With my newly-found time off (aka winter break) I find myself often spending more money than I should so instead, I resorted to a much cheaper and more time-consuming hobby of binge-watching a new show. This week, I started "Sex and The City" for the first time in my entire life. Up until this point, I had never even seen a single episode. I'm currently about halfway into the first season, and while this show is charming enough to be considered binge-worthy by me, I find myself reflecting upon the topic of feminism. It is common knowledge that this show has gone down in feminist history because of its original content, which was considered groundbreaking when the show first released twenty years ago.
While this show is dated in terms of some of the content, I consider it nonetheless. In our generation, I am seeing the growth of people who identify as feminists and barriers that are under attempt to be changed to almost an exponential level. Especially now with trans-gendered women and inter-sectional feminism being trending topics.
The pilot episode's plot is about Carrie Bradshaw, a journalist, writing an article answering the question "Could a woman have sex like a man could?" I do not imagine that kind of article being featured in a newspaper today, even though this concept at the time was considered revolutionary. If anything, this show just made me really consider how far we've come as a society when it comes to slut-shaming, or simply expressing sexuality as a whole - in a more equal form of body autonomy and gender equality.
While there is still room for improvement, as I said, I am unsure that there is much of a market left for an article of that nature nowadays because this mindset is already commonly considered to be progressive - at least in most western societies. We're also seeing this message in a greater amount of media representation, especially with movies like "Think Like a Man." Not to mention, the attitudes toward dating nowadays has created an environment where it's become more socially acceptable to become physically active in a newer stage of a relationship, and entire apps are on the market to make more physically-based relationships possible. In fact, I would love to read an article where Carrie Bradshaw would outline her views on Tinder.
