I bumped into this article a few days ago: Sex and the City’ gets teen spin in Variety.com and have been thinking about it every since.
Now, I’m a guy, but I want to say that, at least in the first season or two, I thought that HBO’s Sex and the City was edgy, funny as heck and sexy. Linda and I both enjoyed watching it and were occasionally shocked by what they addresses but mostly found it good modern TV, far away from the heavy hand of the FCC.
Over time, however, it got tiring and each episode seemed to end with a morbid or depressing twist, leaving me far less entertained than had been the case earlier. Ironically, I bumped into the last few minutes of an episode just last night and it was perhaps exactly able to express the problem with the series over the long run…
In the episode of Sex and the City that I saw, Samantha sleeps with Miranda’s brother, and when Miranda finds out, she gets very upset with Samantha and yells “Is your vagina in the New York City guidebooks? Because it should be, it’s the hottest spot in town, it’s always open!”
Ultimately, it seems like Sex and the City ended up almost a parody of itself where the four women weren’t seeking happiness, they were just looking to get laid with someone, anyone.
Which is why I find it alarming to think that the marketing machine behind the Sex and the City franchise will doubtless put its muscle behind not one, but two new books from author Candace Bushnell focused on Carrie Bradshaw as a high school girl.
Variety explains: “The books, set during Carrie’s high school years, will be published beginning in fall 2010 by HarperCollins Children’s Bray [actually Balzer] and Bray imprint.”
According to Publishers Weekly, “The imprint, which is slated to launch in fall 2009, will release a range of titles, from picture books through YA; no figure has been set for the first list. Bray and Balzer said the list will reflect the work they did together at Hyperion for 12 years.”
So we have two publishers who wanted to do more edgy work than they were allowed at Disney (which owns Hyperion) and so they got HarperCollins to launch a new imprint. Perhaps, then, it’s perfect that one of their first titles is going to be “Sex And City High” (or something like that) from Candace Bushnell.
I just can’t imagine that it won’t be primarily about a young Carrie Bradshaw trying to sleep with as many boys as she can before she graduates, and could well be something more akin to the steamy Gossip Girls series. As the venerable NY Times says: “sex saturates the “Gossip Girl” books, by Cecily von Ziegesar, which are about 17- and 18-year-old private school girls in Manhattan.”
Is it just me, or can you imagine that what Bushnell and HarperCollins are aiming to do is compete directly with the popular sex-laden Gossip Girl series, which means, yes, the subtitle will be “Does Carrie Get Laid?”
Not the kind of book I want to buy for my daughters, and it’s darn frustrating to think that big powerhouse publishers remain interested in selling whatever crap they can publish, regardless of whether it’s actually decent.
Or maybe I’m just becoming a cranky dad.
well she doesn’t get laid, if that makes you feel any better.
These books are a natural evolution of our cultural philosophy of tolerance. Modern American culture is essentially nihilistic because we have progressively divorced our society from judgmental religion. That is, traditional values, the ones that form the foundation of your opinion, have no meaning as they cannot be derived from first principles any more.
You seem to be against teens having sex. Imagine yourself standing in front of some of them and trying to explain why they should not do so. They have condoms handed out to them in school and you are not allowed to use the word “God” in the conversation. How do you make your case?
Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal. Given the opportunity and excuse, he will gravitate towards any and all bodily pleasures. In eschewing the prudery that is based on Judeo-Christian morality, we have ended up here.
C. S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, claims that practicing, devout Christians are outnumbered and behind enemy lines. We’re a group of insurgents fighting an occupying, enemy army.
Welcome to the Underground, Dave.
🙂
I’m not against teens having sex, I’m against society pressuring them into it and giving them the message that the only way to be happy or have fun is to be sexually active.
I know that whether cultural artifacts like books and movies reflects individual interests or create them is a conundrum. As a parent, though, I believe that both are true and therefore believe that media producers have a responsibility to at least occasionally try to encourage responsible and mature behavior.
But maybe it’s just denial. 🙂
We all laughed when George Carlin said bad words over and over again. We yukked it up when Sam tried to bed Diane in every episode of Cheers. It was all OK. Anyone who found moral fault with such things was a prude and worse. Secular nihilism in popular culture washed away all objective moral codes. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch 1950s TV and compare that to what’s on today. (Ernie Kovacs was as funny as anything on the air today so we don’t seemed to have gained much in the way of entertainment.) In the meantime, people unlike you and I, folks who don’t have the financial shock absorbers to pick up the slack for broken homes, descended into hell in the form of places like Oakland.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/09/MNS1RBLQ5.DTL
“The inmates say the only difference between these neighborhoods and prison is the absence of walls. The same hierarchies apply – the meanest rise to the top. It’s a survival skill that ensures ownership of drug corners, a sense of self-worth, female attention and protection from attack.
Experts fear that the neighborhoods are only getting more violent. There are entire blocks without a single two-parent family, where drug dealers have become the predominant male role models, and children fend for themselves in crowded, chaotic homes where they are routinely exposed to drugs, sex and guns.
Criminal families are on their third and fourth generations. Grandparents – the ones who have historically stepped in to help raise fatherless boys and instill a sense of right and wrong – are dying off.”
Have you noticed that the Democratic Party no longer uses the poor to bash the Republicans like they did when Reagan was president? It’s because they no longer have any clue as to what to do about it. Unable to support objective morality, they’re left floundering around with statements like, “Fathers should do more.”
I’m currently reading St. Augustine’s “Confessions” and wading through some St. Thomas Aquinas as well. They were just as smart or smarter than we are, they just didn’t have antibiotics and the Internet. In terms of moral reasoning, however, they lacked for no technology. We’ve discarded Aquinas and Augustine in favor of Bill Maher and Quentin Tarantino. Our loss.
Aside – I’d love to have seen Aquinas as a guest on The View. Imagine the looks of utter confusion on the faces of Barbara Walters and the rest of those twits as they tried to comprehend what he was saying.
🙂
First off dude, let me say I really enjoy your blog. I have been signed into the (rss?) feed unto my page for over a month and I’m glad I took the time to read more again. I agree with natural and attatchment parenting and love Mothering magazine. I must say however,K T Cat’s first comment was….well perfect obviously i am left speechless. As a child I read the whole set of Narnia books and did not know about the author then-but i got exactly what he was getting across. Aslan was symbolistic of God and was pleased to read more about him as an adult. We can be like animals and will do things they won’t–it is our free will and actions that only that keep us seperate, unfortunately not always our intellect. KT- here in the U.S. those with ethics, morals, or ‘believers’ nowadays are the minority and the occupying army is not just the shaytaan(who work 4the devil) but our own desires we fight as well. I’m sorry i didnt mean to turn this into religion I am just so pleased to see ppl sharing intelligently without fighting! I hope you all are in the best of faith and health.
Flickr is another great place for discussions, groups, and photography from ppl all over the world.
Peace