I have a confession to make. Once upon a time, I loved Sex
and the City.
I bought the DVDs and wondered at the ridiculous clothes and
endlessly questioned whether the behaviour of Samantha, as HBO seemed to
suggest, really was the optimum way to live life as an adult female.
And then I grew up just slightly and realised that a
programme where women, despite being intelligent and successful, are only
allowed to talk about men is probably not a very good feminist concept. Despite
what certain magazines might say about empowerment being reached by a woman being able to
buy her own shoes.
Also the ‘independence’ message was more than slightly
undermined by the fact that all the series was geared towards was finding a
suitable man. It was like a bastardised version of Pride and Prejudice set 200 years later, without the beauty and
with added lashings of gratuitous nudity.
There were good points, obviously. SATC was of a time (late
90s, early 00s) when women talking openly about all things sex had never been
seen before and was probably needed. It seems superfluous (and borderline patronising)
now – the films highlighting this especially.
Still, I was 13 and I definitely shouldn’t have been
watching it – and it was a guilty pleasure.
Which is all a preamble to my point in this post, which I am
almost ashamed to commit to blog.
I’ve been reading the biography of Sylvia Plath (see below
post). It’s heavy going. Sylv is in Mytholmroyd (so, so close to home for me),
getting laughed at by straight-talking, slightly bemused relatives of Ted
Hughes, and reacting by tramping off across the moors in that melodramatic way
that would eventually be her undoing,
So, I was getting annoyed with Sylvia and her non-problems.
I wanted to read some trash. I felt the overwhelming need to feed my brain with
the literary equivalent of candy floss. I went into our lounge, where my
flatmate had left a pile of books that will probably, although I doubt any time
soon, make their way to the local branch of Oxfam. I selected The Carrie Diaries.
For those lucky enough to not be enlightened, The Carrie Diaries is Candace Bushnell’s
telling of ‘the girl before she became an icon’, and it recounts Carrie Bradshaw’s
last year of high school. 17-year-old Carrie races around her tiny backwater
town (this is a tale of a small town girl done good, of course), wearing ‘genuine
1970s go-go boots’, sorting out the dramas of temperamental friends and sisters
and of course having man trouble.
It’s utter bollocks. I’m apologising to my brain and the
people who awarded me with my English degree every time I pick it up; I’m trying
to push out of my mind the fact that I’m reading a book with an embossed gold
cover and scrawly pink writing across the front that starts with the earth
shattering lines “They say a lot can happen in a summer. Or not. It’s the first
day of senior year, and as far as I can tell I’m exactly the same as last year.
And so is my best friend.”
Carrie and her ‘best friend’ then go on to discuss the fact
that they really, really need to get boyfriends. So clearly, nothing does
change in the life of Carrie Bradshaw.
I’m still taking Sylvia on the train; I can’t have people
thinking I’m reading this shit out of anything other than desire for perpetual
brain-ache.
The Carrie Diaries, Candace
Bushnell, HarperCollins, 2010