Sex and the City

The setting of Sex and the City is not just a place where Carrie Bradshaw and the rest of her girlfriends live in, it is a part of them. They have revolved their lives in it such as that the city is valued more. In Sex and the City, the place "gives meaning"(Barker 403) to the characters, to their setting, and to their emotions. As seen in the clip, an empty room suggests someone dear to Carrie is gone. A falling leaf in the sidewalk of New York symbolizes a new season has begun, that changes are going to happen. Even Carrie says "Seasons change, and so do cities. People come in to your life and people go. But it is comforting to know that the ones you love are always in your heart".




The setting hugely affects the scenes or the actions of the characters. Carrie's emotions are in sync with the changes in the city. It is given that "the ‘reality’ of the city as a thing or form, they are the result of a cultural act of classification” (403). The scene of Carrie walking down the streets of New York expresses authority or power. Such as NY is seen as a big city, Carrie is seen as an important character or someone who is dominant. Carrie associates herself with the city. She adapts to it and turns it into something of her own. Carrie living in NY represents her own culture, own decisions, own path of life.

Sex and the City: Going Against Tradition

According to Saussure, “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary”(Saussure 79). Signs, in general, usually invoke a deeper connotation. For example, the gym pertains to strength and usually to men, while the kitchen pertains to a more feminine approach. Male are often portrayed to be the stronger or dominant sex, while female are seen as gentle or followers of men.

The Sex and the City, a television series, portrays women as the modern women. Women in this show step up to the level of men and express themselves as independent. Typically, women are seen to be gentle, however, in this television series, the female characters are aggressive and self-indulgent. They please themselves by having their lives carefully planned and sorted out for. Although the characters do not follow the normal roles of women, they still somehow conform to the society’s concept of women: traditional living and loyal service to men. They act as if they live in a “bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels” (Dargis par 7)

The Desperate Housewives, another television series, proves to differ. Instead of having the normal hierarchy of men, the series show how dominant women can be. Women boss around their husbands and/or manipulate them. In the series, the female role is seen as the head of the family, the decision maker, or the financer; roles that are typically portrayed by men. A review of Desperate Housewives states that “Desperate Housewives satirizes women's clichéd, impossible choices: career or family, love or sex, independence or intimacy” (Ravitz par 10). The women in this series go to extremes and act beyond the traditional ideas of romance.
For example, a sign that expresses a greater male versus female argument in the Sex and the City is the kitchen scene. In the kitchen scene, the fiancée of Carrie Bradshaw (one of the lead characters) is cooking. In reality, the word kitchen shows a more feminine approach. Kitchen is a female’s territory. Thus, kitchen equals to woman. However, in Sex and the City, a male character is the one performing a feminine role; an act that would be identified as going against the normal standards of male and female.

The show also portrays women falling for men but in a more complicated scenario. They fall in and out of love and change men as fast as they were changing clothes. But the thing that is most striking is that the women go for the men that they believe are within their standards. They go for men who are successful in life, tremendously handsome, or filthy rich. They tend to “want what others do not have” and are in a constant “competitive and heroic stage of product selection and use” (Baudrillard 409). As in Desperate Housewives, the women become desperate for attention and in need of what others have that they don’t. They compete with each other in a sense that they need to look perfect in the eyes of others and that they have to have better things than the rest. The greed of wanting what others have doesn’t end and the cycle just goes on and on.



The Sex and the City also show women being overly sexual. It happened to all of the characters, one story different from the other. All of them being are being portrayed as showing lust over men. In the norms of society, however, women are usually not seen as being sexually indulgent. Yes, the modern age has definitely turned it somehow true, women being aggressive and sexually active. But in a usual setting, men are usually the ones being shown as aggressive; which results to the dominance of men. In this show, both male and female are capable of holding power and creating pleasure. An example of how in sexuality “pleasure and power do not cancel or turn their back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another” (Foucult 691). The show emphasizes the equality of men and women in a relationship. It shows that not only men can build relationships, women can too. The concept of sexuality, as Foucult states, is a “distribution of points of power, hierarchized and placed opposite to one another; “pursued” pleasures, that is, both sought after and searched out; compartmental sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged” (Foucult 689).



Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The System of Objects." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed.
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 408-19.

Foucult, Michel. “The History of Sexuality” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed.
Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 408-19.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Course in General Linguistics” Literary Theory: An Anthology.
2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 408-19.

Ravitz, Justin. “No Sweats Allowed” Desperate Housewives. PopMatters. 11 October 2004.
13 October 2009 http://www.popmatters.com/tv/reviews/d/desperate-housewives-%202004.shtml .

Dargis, Manohla. “The Girls are Back in Town” Sex and the City. NYTIMES. 30 May 2008.
13 October 2009. http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/movies/30sex.html .

Sex and the City. Dir. Michael Patrick King. Comedy-drama, 6 June 1998.
<http://www.sexandthecitymovie.org/images/images/sex-and-the-city_newposter3.jpg>. img
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnaSg_0mMVY . video clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOJwOdh9sRs. video clip

In Another's Point of View

On Sept. 18, at a Filipino fastfood center inside Seafood City, I decided to conduct my observation. The place had a stretch of three fastfood chains, a bakery, and a remittance center. The fastfood chains were Chowking, Goldilocks, and Grill City. The place had about 20-25 tables, not many were occupied. There was a family eating on a long table, a mother and daughter occupying a table for two on a corner, and a couple (about 50-60 in age) in the middle of the fastfood center. Other people were in lines; ordering food or waiting for their orders to come up. The rest were simply passing by.

The family that I saw earlier was eating. The father was helping the youngest with her food. The mother was talking to her son who looked like in his teen years. The family would engage in a conversation and then would continue doing their own thing after.


The mother-daughter scenario was different. They were eating the same kind of food. The mother was half-way through it, while the daughter was almost done. They were having a conversation and laughing from time to time. The mother would ask questions to her daughter and the daughter would answer. They would keep quiet in various moments and their silence would be broken up by another conversation.



The couple in the middle had plenty of food. They were having their own soup, chicken, rice, dessert, and packs of bread and pastries. The woman would sometimes rest from eating, while the man would continue munching down to the last bite. The woman was talking to the man and the man answered or nodded.



The people in line had things in common. They were pointing out the food or discussing with the people they were with. The cashiers were mostly young women, in their late teen years or early twenties. The customers would come up to the counters and converse with the cashiers. Occasionally they would laugh, but most of the time they were just smiling. As for the people walking by, I noticed a mother holding on to his son. The mother had one hand on her belongings, the other hand on her son.





The stores had mostly women in "front of the house" while the men in the kitchen. The women were the one taking the orders, while the men were the one doing the heavy work at back.

After observing the area, I realized that the environment had a different kind of love in the air. It wasn't a shallow one. Most of the people in the area had love for their family. I can see it through their togetherness and inevitable happiness. These took me back to the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The part wherein Big Daddy and Brick were arguing about what Fatherly love should be about. The interpretation of the whole place itself was like Big Daddy's love from his father. The kind wherein memories were left behind, not material things.

Gramsci's ideology can also be inserted in this social context. Gramsci claims that the bourgeoisie maintains economic control over the proletariats. Just like how the scene with the cashiers in the fastfood was. They were placed there for a certain reason. Cashiers were to take orders from other people; people who would most likely have a higher economic status. There would always be that person higher in status.

As I have observed, the cashiers were mostly women. The men were in the kitchen doing the heavy work. Derrida's theory shows that the signs in our society still equates to men being higher than the women. The signs such as women in the counters show that women are the ones who converse with people, smile, and stay pretty; while the men in the back shows strength and hard work. Not a lot of people may notice this but if we watch closely, we'll see that it is still very common in our society. Men are taken to be strong while women are taken to be gentle, thus, the work placement of people. Also, noting Gramsci's “ideas, meanings and practices which, while they purport to be universal truths, are maps of meaning that sustain powerful social groups”, we are able to see that there are social groupings constructed within the society. There are certain standards given to male and female in which the society ends up being gender specific.