Sex and Fortysomething

I saw Sex and the City Friday night, and this morning I tried to write a review on Movies.com. I couldn’t publish my review, titled “Sex and the City”, because the website said, “We have detected profanity in the [title] field”. I am reviewing a film about sexual liberation on a website that considers the word “sex” profane?

That pretty much sums up my experience with movie: weirdly disconnected. The last time I went to an opening night movie was to see Ishtar in 1987, a film that has become synonymous with “box office flop”. I knew this movie would be no Ishtar, but would it be worth standing in line for an hour just to make sure we weren’t stuck sitting in the front row? Maybe because I was wearing MBT’s, my gut told me that I didn’t really fit in among the Sex and the City aficionados. One passerby saw the husband and wife standing behind me and blurted out, “hey, there’s a dude going to the chick flick!”

[Warning: stop reading if you don’t want to hear about the plot]. I’m sure my expectations were too high, but watching Carrie Bradshaw buy purses that cost more than cars wasn’t my flavor of New York edgy. Carrie snags her dream husband plus a New York society life, and Miranda (played brilliantly by Cynthia Nixon) forgives her husband’s infidelity. Watching these women defy social norms in pursuit of their own fulfillment was the rebellious ecstasy of the Sex and the City brand. But somehow when that feminist resistance is paired with reckless wealth, model-slim bodies and excess leisure time, it begins to feel less self-aware and more self-absorbed. I left the movie wondering, is this what forty-something is about?

I am furious at Sex and the City for making my favorite cocktail the nation’s official girly drink. We fled twenty blocks from the theatre in hopes of ordering a cosmopolitan without looking impossibly cliche. As I munched on crab at our fantastic Indian restaurant I began to wonder if, in fact, this movie did hit on some forty something truths. I thought about my personal trainer, my personal assistant, my personal blog, my treo, my blackberry (yes I have two pda’s), my personal ipod, and, when I can afford her, my personal therapist. Is it all about me? When does personal empowerment turn from rebellion to indulgence?

On my birthday weekend this year I went on a retreat with my two lifelong best friends. They have both been married almost two decades. Somehow I had became the “other” in our group, the lesbian New Yorker dragging her kids to war protests while they bought homes and built community in solid neighborhoods. We spent our weekend snowshoeing in Tahoe, which I soon learned is just walking with flimsy wooden shoes. Somewhere near the top of the mountain, with clean snow ahead of us and only our voices breaking the crystalline quiet of the dense trees, my girlfriend said, “Now that we’re out here I wanted to ask you guys something.” We braced ourselves for something taboo like if we ever watched porn or had filed for bankruptcy. “Are you happy?” she said.

And that’s the thing about forty something. Life begins to add up in unplanned ways. Answering the happiness question honestly, or even thinking to ask it, requires a level of self absorption that is itself taboo. The most profound line in the movie comes from Miranda when she yells at the philandering Steve, “I changed myself for you!” Because isn’t it the molding that we allow that is the most excruciating, whether for reward or for survival? Maybe seeing our molded selves (or a vision of our molded selves on the horizon) is the forty something revelation.

Women live in a world that is out of balance, and no dream wedding (gay or straight, thank you Gov Patterson) is going to fix that. Maybe all the pda’s and assistants are about resistance. Perhaps finding a way to be in control of our lives makes us strong enough to detect the difference between molding and maturing.

The entire experience of Sex and the City exists in an economic fantasyland. So, Carrie Bradshaw and I may both have a personal assistant, but hers is managing invitations to A-list parties and mine is waiting for the Ikea shelves to be delivered. The only nod to social responsibility in the movie occurs when Carrie promotes the old fashioned value of the library.

The Sex and the City movie suffers from melodramatic writing and impossibly high expectations but its undercurrent themes of empowerment, social norms, and aging beauty in the end were worth the long lines. The movie ends with a 50th birthday celebration for the oldest main character, Samantha. After the false starts and sincere efforts at changing in her forties she discovers, once the question is called, that she ended up exactly where she started.