Sex and the KiddiesBy Dawn Eden
Published 6/3/2008 12:07:59 AM
For a few months when I was nine years old, in 1978, my pride and joy was inside a large cardboard box that had originally held a pair of sexy knee-high tan leather boots belonging to my divorced mom. Within was my collection of Charlie's Angels bubblegum cards, separated into rubber-banded sets so I could easily locate duplicates with which to trade, usually in hope of the prized Farrah cards. Farrahs were the rarest because they were discontinued after the first season, when Mrs. Fawcett-Majors departed the show. It wasn't that I was a fan of the TV show; in fact, I hardly ever watched it. What I liked were the images of the show's stars, especially the close-ups that offered their physical stats on the back. My body was beginning to sprout curves, and I hoped against hope that one day I could be beautiful like the Angels, or at least pretty enough to model. One thing holding me back in that department was height. Models, I knew, were tall, and none of the women in my family made it up to five-and-a-half feet. The Cheryl Ladd card gave me encouragement; it said the blue-eyed blonde was just 5-foot-4, my mom's height. I had blue eyes and blonde hair, and my dad used to tell me that after my braces were off I would have a shot at being Miss America.
For a few months when I was nine years old, in 1978, my pride and joy was inside a large cardboard box that had originally held a pair of sexy knee-high tan leather boots belonging to my divorced mom. Within was my collection of Charlie's Angels bubblegum cards, separated into rubber-banded sets so I could easily locate duplicates with which to trade, usually in hope of the prized Farrah cards. Farrahs were the rarest because they were discontinued after the first season, when Mrs. Fawcett-Majors departed the show. It wasn't that I was a fan of the TV show; in fact, I hardly ever watched it. What I liked were the images of the show's stars, especially the close-ups that offered their physical stats on the back. My body was beginning to sprout curves, and I hoped against hope that one day I could be beautiful like the Angels, or at least pretty enough to model. One thing holding me back in that department was height. Models, I knew, were tall, and none of the women in my family made it up to five-and-a-half feet. The Cheryl Ladd card gave me encouragement; it said the blue-eyed blonde was just 5-foot-4, my mom's height. I had blue eyes and blonde hair, and my dad used to tell me that after my braces were off I would have a shot at being Miss America.
TODAY'S YOUNG GIRLS have their own dreamgirls -- the ladies of Sex and the City. Glamorous protagonist Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is just 5-foot-4, though her character's signature Manolo heels seem to raise her into the stratosphere.Although SATC in its original HBO incarnation abounded in profanity and exposed flesh, for the past four years a "cleaned-up" version has aired in syndication, gaining an audience of girls too young to legally drink its protagonists' beloved Cosmopolitans.
The fact that Parker and her co-stars are old enough to be their mothers doesn't quell teens' enthusiasm for the show. If anything, it seems to give the Sex characters' actions an imprimatur, fulfilling the sort of elder-stateswoman role that Betty Friedan fulfilled for baby-boom feminists. "It's my favorite show! I love it," gushes 15-year-old Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus in this month's Vanity Fair -- the same issue in which she caused an uproar with her backless photo session. Her SATC obsession helps explain why she was "embarrassed" at the reaction to a shoot she had thought was "artistic." After all, Samantha Jones, the show's most "sexually liberated" character, played by Kim Cattrall, posed nude, and if glamorous, self-assured Samantha could do it, why couldn't she at least show some skin?As her love of SATC made headlines, Cyrus's flacks went into damage-control mode, claiming she was referring to the syndicated version. "The show she watches is completely sanitized," a source told People.WELL, YES AND NO. The syndicated show is indeed missing many of the original's profanities and its X-rated sex talk. But no one would confuse it with Anne of Green Gables.
While the four-letter words are gone, the acts for which they stand remain, replaced with dubbed "clean" dialogue. The gals' "f---" buddies become "sex buddies." Samantha's war cry, "You gotta f--- me" is replaced with the so-much-better "You gotta bang me." When the syndicated episodes debuted, Kristin Davis, who plays Charlotte, observed, "[Watching the new version], I was sitting there trying to figure out what they left out!"One of the most talked-about scenes in the SATC film that opened last Friday is a thinly veiled satire on how the TV show has attained an under-18 audience without losing its X-rated themes. The four female stars are sitting around the brunch table at their favorite restaurant, where they usually dish salacious bedroom stories, only now Charlotte's 3-year-old daughter is present as well, working on a coloring book.When Miranda brings up their favorite topic, Charlotte urges her to watch her language around the child. Carrie saves the day by suggesting they substitute the word "coloring" for "sex."
Read Dawn Edens full article at The American Spectator (here)
Dawn Edens blog is entitled The Dawn Patrol
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