Illiam McCade, the husband of our regular commentator Fiona, is a full-time father and homemaker.
WHEN the Spice Girls arrived on the scene more than a decade ago, they brought with them their own brand of feminism: Girl Power. This involved using female sexuality and assertiveness to highlight issues around gender as a social construct and as a
means by which half the world's population is defined, controlled and subjugated.
The Spice Girls phenomenon also forced men to tackle a profoundly difficult question: "Which one would you sleep with?"
At first, it seemed like Sex and the City was pretty much the same idea, and that male interest in it would be limited to the same "which one…?" question. However, I soon realised that the programme might actually have some cultural significance, mainly because the discriminating Mrs McCade watched it regularly. She wasn't the target demographic for the Spice Girls, but she fitted the bill perfectly for Sex and the City… and so, apparently, do most women in some way or another.
Realising that I may learn something about my wife and women in general, I started watching it too.
The first things that struck me were: that women instinctively reject perfectly nice men; that they have a far more satisfying relationship with shoes than with men; and that these two themes are interdependent. In Sex and the City, women mainly buy shoes when they are unhappy with a relationship.
At first, this was a worrying revelation, as Mrs McCade owns more than 30 pairs. Thankfully, it soon became clear that, relative to Carrie Bradshaw, my wife lives in shoe poverty.
The next thing that struck me was that although these women are supposed to be attractive and aspirational, they actually come across as being whiny, or self-obsessed, or unreasonably demanding – or, in the case of Carrie Bradshaw, all three.
For New York's favourite columnist, sex in the city always seems to be a prelude to one of two courses of action: if she's enjoyed the encounter, she'll light up a fag, find some reason to dump the guy, then complain to her friends. If she hasn't enjoyed it, she'll dump him, buy a new pair of shoes, mention it in her column, then complain to her friends. Somehow, this makes her an icon for modern femininity.
I am pleased to say that I've never met, or had a relationship with, anyone quite as loopy as Carrie, as glacial as Miranda or as voracious as Samantha. And so I concluded that the Sex and the City gals don't represent actual women, in which case they must simply be fictional devices for conveying a deeper, more meaningful message. To understand why women like Sex and the City, I needed to look beyond the characters.
Eventually, though, I gave up trying to understand it. Like real women, Sex and the City was obviously just too complex, layered and subtle for a mere man to divine its true meaning. So I asked the wife what on Earth it was about the programme that really spoke to her.
"I just like looking at the clothes," she said.
The full article contains 532 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
