Posts Tagged ‘Sex and the City’

Read my interview with video remix artist, Elisa Kreisinger, creator of QueerCarrie and Queer Housewives of NYC, on The Daily BR!NK.

Susan J. Douglas introduces her book, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done, with a definition of what she has coined  as “enlightened sexism.” This new brand of sexism promotes the idea that feminism is no longer needed given certain milestone achievements for women’s rights.

Douglas writes, “Enlightened Sexism a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved — so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.”

Douglas supports her thesis by calling on a wide range of  media examples from the 1990s and 2000s such as Melrose Place, the Spice Girls, the reality TV boom, Gossip Girl, and Sarah Palin. Douglas also chronicles feminist efforts that were destroyed by enlightened sexism, such as the birth and death of notoriously smart Sassy magazine, a teen publication Douglas describes as presenting articles and ideas to young girls “[that] could have appeared in the Village Voice or Mother Jones.”

Douglas’s promotes a well-researched concept, as the sexist thread that runs through the manufactured “girl power!” of the 90s up through films like Legally Blonde and Mean Girls is consistently observed. Readers can appreciate Douglas’s wide ranging perspective as she includes pragmatic statistical research, her own experiences raising her millennial daughter, and observations of her students at the University of Michigan.

Most central to Douglas’s idea of enlightened sexism is the birth of reality TV:

As reality TV has evolved in the early twenty-first century and become formulaic, one of the biggest formulas has been to rely on stereotypes, like “the slut” and “the bitch,” and to insist that women be defined by their relationships and assessments by men. As a woman who worked as a “resident psychologists” on one of these shows reported, she was “struck by how embedded in the show’s narrative were the common stereotypes of gender” and how it was in the editing room that “the nonconscious ideology of sexism” took control of the footage. It is in reality TV where the spritzy new girliness of chick flicks and women’s magazines in the late 1990s began to curdle into something more reactionary.

Despite many thoughtful observations, Douglas’s writing wavers when uniting all of her experiences and research into one solid narrative. Successfully, she deconstructs the implicit sexism in Legally Blonde protagonist Elle Woods, explaining that it was Elle’s girliness and attention to hair care practices that won the final court case, not her knowledge of law. But Douglas’s voice struggles when balancing her research with a conversational, informal tone, often relying on jokes to conclude her chapters rather than the analysis her findings merit. Her anecdotal style can often stray too far from central points, detracting readers from the significance of her topic and her riveting research.

Regardless of Douglas’s wayward voice, her research warrants reading. Enlightened Sexism has much to share about Y2kers — young girls and boys who came of age post-2000 whose first experiences with media were Spice Girl lyrics, reality TV characters, Sex and the City, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By tearing into these influences with a critical eye, Douglas taps into a new wave of feminists, calling into question the media consumed in their not-so-distant childhoods and ensuring a new effort on the feminism front. Douglas’s book serves as a strong encyclopedia of media depictions of women for the past two decades, a resource surely needed among feminists of all walks and ages.

To read more about Susan J. Douglas, click here.

Read my piece on how Sex and the City‘s witty and feminist foundation fell ruin to expensive shoes, marketing, and convention on The Huffington Post.