all of Lindsay Lohan’s contemporaries who took the Sex and the City lifestyle to heart as a life goal in their teens and are now reaching that stage where they’re about to discover that it’s actually a show about unhappy women facing the sucker’s payoff of their terrible decisions and worse attitudes?
How delighted are they going to be to discover the toll that partying hard every night and bringing home bartender after personal trainer after aspiring artist eventually takes on their minds and bodies?
Only one thing seems certain: one day they’re likely to run into that one man who’s perfect in every way, but just doesn’t seem to want to commit to them no matter how hard they try to analyze his motives over drinks with their girlfriends or how many tantrums they throw.
Just like in Sex and the City.
This article brought to you by Delusion Damage.
