Because to even come to that conclusion you’d have to evaluate the show based on criteria that you artificially put there.
It was a well-written, well-acted comedy starring 4 pretty women in New York with disparate personalities.
It wasn’t status-quo propaganda. It was a sit-com.
You can’t ascribe a subtext to it that IT DIDN’T ASK FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE and then criticize it for failing to meet your ascription.
Do you really think that the people making this show – the people who had the lead woman in tears every other week over the newest idiot to come down the block – believed they were making sassy grrrl-liberation? Just who were we, the audience, supposed to look at this liberator?
The slut? The prude? The mostly de-sexed career girl?
Don’t criticize it for not being something it never strove to be.
Maybe you took a wrong turn. Great Debates is on the left. If someone opened a GD thread titled “Why is Bill Clinton so great?” and got responses like the ones here (“He’s fat.” “He’s not very talented.”) then you’d have a reason to gripe. I think we are being reasonably civil here. The consenus seems to be she’s okay , but nothing special both in acting chops and appearance. There’s a few outlyers, but that’s to be expected.
Like Brian Kinney on Queer as Folk, altho the actor is not ‘hot’ in any sense, the character they play is ‘written as hot’. So with the other characters pretending they are hot, and acting like they deserve it, they give off the ‘aura’ of hotnes. Something like in Quantum Leap when Sam gives off the illusion of being someone else.
Wow. I am really fucking insulted.
For the record, I don’t actually promote myself as hot, and I’ve never participated in a picture thread, you seem to equate participating in this thread with “must be fucking ugly and mean and catty”? Perhaps some people have phrased things in ways which could be kinder, but I don’t think anyone here has said, “I am much more attractive than SJP, and therefore should have her job and her contracts and her money.”
It’s a thread about celebrities. In Cafe Society. It’s allowed to be shallow.
(And I stand by my earlier statement that SJP seems pretty cool from what I’ve read about her).
I do like one thing about her: the tagline for her perfume campaign is “lovely on the inside”. It proves she knows she looks like a horse and can laugh at herself.
I’m not ugly or catty (though perhaps mean) and yet I participated in this thread. At any rate, I equate “makes mean, catty remarks about the appearance of attractive women” with “must be mean and catty”.
I have to say that it’s endlessly amusing to me to watch people say things like this and then take great umbrage at the notion that others are judging their personalities by how they conduct themselves. I just can’t imagine having the nerve to sit around and throw around nasty commentary like a lot of the people in this thread have been doing, and then act as though I’d been wronged or insulted when other people call me nasty.
For the record, I didn’t think your comment was mean or catty. But those of a lot of the posters in this thread certainly were.
The fact that many people around here are ugly (and I’m not meaning to imply that I’m gorgeous, either) is apparent if you look around in one of the picture threads in MPSIMS. The average person you see walking down the street is unlikely to be particularly glamorous either. But there’s a certain mean-spirited irony in a group of people - many of whom, statistically speaking, are probably pretty ugly - tearing apart the appearance of a relatively attractive woman because it apparently makes them feel better. Perhaps you don’t find that shallow, or catty, or mean-spirited, but I do.
No, no one has said anything of the sort. It would be somewhat nasty for someone to do that, but there’s something particularly pathetic, in my eyes, about ugly people sitting around and criticizing minor flaws in attractive people’s looks. I’m comfortable with how I look; I don’t feel any need to sit around declaring that people who are more attractive than me are actually ugly in order to make myself feel better.
Indeed. It’s to be expected. However, I think there’s a real ugly undertone to sitting around and tearing apart attractive female celebrities for the fact that their appearance is not perfect. The same thing happened a couple days ago in a thread about Eva Longoria, and it seemed rather pathetic and mean-spirited then, too. Quite a number of posters leapt upon a couple candid photos of Eva Longoria taken when she didn’t have makeup on to declare that she was actually ugly. Again, where does this bitter and gleeful savaging of someone’s looks come from? Why does it matter so much to so many people what Eva Longoria or Sarah Jessica Parker looks like? Why are they so ready to leap on a couple bad photos of Eva Longoria to decide that she’s obviously secretly terrible-looking without a team of makeup artists and a lighting crew. Even if it were true, so the fuck what if an actress is unattractive? And the fact that it’s not really true just makes it sad. Having to invent some fantasy in which attractive celebrities are actually secretly ugly in order to feel better about yourself is just honestly terribly pathetic.
