Sex And The Shitty

Against my better judgement, I agreed to accompany my girlfriend to the cinema to watch Sex And The City 2 this week, and boy was it FANTASTIC! I’m kidding, it was shit. Utter shit. I realise that I am not exactly the target audience, but other reviewers seem to agree with me and thus, my feelings are not entirely without support. After sitting through two and a half hours of inane, shrill ‘dialogue’ watching a woman who looks like a foot and her annoying friends discuss their female, middle-aged problems, obsessing over huge amounts of designer tat, I was just about ready lie down for a while in a nice, quiet coma.  In fact, even my girlfriend thought it was ‘a bit crap’, but mainly because setting the film in Abu Dhabi lost a lot of the energy and cosmopolitanism the series had drawn from the big NYC. 

The choice of the UAE capital as the backdrop for SATC2 has also drawn somewhat sharper criticism from the Comment Is Free section of The Guardian website, where Nicholas McGeehan attacks the choice to set SATC2 somewhere ‘where human rights are systematically violated and women are routinely discriminated against.’ This is quite a sensible point, especially if we take a look at Article 25 of the UAE constitution, which states, ‘All persons shall be equal before the law. No discrimination shall be practiced between citizens of the Union by reason of race, nationality, religious belief or social position.’

Um, good start, but isn’t there something missing? Oh wait yeah, gender. Whoops. 

The UAE maintains a deeply conservative and patriarchal society, where women are expected to fulfil the role of housewife, and dress ‘appropriately’, which of course usually means the full veil. I don’t want to get bogged down in the burqa debate, but even if we ignore the dress codes, the treatment of women in Abu Dhabi is at best ‘traditional’, and at worst violent, cruel and downright barbaric. I am thankful, therefore, that Carrie and the girls decided to open a much-needed can of sassy womanhood on the UAE and promote the advancement of women everywhere in the only way they knew how: by flashing some cleavage, dropping condoms in the middle of a crowded market and singing some karaoke. Go sisters.

Whichever way you slice it, Abu Dhabi isn’t really a force for women’s rights. But that’s OK, because SATC2 isn’t either. Maybe then the two aren’t quite as ill matched as suggested, especially if we look a little more at what they have in common. 

Abu Dhabi is rich. Stinking rich. Like much of the Arabian Gulf, the place is swimming in oil money, and like the rest of the Gulf, Abu Dhabi spends big. What was once a barren stretch of desert populated with mud brick huts is now an ugly cacophony of steel and glass skyscrapers, funded by the state’s enormous hydrocarbon wealth. Construction of this consumerist Disneyland is mainly undertaken by immigrants from India and the Far East, who also work as domestic servants in Abu Dhabi households. To be fair this is alluded to in the film – the ‘girls’ all get themselves nice, submissive, personal servants who somehow resist the temptation to spike their drinks. But, it also revels in the tackiness and forced glamour of Abu Dhabi.  

I spent three weeks in Jordan over Easter, and about half the television adverts originated from the UAE, trying to attract even more Western money. They showed a spotless, gleaming and synthetic city, with all the charm and warmth of a thermos flask. I hated it. Like SATC2, Abu Dhabi is a caricature of globalisation and consumerism. Both are soulless, even nasty tributes to the pleasure of owning ‘stuff’: shoes, money, Rolex watches, cars, more money, private jets and even more money. A match made in heaven then? I would say so. As far as I’m concerned Abu Dhabi can keep Carrie’s horsey face and her vapid, piss-irritating friends; at least then they’re all contained together. Oh and by the way, there was hardly any sex in the film either, which probably fucked me off most of all.