Sex And The Suburbs

BY Kate Lansell

Just as a dark dye job and some bad lighting exposed that Sarah Jessica Parker is indeed a transvestite, the opening of the Sex and the City movie has shone a harsh fluorescent on women’s originality. The formula was the same no matter which cinema you went to: Take two parts mid-thigh boot, one part high-waisted skirt, one part cropped fringe, four parts girlfriend, mix liberally with cheap champagne and spread evenly around a crowded cinema showing the Sex and the City movie. Wait for 145 minutes or until a massive queue forms outside the ladies’ toilets and voila, you have a straight-out-of-the-packet, one-size-fits-all girl’s night out.

The movie itself was as two-dimensional as the skyscraper cutouts and giant pretzels that popped up in shop fronts around the city in the pre-opening hype. And yet women across Melbourne, from sophisticated fashionistas through to Supré-wearing bogans, seemed united in their cinema experience. Before it started, the girly chatter was at a brain-numbing pitch. I felt as if my IQ were dropping by sheer proximity to the masses. Women, who had clearly gone to a lot of effort to get dressed up, flounced up and down the aisles, delivering refreshed flutes of pink champagne to their friends.

During the movie, as I echoed Miranda’s mid-coitus slip, “Let’s just get it over with”, the majority of the audience seemed genuinely shocked and thrilled by yet another Carrie Bradshaw meltdown. The shocked gasps at the side shot of flaccid penis would lead you to suspect some people had never seen one in their lives, or least never watched SBS after 10pm. You could imagine a gaggle of older women describing the movie as “deliciously naughty” over a bottle of chardonnay.

Of course the world occupied by the Sex and the City girls represents a holy grail to a lot of women. There are singletons everywhere who need to believe in the ‘big’ love of their life and a ‘happy ending over 40’. And column writers everywhere would love to earn enough to buy the shoes and dresses spilling out of Carrie’s wardrobe. It seems our need to escape the reality of our own Versace voids is high on the agenda for a lot of women. There is no denying that light entertainment can be a perfect remedy for a hectic week.

But are we so starved of a decent girls’ night out that we need one shrink-wrapped, diamond-encrusted and shoved in our faces? Surely there are events of more interest than a fairly flimsy chick flick to bring women of all ages together. If people get really desperate, they could re-enact their own ‘shock dresses of the 80s and 90s’ montage to cheesy music in the privacy of their own homes.

And for those who have been unable to sleep properly since sighting Candice Bergen primped up like a peacock as the editor of Vogue, close your eyes and think of Boston Legal.