At any rate, as a feminist, I find it disquieting to watch a group of people dismiss a woman by giving her appearance a negative review. There’s numerous famous women who are much less attractive than Sarah Jessica Parker. Like I said in my first post, what the hell do you people think of Kathy Bates? So what if Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t the most attractive woman on the planet? She’s still better looking than the average woman you’d see on the street; what’s more, it doesn’t make a woman worthless if she’s not incredibly attractive.
Yeah, I think cattily tearing apart a woman’s looks is a mean-spirited thing to do. I don’t like it in real life, I don’t like it much here either.
OK, maybe I leapt too quickly. But I really did think you were painting all participants in this thread with a broad brush.
FTR, I do agree with you, to a certain extent. I don’t think it’s particularly nice, what people and the magazines get into with the criticism of looks. “She’s fat!” “She’s too thin!” “She should do something with that hair!” “She’s obsessed with coloring her hair!” etc etc.
The characters are representative (if somewhat cartoonishly so) of certain types of “single New York gals”. Single people tend to stay single in New York because a) there is a lot for single people to do, b) there are always other people to do and c) people tend to look for a Bigger Better Deal.
Kathy Bates has both talent and skill; she’s an incredible actress.
I agree with you that someone’s worth is not based on their attractiveness. For me, that’s why I don’t consider it that bad to say someone isn’t attractive - I’m not making a statement about their worth as a human being, I’m making a statement about their attractiveness which is not a part of that worth.
Revise that to 50% and then you’re right. I can think of an easy half-dozen friends of mine and co-workers who are considerably better looking than she is facially, and probably 4 of the 6 have equally good figures as well.
I think you’re right in one sense- she is the sort of “everywoman” for today. She comes across happy, confident and sexy, in spite of not being terribly beautiful, and this tends to resonate with a lot of women, I believe. It’s the very ugliness that everyone’s talking about that make her so popular.
If SATC was “a sit-com,” it was one which positively cried out to be taken as realistic and relatable. Maybe to get itself across more vividly, it reinforced a lot of easy stereotypes – about women, men, New York(ers), dating, parenthood, you name it.
I’ll admit a lot of what you get out of this show depends what you bring to it. I saw hardly anybody I could relate to – especially male characters – although I could sometimes sympathize with their emotions.
OK, it’s not propaganda, but it always has at least one foot in the sexual status quo. Even as the women struggle to get out of it, SATC subtly hints at its inevitability.
Also: Anybody notice that Carrie spends much more time writing about sex than having it?
Um, if you only know four women who are better looking for her, then she’s way higher than the fiftieth percentile. Unless you only are acquainted with eight women total.
You are my fuckin’ hero. That was brilliant. And. True.
I’ve worked with S.J. quite a few times. *** I shot perhaps a half-dozen episodes of Sex and the City, and worked on another project with her and her hubby, Matthew Broderick. She’s a complete professional. Upbeat, polite, focused and fun. Not a diva or a bitch. I respected her work ethic on all of the sets where I found her at work.
I find her to be completely unappealing- but what the hell, it’s completely subjective right? She’s clever, and a good comic actress ( her stuff in LA Story left me in tears. That High Colonic scene? Brilliance ).
What’s the appeal? For some, it’s not skin deep, it’s deeper.
Cartooniverse
*** I’m not puttin’ on airs. That is what the woman is referred to on set, just as the late and genteel Peter Jennings was referred to as P.J. in scripts, rundowns and on set and in meetings. **
I should point out that the girls on Sex and the City are only supposed to be “kinda hot”, not supermodel hot. They are supposed to be attractive enough that they can believeably land good looking successful guys every episode, but they still need to feel threatened by supermodels, 20 something eye candy and the like.
That was brilliant. And. True.