Sex and the City: Lauren Jackson, November 28 (Guest Post)

Lauren Jackson / 11.28.18

Chicago, Illinois

HEY LADIES!!

I watched Sex and the City in the summer weeks between college and grad school, holed up in a tiny, campus-adjacent apartment surrounded by hundreds of miles of cornfields. Like many of you on this blog, I saw SATC as a primer for Life in the Big City, but instead of avoiding it as a result, I wanted to learn as much as possible from these fabulous women. That fall, I moved into an even tinier apartment in a big city and did it all over again, even knowing, by then, that I would never be fabulous: I was—and still am—a doctoral student. I have now watched Sex and the City, start to finish, more times than anything besides The Incredibles. I am the ultimate sucker.

Even I, however, am not enough of a sucker to have had any patience for the Aiden plotline. Aiden's function as overbearing boyfriend is to force Carrie into—in her words—"behaving just like Big." (She says this during their first go-around as a couple in Season 3, after balking at a too-early invitation to meet Aiden's parents.) Aiden proceeds to move in without asking, disrupts Carrie's messiness with his own, and purchases an (ugly) engagement ring for someone with whom—far as I recall—he's never discussed marriage. Carrie do be tripping sometimes (most times), but Aiden is an r/relationships nightmare.

The problem of "Just Say Yes" (Season 4, Episode 12) centers on that ring. Following a series of events that look no less fantastical to me now at age twenty-seven than they did at twenty-one when I first watched the series—Carrie's building goes co-op; Aiden offers to "sell my place and buy this place and that place next door" "for us," officially unofficially moves in, and starts singing Tom Jones in the shower—Carrie discovers an engagement ring hidden among her boyfriend's messily duffel-bagged clothing. But Carrie might not be the marrying kind, and— though we know this and Samantha knows it and Big's lurking black town car knows it—she doesn't quite know it yet. And so she must embark on a spiritual journey catalyzed not by something so superficial as a proposal, but instead, by some bad jewelry. Pear-shaped diamond. Gold band. She sees it and vomits, some sort of yolk-like concoction, right into the kitchen sink.

"You're getting engaged!" Charlotte enthuses without losing her smile, when Carrie announces the find to her friends. A rapid-fire conversation about the meaning of matrimony follows, until finally, Charlotte gets down to the important business of inquiring about the ring. Carrie puts on her classic trollface. It comes as no surprise that Aiden would pick the "wrong ring," being so tirelessly frustrated with Carrie's fashion and fabulous-adjacent lifestyle as he is. ("How many pairs of shoes does one person need?" he scoffs in the next episode, "The Good Fight," in which Carrie must save Roberto Cavalli from a death sentence. "Don't do that," she is forced to say outright, "don't mock the clothes.") Aiden, we eventually learn, enlisted Miranda to help pick out the ring, which itself looks like evidence of disdain: even if not thrown out of whack by pregnancy hormones, this just doesn't seem like a Miranda gig.

I am compelled to detour to a recent drama surrounding a Facebook group called "That's It, I'm Ring Shaming" (TIIRS). As the name suggests, the group is dedicated to posting matrimonial jewelry to be roasted by thousands. Recent controversy arose when a woman posted the picture of the ring she discovered in her boyfriend's nightstand (did this guy even try to hide it?), requesting advice on "how to tactfully say no you need to go get something different." The post made its way to Reddit where—naturally—the woman was dragged to hell and back for suggesting that a piece of jewelry purchased for her to be worn every single day for god only knows how long ought suit her personal taste. And she's hardly alone. Many an Aiden roams the earth, investing likely the bare minimum on an accessory to a personal style they couldn't pick out of a lineup.But back to business. Enter: the bad ring. Pear-shaped diamond. Gold band.

"Ick," says Charlotte.

"You wear gold jewelry," Miranda points out optimistically.

"Yeah like ghetto gold for fun," says Carrie. "But this is my engagement ring."

Charlotte interjects, "That statement is deeply classist and displays a complete lack of awareness of your privilege as a white woman." Carrie and thus the universe implodes. Cue an executive producer credit for one Michael Patrick yas queen.

