Page 50 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

34 Gender and Sexuality

reproduction, SATC reminds us that the physical machinery of sex is in
fact inseparable from reproduction and from the cultural institutions
such as marriage and family that humans have built up around that
natural fact.

SATC ’ s commitment to the dominant model of heterosexual marriage

for the sake of family - formation is not unqualified, however. One character
decides in the movie version to do without her boyfriend because she
prefers life on her own terms, and in the episode entitled “ They Shoot
Single People Don ’ t They? ” the girls decide it is better to live alone
than with the wrong mate. Hedging all of the series ’ exploration of new
era single women ’ s lives is the obdurate economic reality of male wealth
and comparable female poverty. Men largely control the economic
world and possess the power that goes with it, and in the New York
metropolitan area, the setting for the series, single women outnumber
single men by 770,000, turning the city into a male sexual shopping
mall. The series and the movie bump up against those realities occasionally,
as when Big in the movie buys Carrie an apartment that probably
cost millions of dollars. However much the show challenges traditional
notions regarding women and sexuality, it accepts and even endorses
that basic gender power relation. In SATC , men rule and young women
drool, as the Middle School rhyme goes. And it is difficult to locate the line

where the natural and the cultural ingredients of that reality separate – if
they do at all.
Novels can go much deeper than a popular television show, even a
supposedly less commercial one, in exploring issues related to gender
and sexuality. A case in point is Natsuo Kirino ’ s novel Real World (2008),
which concerns Japanese high school girls who become involved with a
boy named Worm who has murdered his mother. One of them helps
him, and they both die in a car crash as the police pursue them. Plot
aside, the novel really concerns gender identity and how boys and girls
both are conditioned and respond inventively to their conditioning
by adopting various roles or performing different, almost theatrical,
gender parts in their engagement with others. One of the girls is lesbian,
dresses like a tomboy, and speaks in a low voice to imitate a man.
Another is an ultra - feminine Barbie Girl, who dyes her hair blonde,

modifies her body by going to tanning salons to turn her skin light
brown, and uses glue in her eyelashes so that they permanently curl up.
She does this in order to be “ totally accepted. ” Her extreme role forms a
continuity with the more “ normal ” roles that the other girls perform that