Single and Fabulous Question Mark
"Sex and the twin cities!" screams a special on the Rock 106. "It's the hottest new ladies' night in town! From 5:00 PM 'til 9:00 PM in the bar and out on the patio, ladies get all premium martinis for just $3.99! Don’t worry guys! You get to be Mr. Big!"
Listening as we drive through Louisiana feels like going back in time, both because of the unfamiliar setting and because of the allusion to Sex and the City.
Sex and the City changed a generation. Not because it opened the eyes of women and helped them embrace their sexuality but because, in ending with all four protagonists coupled up, the show confirmed what all the so-called Single and Fabulous! women of the late 90s and early 00s had feared all along: that the exclamation point after Single and Fabulous is a cruel question mark.
It caused an incredible backlash: from sitcoms like Desperate Housewives and Army Wives, where the emphasis is on married women and mothers, to reality fests like Bridezillas and The Real Housewives of Orange County, we can’t seem to get enough of the kind of women we spent over half a decade mocking (cue Miranda: "I’m telling you, married people are the enemy").
But the cultural shift is not just happening inside out TVs--it's outside the window, too. Lizzy Ratner writes in The New York Observer: "recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack--call them the New Victorians--appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20's in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel's 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn't make sense to them."
Arts eschewed by recent generations such as cooking, gardening, home decoration and bathroom renovation have made a full-force comeback. Martha Stewart made a grave error, but the most important thing is that she makes great gravy.
"Such concerns tend to occupy a good plot of space in the New Victorian mind," writes Ratner, "crowding out more troublesome notions like 'Why are we in Iraq?' or even 'Why I am attracted to my best friend’s husband?' (The adultery-filled pages of John Updike’s best novels now seem like dispatches from a foreign land. One need only mention the word 'affair' in the chatroom pages of Urbanbaby.com to get quickly excoriated as a 'home wrecker'; the New Victorian morality is not one that permits nuance or discretion.) Single people are to be pitied--that is, if their existence is even acknowledged."
This return is part of something bigger, a sort of massive hangover after a decade of Sex and the City antics. The martinis, shoes and game of musical beds of Single and Fabulous! was a momentary fix to the powerful Reality Bites-induced existential crisis of the early 90s. It gave us a sense of purpose.
The names of the boys and bars and even fave drinks and designers change. But the storyline is the same. Suddenly, Single and Fabulous! starts to fall apart. You see the wrinkles under the flawless makeup and the sagging, less flexible skin. "Single and Fabulous!" you scream at the mirror, spilling a little vodka on the cheap dresser you bought off eBay a few years ago after you got tired of putting your make-up on top of cardboard boxes. It's so hard being a working woman in a not-so-fabulous job and having a closet full of fabulous shoes and going out every night! Single and Fabulous!
Single and fabulous?
"I don't think anyone drifts for the sake of drifting anymore," says Anya Kamenetz, 26, the Yale-educated author of Generation Debt. "There's much more of a purposeful zigzagging. It's very much like, 'I'm going to check off this list of things.' And it might be the same things that my older brother and sister did when they were out of college, but they did it with this aimlessness and relaxation, while we do it with a sense of the life course and 'what are you going to accomplish?'"
What, indeed, I couldn't help but wonder.
"They say nothing lasts forever," comes Carrie’s answer from the trailer for Sex and the City: The Movie. "Dreams change, trends come and go…" and with all the shots of her in Mr. Big's arms and one half of the cast tending to toddlers, it looks like Single and Famous! is out like last season's Louboutins.
Tags:
love, marriage, relationships