Can Girls Escape Sex and the City's Shadow?



Girls: Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet

Fourteen years ago, a show about the sex lives of four women in New York City premiered on HBO. Though many lavished it with praise, it also came under fire for being too white, being too privileged, and being secretly anti-feminist. Three weeks ago, another show about the sex lives of four women in New York City premiered on HBO. Though many lavished it with praise, it also came under fire for being too white, being too privileged, and being secretly anti-feminist. The first show was, of course, Sex and the City. The second, Girls. But wait--I thought Girls is supposed to be an anti-Sex and the City: gritty, not glamorous; perspirational, not aspirational.

If Girls is supposed to transcend Sex and the City, why are we talking about it in the same way?

I have a couple theories about this, neither of which bodes well for the future of women on TV.

First, maybe Girls is fundamentally not that different from Sex and the City. The four women here suspiciously resemble their older counterparts. Hannah, the main protagonist is--like Carrie--a writer of essays based on her life, often a mess who relies on her friends (asking Marnie to make her an STD test appointment), and self-obsessed ("I may be the voice of my generation"). Marnie, like Miranda, is the hypercompentent best friend with a boyfriend who loves too much. Jessa--the only blonde--is promiscuous in a Samantha-like way. She has HPV and isn't afraid to admit it ("All adventurous women do.") Finally, Shoshanna is an even more naive version of Charlotte, admitting she's a virgin in the second episode. These similarities worry me. Can women only be portrayed as either lost and confused, scoldingly bitchy, slutty, or innocent?

The show is also similar in its ambition to SATC. It tries to explore female agency by showing women having sex. Where Sex and the City tried to show women as powerful exercisers of their right to sleep with whomever they want, Girls shows how female agency has resulted in a hook up culture. Both shows must linger on the sex scenes to get its point across.  No one really had as much guilt-less sex as Samantha, and no one really has as much awkward sex as Hannah (at least not with one partner), but that's not the point. But it does make me wonder: is examining their sex lives the only way we can say anything about women?

Second--even if Girls is really doing something different from its predecessor--maybe the state of the world hasn't changed much. The objections today to Girls echoes the objections critics had to Sex and the City because society feels the same way about women on TV the same way then as it does now. Some of this is good because it shows that critics had high expectations from Dunham. You don't see the same scrutiny of 2 Broke Girls. Because of the dearth of women on TV, people project all their hopes onto a female-led show. Most of the critiques are rather PC, claiming that the show completely white washes Brooklyn. These are fair criticisms, but they also illustrate the problem that audiences are more willing to critique shows with women simply because there are so few of them. There was never any rage over Entourage's all-white ensemble because there are enough shows by men out there featuring men of color (mostly The Wire).

More worrisome are the critiques from feminist circles. In 1999, Wendy Shalit, a conservative feminist, wrote that Sex and the City is "a lament for all things of inestimable value that the sexual revolution has wrecked, in this city and beyond." Her critique was simple: for a show about sexual freedom, the women of Sex and the City spent an awful lot of time "complaining about insensitive men." Maybe women couldn't really have it all because we were still hardwired to want commitment. Now, thirteen years later, some things have changed for women. There are more women breadwinners, for instance. But with these great changes comes a similar anxiety. This time Katie Roiphe, writing in Newsweek, speculated that Girls is part of a trend of women seeking "sexual submission" in culture. "It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace," Roiphe writes. In other words, Maybe women can't really have it all because we are hardwired to be dominated.

Though many people disagree with Shalit and Roiphe, this kind of conversation still illustrative of how people think about culture made by women. I'm glad that there is a show written, directed, and starring a very talented women of my generation, but it may take more time before we can just critique such a show strictly for its art without the political baggage attached.