Page 48 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

32 Gender and Sexuality

for families, and competition for scarce resources imposed on them an
ideal of toughness as a mechanism for assuring survival in a harsh eco-
nomic landscape. Concomitantly, the chick - lit phenomenon arguably
appealed to young women who belonged to a generation unleashed for the

first time in human history from traditional strictures on women. More

independent sexually and self - sufficient economically than their mothers
or ancestors, they faced a more precarious and risky social universe in
which the quest for a mate involved new forms of cultural negotiation and
placed one in contact with a wider range of possible partners. In the older
world of masculine toughness and female wile, roles were more staged and
predictable. In the new world of post - feminist life, scripts often had to be
written on the run, and the behavior of others was as a consequence less
predictable. To an extent, Bridget Jones ’ life is as adventurous, as much a
matter of questing to get the right answer to a life puzzle, as the life of Sam
Spade or the Continental Op.
Not all cultural narratives are as benign as the Bridget Jones story. And
not all women live in social universes characterized by such freedom of
action or such choices as Bridget faces. In Africa, women living within
traditional gender cultures are more likely to be victimized by AIDS because
a culture of safe sex does not exist. You are very unlikely in your lives to
see stories dealing with such issues. You might see a movie called Quartier
Mozart from Cameroon that depicts a young woman ’ s attempt to deal with
the male culture of cavalier sexuality, but it is unlikely. Moreover, for every
cute White Bridget in America, there are scores of young African American
women whose lives are limited by economic pressures. These life stories
do not make for popular cultural fare; they are snagged by the fi lters that
assure that the stories we consume most commonly are pleasurable rather
than disturbing. Works of literature can deal with such harsh realities
because they do not require enormous amounts of money to produce and
can therefore get by with less income from a smaller consumer base. Film
and television, however, are expensive cultural products, so they must
appeal broadly to a large population to guarantee a return on investment.
They cannot risk creating pain rather than pleasure. A comparison of a
successful television show about gender with a recent novel bears out this
point.
Sex and the City was a popular television show in the US that ran from

1998 to 2004 on Home Box Office (HBO). That venue was less dependent
on commercials for financing and so was less constrained by the need to