There's something off about the Sex and the City 2 posters … Namely, everything. Why the over-airbrushed images are the saddest thing to happen to the SATC franchise.

No matter how gorgeous Sarah Jessica Parker looks in this poster:

hardly any men will willingly see Sex and the City 2.

It’s no secret that the vast majority of people who started buying tickets to SATC2 six weeks ago are not part of the penis-possessing population. Most of the guys in line for the movie will have been dragged there by girlfriends and wives, grateful for a brief glimpse of this chick  and optimistic that the grand gesture of sitting through the film will ensure sex that night.

So why, in this poster, is Sarah Jessica Parker airbrushed beyond recognition? Men won’t want to see it no matter how hot she looks, and the women buying tickets to see her movie want to see her exactly as she is, because they want to be reminded that they, too, are sexually desirable exactly as they are. That fact didn’t stop the release of this poster, featuring all four lead actresses looking like, well, this: 

For a breakdown of all the nips, tucks and photoshop-WTFs that went into this work of art, check out Jezebel’s annotated version here.  They also footnoted the Photoshop as displayed on this Entertainment Weekly cover  and Harper’s Bazaar in Japan. 

Airbrushing and Photoshop certainly aren't new, and its use in moderation wouldn't be anything to talk about. But in this case, the promotional materials directly contradict the message of the movie: that sex appeal has no expiration date. The whole point of the SATC franchise is that your sexuality is based on any number of things – your confidence, your passion, your insatiable libido – but not your age. Why attempt the impossible, with all due respect to the still considerably smoking Kim Cattrall, and try to make these women look like girls?

Here, Kim Cattrall standing next to an actual teenager. See the difference? Um, yeah, so can everyone else. 

They’re not supposed to be girls. They’re supposed to be women. If the crew behind the SATC2 posters really wanted to win over the female masses, they’d stop trying to make SJP and the gang look like potential girlfriends for Justin Bieber.

You can blame Sex and the City for a lot of things: an increase in materialism, television’s abuse of voiceovers, the promotion of causal sex. This guy even thinks SATC inspires terrorism. (Guess we can cancel that war in Afghanistan.)

If you don’t think this foursome is responsible for evil, though, you can get at the premise upon which this franchise was based in the first place: female empowerment. Okay, I admit that in 1998 - when the show first aired – I was all of ten years old and my idea of a “big question” was if we’d get Capri Sun and orange slices during halftime at my soccer games. But I’m pretty sure that in pre-SATC America, the big questions actual adults were asking concerned the changing roles of women. Liberated by the Pill and present in the workforce in unprecedented numbers, women had both the freedom and the finances to socialize exactly like men. Of course, the problem with having freedom – sexual or otherwise – is figuring out what the hell to do with it. Cue that little piano intro, bring on that bus through a puddle of water, and enter the splashed and tutu-ed Carrie Bradshaw who would spend the next six years pondering that exact conundrum in voiceovers beginning with, “I just had to wonder…”  At its height, SATC drew up to 7.3 million viewers an episode; clearly we were wondering, too.

Sex and the City is no The Feminine Mystique, but the show broke a lot of boundaries. The uncensored conversations about sex (thanks, HBO!), the depiction of women supporting instead of hating each other, the key female characters defined as successful professionals in fields as competitive as law and PR rather than as the girlfriends or wives of male leads—the power of the show was in the power of these women. The movies – and, by extension, the movie’s advertising - should hold on to that legacy. What would the snarky Carrie of 1999 have said about these images? I have a feeling she would have called bullshit on this whole ad campaign.

SATC contended that sexual promiscuity is not a crime punishable by bad reputation and a scarlet letter but something that smart, accomplished, independent women could engage in without guilt or shame. Also, that a forty-year-old woman could be sexier than a girl half her age. It was (as Carrie would have it, pun intended) a f***ing awesome thesis for a television show. It’s too bad the movie posters don’t express that same belief, or they’d be f***ing awesome, too.

Sources:

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,627510,00.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3iffccd69245ce8f752513d639caae7cf9