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.
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.
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.)
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/
http://www.hollywoodreporter.