'Sex and the City's Sam spearheads pop-culture empowerment of women

Like a little kid giggling when she says penis aloud, pop culture today is basking in its newfound ability to push past the taboos of old. It seems everywhere you look, the female libido is getting a lot of play . . . I mean attention. I came home for Fall Break to find the Oct. 23 issue of New York magazine on my kitchen table. The picture on the cover of Kim Cattrall — a.k.a. Samantha on HBO's hit "Sex and the City" — with the inset subtitle "Confessions of a Sex Warrior," looked a bit risqué for a magazine that I have come to associate with images of, for example, male, middle-aged political figures. Then again, maybe the "Sex Warrior" subtitle is not so foreign — at least not in that wishful thinking sense.

Seeing a woman with Samantha's drive is definitely refreshing. The article mentions that "empowering moments for single women" in television and film have, until fairly recently, been nonexistent. "Sex and the City" essentially laughs at the stereotypical gender polarity associated with sex. We all know that famed double standard — guys who get a lot of action are studs and girls get bad reputations. As my guy friends have illustrated to me on many occasions, there are the girls you want to take home to your mom and the ones you want to take home to your dorm room. There are the ones who have got you whipped and the ones who appear in your dreams holding whips. There are the ones you have got plastered all over your wall in shrine-like formation and the ones with whom you'd like to get plastered on Saturday night, and so on. But HBO finagles the stereotype each and every episode of "Sex and the City."

Sam is not a whore. Guys like her because — besides the obvious reasons — in our modern culture's terms, she is a guy trapped in a female body. Women like her because she isn't fragile. She's not threatening or intimidating, and most importantly, no one is branding her for getting what she wants. And the trend extends outward. Having been piqued by advertisements for David Kelley '79's new show, "Boston Public," I decided to watch an episode. The show's creator is known for pushing the envelope and getting a rise — or three or four — out of his viewers. A tradition-minded teacher on the show had this to say to his students: "All throughout history, when men look at women, they want sex . . . you [the women of the class] must harness your bosoms in order to squash the discrimination caused by the male gonads."

I nearly choked on my Granny Smith apple from laughing so hard. Humor can be a powerful antidote. Welcome to the land of modern television, where a comment like that one denotes not condescension, but empowerment. Moments later, the camera panned on dozens of girls removing their bras and hanging them in triumph from their lockers, a symbol that they would not be oppressed or contained by their gender. Now that's something you don't see everyday, or at least, you didn't use to see every day.

But perhaps it was Ally McBeal, the ever-perky champion of women in want of men, who had the quote of my television-heavy break: "Society has always put a scarlet letter on the woman who leads with her libido." I would venture to say this stereotype is beginning to lift. For now, it is a surge of popular "female machismo" that is allowing our society to deal with women as more than just helpless damsels in distress, or on the flip side, merely as sex symbols.

Women in tight, black, vinyl, cleavage-revealing jumpsuits and stiletto heels can be superheroes — just look at those famed kung-fu kittens Charlie's Angels (believe me, wearing those shoes to fight crime is quite a feat). Along those same lines, a woman who sleeps with half of New York, but can do it with the gusto of a guy, is accepted without put-down. Unfortunately, this emerging model of sexual "equality" is framed by the exact stereotype it purports to break.

How 'bout some gloss with that lip service? Marnie Podos is from Tenafly, N.J. She can be reached at mpodos@princeton.edu.