back in america. its designed for fucking idiots. you would have to be a moron to watch it. talk about objectification of women....

Hahaha. Seattle's inner-city athiest-partyhead pop rag! Before the internet this was where all the musicians and hos advertised faithfully, week after week.

The Stranger - I feel like you've memorialized my hometown newsweekly (or something like that!)

Ladypoverty

A friend explained to me yesterday that Sex and the City is Die Hard for women. I think this is the best description I have heard.

(from a reply in the comments):

I've never consciously thought of S&TC as satire; I don't think that's how the show was written. It has some satirical elements. I think of it as a liberal fantasy cocoon, from the perspective of women. Everything that being a modern successful woman is supposed to entail, for women at the pinnacle of success.

...

Very interesting that liberals are having the reaction they are considering that they created the show in their own image. Guess they don't like what they see anymore.

"Sex and the City 2's" stunning Muslim clichés

Salon.com, By Wajahat Ali, May 26

I'm a heterosexual, Muslim dude who until recently thought pleated khakis and loafers were "hip" and mistook Bergdorf Goodman for an expensive Swiss chocolate. So it is not surprising that 40 minutes into "Sex and the City 2," a 150-minute cotton candy fantasy accessorized with materialism and fashion porn, I was comatose with boredom.

But I was defibrillated by the film's detour into Abu Dhabi (really Morocco and studio sets) and what can only be described as an Orientalist's wet dream. After discovering they will visit the Middle East, the ladies whip out hall-of-fame Ali Baba clichés: References to "magic carpet" (a double entendre, naturally), Scheherazade and Jasmine from "Aladdin" come in rapid succession. Upon hearing a stewardess give routine flight instructions in Arabic, Samantha behaves like a wild-eyed child hearing a foreign language for the first time. "I wonder what she’s saying. It sounds so exotic!"

Michael Patrick King's exquisitely tone-deaf movie is cinematic Viagra for Western cultural imperialists who still ignorantly and inaccurately paint the entire Middle East (and Iran) as a Shangri La in desperate need of liberation from ignorant, backward natives. Historian Bernard Lewis, the 93-year-old Hall of Fame Orientalist and author of such nuanced gems as "The Arabs in History" and "Islam and the West," would probably die of priapism if he saw this movie. It's like the cinematic progeny of "Not Without My Daughter" and "Arabian Nights" with a makeover by Valentino. Forget the oppressed women of Abu Dhabi. Let's buy more bling for the burqa!

what you call the best take down of Sex in the City 2, I call a pretty nasty and vicious review for the same reasons cited by this commenter.

While you have a very vivid way with words and the movie does sound terrible for so many reasons, I fail to see how you're standing up against sexism by calling Samantha a prostitute because she's a woman who enjoys sex and by picking on Carrie's physical appearance. Oh, and by perpetuating gender stereotyping in your description (and dismission) of Cynthia Nixon's partner.

I'm sure it's all very culturally insensitive and handled badly, but suggesting that Samantha is wrong to rebel against sexism in the guise of traditional mores only helps that sexism to continue. And I've read memoirs by women in Muslim countries, which say that women do wear designer clothes under their more "modest" coverings. That's why designers make so much money in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

Here's another comment that points out a double standard.

I'm saying that the guise of hating this movie under the veil of feminism is in my opinion very anti-feminist. A well-drawn character like Carrie can have flaws like materialism and being a self-obsessed. Male characters, such as Indiana Jones or Sam from Transformers, rarely seem to be criticized for similar flaws. Whereas a movie like 007 is the prototypical alpha-male extreme of having fast cars and lots of women and tons of really awesome guns, SATC is the polar opposite where the women really like shoes and clothes and jewelry to a heightened extent. 007 rarely gets criticized, at least not with the hate and vitriol that seems to be reserved only for SATC, for this extremism. The clothes and accessories are just that, accessories, to a story about women who date, have sex, have kids, have jobs, and lives. Becoming mired in the gloss of the film seems to be preventing people, including the above critic, from reviewing it fairly.

I have never watched one episode of Sex in the city neither have I seen any of the films and don't intend to. Hollywood films do nothing to bring men and women closer together - they just reinforce Gender Apartheid.

_{Tolerating prostitution is tolerating abuse and torture of women and children.}