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Friday, May 30, 2008
Beijing prostitutes--one, Sex in the City characters--zero
Last night I flipped back and forth on television between two things. One, a CBC documentary on the rise of prostitution in Communist China. It’s something Communist nations typically have a stranglehold over—being totalitarian and all--but the Communist regime there is turning a blind eye because of the rising numbers of single men. CBC did not mention this is because of sex selection abortion and the one-child policy.
The program went on to say that these young girls are lured from the rural countryside into the cities, and they know nothing about “safe sex.”
The other program I watched was a “documentary” on how Sex in the City came to be a program. Lots of men talking about how they realized that there had never been a show about women’s attitudes toward sex. And wouldn’t that be so interesting. To have men decide what women’s attitudes on sex are. And how avant-garde it all was, and how they weren’t even sure if they could call it Sex in the City…And could they convince Kim Cattrall? The tension was enormous, as you can imagine.
And I was left thinking two things. One, the women on Sex in the City don’t know anything about safe sex either. But still, the girls in China are one up on them. For at least they are getting paid. The characters in Sex in the City give it all up, over and over—sex, dignity, you name it—for free. Very avant-garde, indeed.
(cross-posted to ProWomanProLife)
Posted by Andrea Mrozek on May 30, 2008 in Film | Permalink
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Comments
"Lots of men talking about how they realized that there had never been a show about women’s attitudes toward sex"
And these were gay men, to boot.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but what do they know about straight women's attitudes toward sex? That's why many dismissed the show as really a show about gay men portrayed by women.
Posted by: Joan Tintor | 2008-05-30 11:13:56 AM
"...a show about gay men portrayed by women."
Brilliant!
Posted by: Matthew Johnston | 2008-05-30 11:50:31 AM
I love a good juxtaposition!
Posted by: Cyril Doll | 2008-05-30 1:14:51 PM
Shouldn't that be gay Jewish men? Or is Star not gay? Jews have been disproportionately involved in sexual "liberation", since at least the Weimar Republic.
Magnus Hirschfeld, a 'sexologist' and inventor of the word "racist" was also a strong proponent of gay rights.
Sam Francis wrote:
"Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was a German-Jewish medical scientist whose major work was in the field of what came to be known as "sexology" – the scientific study of sex. Like Havelock Ellis in England and Alfred Kinsey in the United States, Hirschfeld was not only among the first to collect systematic information about sexuality but also was an apostle of sexual "liberation." His major work was a study of homosexuality, but he also published many other books, monographs, and articles dealing with sex. He wrote a five-volume treatise on "sexology" as well as some 150 other works and helped write and produce five films on the subject.
It is fair to say that his works were intended to send a message – that traditional Christian and bourgeois sexual morality was repressive, irrational, and hypocritical, and that emancipation would be a major step forward. His admiring translators, Eden and Cedar Paul, in their introduction to 'Racism', write of his "unwearying championship of the cause of persons who, because their sexual hormonic functioning is of an unusual type, are persecuted by their more fortunate fellow-mortals." Long before the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, Magnus Hirschfeld was crusading for the "normalization" of homosexuality and other abnormal sexual behavior."
At the cost of Christian European 'bourgeois' morality, of course.
Posted by: DJ | 2008-05-30 1:23:08 PM
Taking a man to this movie is akin to a man taking a woman to a strip-joint.
The whole thing is irrelevant.
Posted by: gerry | 2008-05-30 3:32:13 PM
"But still, the girls in China are one up on them. For at least they are getting paid. The characters in Sex in the City give it all up, over and over—sex, dignity, you name it—for free."
You can make a lot of legitimate criticisms of the female characters in Sex in the City (and Gilmore Girls, and Desperate Housewives, and...). But to suggest that they shouldn't be "giving sex up for free" isn't one of them. This has to be the most retrograde and sexist attitude ever expressed on this blog -- to think that women should always be paid in some fashion for sex. The "all women are whores" stereotype went out of style among thinking people some centuries ago.
Posted by: Grant Brown | 2008-06-02 11:50:29 AM
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