Is
it a coincidence that the bubbling idiocy of “Sex and the City,” the
movie, exploded upon the cultural scene at the exact same time that
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy imploded?

Literally, of course, it is. Figuratively, I’m not so sure.

And before I set off an avalanche of e-mails explaining why Hillary
deserved to lose, I want to make one point clear: I am talking here not
about the outcome of her candidacy – mistakes were made, and she faced
a formidable opponent in Barack Obama – but rather about the climate in
which her campaign was conducted. The zeitgeist in which Hillary floundered and “Sex” is now flourishing.

It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an
outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month,
characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.”
A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing
political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park”
episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and
Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth
between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice,
largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream
opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the
nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she
comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry,
watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)

Stephen is not the first commentator to note
that if similarly hateful racial remarks had been made about Obama, our
nation would have turned itself inside out in a paroxysm of
soul-searching and shame. Had mainstream commentators in 2000
speculated, say, that Joe Lieberman had a nose for dough, or made funny
Shylock references, heads would have rolled – and rightfully so.

But 16 months of sustained misogyny? Hey — she asked for it. With that voice,
(“When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, ‘Take out the garbage’ ” Fox
News regular Marc Rudov, author of “Under the Clitoral Hood: How to
Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables,” said in
January). With that ambition, and that dogged determination (“like
everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court,” according to
MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle) and, of course, that husband
(Chris Matthews: “The reason she’s a U.S. Senator, the reason she’s a
candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her
husband messed around.”). Clearly, in an age when the dangers and
indignities of Driving While Black are well-acknowledged, and properly
condemned, Striving While Female – if it goes too far and looks too
real — is still held to be a crime.

In a culture that’s reached such a level of ostensible enlightenment
as ours, calling a powerful woman “castrating” – however you choose to
put it – ought to be seen as just as offensive as rubbing your fingers
together to convey a love of gold coinage when you talk about a Jew.
It’s nothing other than an expression of woman-hate — and the degree to
which such expressions have flourished, in the mainstream media and in
the loonier reaches of cyberspace this year, has added up to be a real
national shame.

Which brings me back to “Sex and the City.”

How antithetical Hillary’s earnest, electric blue pants-suited whole
being is to the frothy cheer of that film, which has women now turning
out in droves, a song in their hearts, unified in popcorn-clutching
sisterhood to a degree I haven’t seen since the ugly, angry days of
Anita Hill and … the first incarnation of Hillary Clinton. How times
have changed. How yucky, how baby boomerish, how frowningly pre-Botox
were the early 1990s. How brilliantly does “Sex” – however atrocious it
may be – surf our current zeitgeist, sugar-coating it all in Blahniks
and Westwood, and yummy men and yummier real estate, and squeakingly
desperate girl cheer.

Take Miranda: a working mother archetype for an anti-woman age.
She’s so callous now that she won’t let her nanny eat a decent meal,
and so defiantly sexless that she’s let her pubic hair grow in. Take
Charlotte: the Good Mommy, with an angel’s face and no employment, a
seemingly limitless credit line and an adoring troglodyte of a husband
(so short, so bald, and yet so good with the gelt). And then
– please – take Samantha. At 50, she’s the one girlfriend aged enough
to bear the baggage of old-time, Clinton-era feminist sentiment. She’s
a self-centered heart-breaker, a real man-eater — you should see how
she rejects a drooping roll of sushi — her corruption made manifest by
the fact that, at film’s end, she develops (gasp!) a gut.

Yes, a gut, girls, like yours and mine and that of virtually any
real woman who’s over 35, or has had children, or has something more
important to do than full-time Pilates.

“Sex and the City” is the perfect movie for our allegedly
ever-so-promising post-feminist era, when “angry” is out and Restalyne
is in, and virtually all our country’s most powerful women look younger
now than they did 20 years ago.

Oh, lighten up, I can hear you say. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.

Earnestness is so unattractive (in a woman).