Anti-Climacus

LINK: Very interesting and thoughtful post by Sara Butler on Sex and the City and feminism. A couple of thoughts:

1. I always took the message of the show not to be "it's liberating to be a slut," but rather, "what your sex life is like has nothing to do with what you're like." Obviously, the second one is far too facile to be useful--whether or not you're promiscuous is going to have a lot to do with what sort of person you are. But, then again, if you look at the four main characters, the amount of sex they have isn't really an integral part of who they were conceived to be (with the exception of Samantha); e.g., my informal survey over winter break of the dvds I owned confirmed my theory that Charlotte (the "nice" one) was second only to Samantha in number of men, ahem, involved with. But you tend not to think of that when you think of Charlotte--or you don't think of it first, which is sort of the point.

2. Feminism always seemed to me (when explained to me by my mother and sister) to be one of those things that's a really simple idea (my formulation would be something like "men and women are more alike than not alike, and so should be treated more the same and less as though they're two separate species") that, due to it's basic simplicity, has far too many entailments for it to be adopted on its own ('liberalism' strikes me as another example). So perhaps the difference in definitions comes from the different more basic sets of beliefs of the groups involved, rather than a fight over what 'feminism,' as such, is. Maybe this is obvious, but it did strike me as a thought.