Leftists need better fairy tales. Consider, for example, a recent New York Times piece in which Jennifer Weiner lamented her disappointment in the fairy-tale deficiencies of the Sex and the City reboot or sequel series And Just Like That…
I would normally neither care nor comment because I haven’t watched either, except that Weiner and her editors at the flagship of upmarket leftist opinion regard the shows as freighted with cultural meaning. They even titled the article: “In ‘And Just Like That…’ a Craven Era Took Its Revenge on Youth and Hope and Fun.”
Really? Screens are full of disappointing follow-ups, from the Star Wars prequels and sequels to Alien 3 to Stranger Things Season 3 and so on (“third time’s the charm” rarely applies to film and television franchises). Weiner should have reminded herself that it’s just a show and that she should really just relax.
But to her, Sex and the City wasn’t just a show, Rather, it was
a brand-new kind of fairy tale, a glittering fantasy of single-lady life in New York City. The year was 1998. Bill Clinton was president. Donald Trump was a New York City tabloid fixture. Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. Into this brave new world strode “Sex and the City,” the story of a quartet of glamorous New York City women who worked and dated, vacationed and shopped, went clubbing and dancing and enjoyed fulfilling casual sex — just like men!
For Weiner, Sex and the City presented a vision for how life should be — an ideal of self-actualization centered on, well, the self, which seeks fulfillment though accomplishments, accoutrements, experiences, and orgasms. Such a self is, of course, essentially unencumbered and unobligated, free to hop in an out of beds and relationships whenever it chooses. This seemed, to Weiner and apparently to many other viewers, to be a freedom worth having and an ideal to aspire to.
In contrast to the old series, Weiner found the sequel was “overblown and dispiriting. It felt less like a romp than a slog. It’s not an overtly political show, but it is a reflection of a very different era, when retrenchment was underway. Many of those thrilling possibilities now feel impossible.” Of course, perhaps such possibilities were always impossible. But Weiner prefers to pin the blame on “our current pendulum swing to the right.”
She whines that the new show seems “like an apology” for its predecessor. “Did we tell you that women could be happy, even if they were single; that it was OK to chase success instead of men? Our bad!” If that was what she took from the original show, then yes, it was bad.
It is, of course, possible for single women to be happy, but the problem is that the chasing Weiner extolls, whether of success or men, is itself a recipe for unhappiness. It arises from a restlessness that is always seeking a new thrill rather than a deepening of love.
We are meant to be fulfilled through relationships of love. Indeed, these commitments are the foundation of true fulfillment, which is established through love for God and one’s neighbor. It is in this framework that other blessings, from career successes to treasured possessions, find their rightful place and significance, which is at the periphery, rather than the center, of our hearts’ desires.
To believe that we can be satisfied by seeking shoes and sex and career achievements is a foolish fantasy. In the real world, it isn’t glamorous. Rather, this sort of thinking hurts people.
But the illusions of glamor can be hard to shake off, as is illustrated by Weiner bringing up Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, whose “message was that women didn’t have to stay in unfulfilling marriages. That bigger, richer lives beckoned. That message sold more than 20 million copies and made Ms. Jong a celebrated figure.” Weiner approves.
But, she notes, Jong’s daughter has now published a memoir that portrays her mother “as a narcissist, a drunk, a disinterested parent who was either mining Molly’s life for material or ditching her to pursue her own adventures.” Weiner argues that this book joins the Sex and the City reboot as “a generational rebuke to the women who prioritized careers and sex and fame and fortune over family…For those of us who loved the originals, the rise of the reboots feels chilling, especially since it could be decades before the next pendulum swing.”
Awesome. Rebuking those who pursue “careers and sex and fame and fortune over family” is good, actually. Yes, that applies to men as well as women. But Weiner’s version of feminism sees living like a bad man as the key to empowering women to live the good life. If this is the meaning of Sex and the City, then it is indeed a fairy tale of sorts, but an inverted one, in which the selfish win the day and the wicked witch was right.
The enduring appeal of fairy tales is not just due to their fantastical elements—dragons, enchanted sleeping princesses, fairy godmothers—or the wish-fulfillment of happily-ever-after, but their encapsulation of truths about man and morality. Indeed, beneath the fluff, fairy tales are often brutally realistic about the world.
This is why so many modern efforts to write (or rewrite) fairy tales fall flat: they are being written by those with a poor grasp of reality. And a show in which “the women who prioritized careers and sex and fame and fortune over family” live happily ever after was a poor sort of fairy tale — it just wasn’t believable.