***

Some of this is not canon, but a meme from the minds of Chelsea Fairless and Lauren Garroni, the duo behind the Instagram account everyoutfitonsatc, a running archive of, well, every outfit worn on Sex and the City (good, bad, and pinstriped). #WokeCharlotte imagines an alt-SATC universe where Charlotte is given the kind of lines that fit cozily (if no less clumsily) with today's wokest teens as seen on Riverdale or Sabrina. In the very special Season 3 episode I like to call "Samantha Fucks A Black Guy," Samantha assures the table that her g-dropping has nothing to do with "black talk"—it's "sex talk," she insists. Charlotte prefers to call it "African-American talk," delightfully knotted by her own liberalism. #WokeCharlotte's appraisal is hardly more articulate.

#WokeCharlotte is hilarious not for performing some reparative gesture, though some of the humor absolutely stems from the jagged confluence of words like "intersectionality" and "transphobia" with images of Kristin Davis' Charlotte, a character more likely to lament the rise of wedding e-vites than the return of fascism. (Davis has expressed her support of the meme.) But what fawning coverage of the meme seems to miss is how frankly awful #WokeCharlotte would be in her own universe or any other. Her sense of the world is far more rudimentary than that of the actual Charlotte, who navigates the enclaves of high-power lesbians with poor taste in art and Highland-descended WASPs with equal acuity. #Woke Charlotte, on the other hand, is, in short, dumb—and, worse, not funny. She ventriloquizes the kind of nonsense drivel that suffuses so much television today in a "here's a bone" fashion, making me yearn for the time when dramedies about affluent people instead chose to forget about the existence of black people altogether. Which is to say, the time of Sex and the City. The show's occasional exceptions—the aforementioned "Samantha Fucks A Black Guy," and the multi-part reprise, "Miranda Fucks A Different Black Guy"—rather efficiently prove the rule.

The proposed irony of #WokeCharlotte is that the show's most "traditional" (as in, most attuned to her own heteropatriarchal desires) character is transformed into an earnest warrior of the clan social justice. The greater irony, however, is that the canonical Charlotte experiences more development and elicits more sympathy across the six seasons of the show than any other character (and not one but two characters get cancer!). Sex and the City knows this, I think, even if the meme doesn't. This degree of change, of course, is only revolutionary within the scope of a series that can build an entire episode around the leap between a landing strip and a full Brazilian (and, like, fair). The logline would be that Charlotte, repeatedly belittled and unsatisfied by her Williams-Sonoma-tic reality, finds contentment in readjusted expectations—her husband is bald! and Jewish!—that nonetheless realize an intensity of photogenic wealth and whiteness most can only dream of. The big drama with Charlotte in Season 6, Episode 8 ("The Catch") is her so-called "worst wedding in history," the foil to her first, outwardly-perfect ceremony. Charlotte is crying in Badgley Mischka, having just married her second great love.

Charlotte: Everyone knows you only get two great loves in your life.Carrie: Everyone who? Where'd you get that?

Charlotte: I read it in a magazine.

Miranda: What magazine, "Convenient Theories for You Monthly"?

Carrie is not too sore from Harry's jackhammering best man to speak in maxims. "You already had the perfect wedding and the marriage, not so perfect. You have a wonderful man who loves you, who will be there to catch you when you fall. Do you know how special that is? I would love to find a man who's strong enough to catch me." The moral, straight from the writer's mouth, verbalizes Charlotte's arc from perfectionist to pragmatist. But, of course, it's all relative. You have to give the woman, and I guess the showrunners, some kudos: at least no one here is pretending that Charlotte (or anyone) could be genuinely satisfied at middle class. In SATC-speak, imperfection means a hairy back, not a weak (or nonexistent!) stock portfolio. Even Steve, the only recurring working-class character, inexplicably skips ahead a tax bracket or two, a part of the owner class by the end of the series.

I say all this and still haunt the digital aisles of Nordstrom and SSENSE, willing a generous markdown to appear; I incorporate Uber into the ritualistic pleasure of "stepping out" for "a night on the town" that I tend to abandon by 10pm when cocktails turn into something-and-sodas; I embrace the cult of skincare and makeup minimalism touted by women with dermatologists; that is, I am, still and always, a sucker in grad student's clothing. In turn, my relationship to the show remains a conventional one, full immersion and desire. I wouldn't change one thing, nor would I wish it upon the next generation (which is really my generation since I was six when the show debuted in 1998). We have more than enough want to go around. But reruns, those are just fabulous. No one is too woke for pleasure.

XOXO (it's a crossover!),

LAUREN

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The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction

Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1