Sex and the City S3 Ep 4-6 and S6 Ep 5-8: A Retro SSL Review

My little segment is back for another round. It's a modified, lazy version of an SSL Review. It's just me transcribing my notes, page by page, on all of the Sex and the City episodes. I watched them all - not necessarily in order - during 2007 and 2008, and I took notes on the depiction/discussion of female orgasm and female masturbation. It was my early attempt at this type of lady-gasm review stuff. Anyway, I never actually created reviews from these notes, but since they exist, I'd like to get them out there on the interwebs before they get burned in a house fire or something...thus this series.

The fun of this will be that I will transcribe these as word for word as I can while still trying to make it be a sensible read. I'll post a pick of the notes for your reference. I'll do one or more episodes at a time - from the beginning of the notebook to the end. I may add notes for clarification or add my SSL-Review-style comments.

Hopefully the notes I took privately 10 years ago won't make me look like a dumb asshole. I will add them in the TV SSL Review Master List  (of course you are also welcome to check out the Movie SSL Review Master List as well). Here we go.

Sex and the City Season 3 Episodes 4-6, Season 6 Episodes 5-8

Season 3 Ep 4

- naked woman serving drinks

-Carrie kissed girl in spin the bottle at her bi boyfriend's ex gay lover's party where everyone was bi, but she decides it wasn't her thing - the bi stuff.

Season 3 Ep 5

(nothing)

Season 3 Ep 6

-chlamydia - miranda

-Charlotte having sex w/ guy that says dirty things when he comes;

    They are having sex and he says he's scared to come because he'll say it. She says, "oh come on - I'm almost there." She doesn't look like it. It's missionary. He is pumping in and out. -Simultaneous intercourse orgasm insinuated here. 

Season 6 Ep 5

- male naked ass --> Smith in a play

Season 6 Ep 6

(nothing)

Season 6 Ep 7

(nothing)

Season 6 Ep 8

-Sam - "I can't believe you got into a harness w/o even the hope of an orgasm" - about Carrie doing trapeze for story.

- Carrie had bad sex --> he was banging the fuck out of her. "That night me and Jack had sex like we were in high school - meaning he didn't know what the hell he was doing, and I didn't say anything."

-She was telling Stanford about the "jackrabbit" sex and he said, "Oh my god, are straight men still allowed to do that?" (Carrie said) "No they're not. I don't likey."

Modern Day Me's Take

A lot of the things I took notes on for these episodes are not things that I would currently include in an SSL Review. Naked drink serving, lady on lady kissing, chlamydia, a naked male ass - these are all things that do not depict or discuss female orgasm, masturbation, the clit or cunnilingus, so they wouldn't get SSL reviewed. I didn't have specific criteria set up back then. I was just noting down anything sexual, and I was also noting times when women were sexualized and when men were sexualized. I thought I might want to get into discussing the intense disproportion of how and how often the different genders' bodies are depicted as objects of desire. However, in the end, that can of worms was much too big and broad, and I decided to focus on the depictions relating to orgasm. I mean that's what this blog is all about. There's plenty of people out there discussing disproportionate sexualization way better and in way more depth than I could do. 

So, only episode S3E6 and episode S6E8 up there are of particular interest to me. So let me just comment on those quickly. Quickly, because I'm going to go from memory and from my interpretation of what I wrote back then. I'm not going to go back and watch through the scenes in detail. This ain't that kind of review. (I wrote that too soon. It's actually quite long-winded).

Charlotte's about to "orgasm"...I guess

If memory serves me, Charlotte had tons of scenes in this series where she was getting banged in a fairly normal, bangy sort of way and 'came' during it. I mean not as much as Samantha, but maybe 2nd most...maybe. They all did it from time to time, though. Anyway, that's what's happening here. It's a classic scene where a woman is getting a penis pumped in and out of her vagina. There's no additional stimulation from hands or from vibrators or from her pelvis grinding against something - nothing that might allow her clitoral glans area to get any kind of consistent stimulation. Without that chance of stimulation like that, it's pretty ridiculous to assume she was 'almost there.' BECAUSE STIMULATION TO THE INSIDE OF THE VAGINA HAS NEVER BEEN PHYSICALLY OBSERVED TO CAUSE ORGASM IN ALL OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.

And that's the truth, even though orgasms simply from getting banged are probably the most commonly depicted types of lady-gasms we see. 

It's bullshit, and if this weren't a show, and if Charlotte weren't just a character, I'd say ol' Charlotte was just 'almost there' to vocalizing and not actually having an orgasm - either because she knew her 'orgasm' would give him the permission to finish up (because on the other hand, moving a penis in and out of a vagina is a GREAT way to make a penis come)...or as is the case, I believe, for many a woman, she is confused about how orgasms are supposed to happen, feels like they should happen during intercourse, and well, kinda fakes them close to an intensity peak of intercourse that is her partner ramping up to and then orgasming. Whether the fake is intentional, or habit, or she kind of believes it, I believe varieties of faking are not uncommon, and faking seems like a much more sensible explanation for what was going on with this no-clit-stimulation bang Charlotte was getting (I mean, ya know, if she were an actual person and not a character written by writers, of course).

Carrie's Bangfest

And that is directly related to Carrie's situation in Season 6 Episode 8. In essence, there was nothing really different at all about what was happening to Charlotte and what was happening to Carrie. They were both getting banged. Neither was getting any kind of clit stimulation, and there would be no reason to believe in either of these scenarios that either woman should sensibly orgasm from what was happening. Yet for some unknown reason we are expected to believe that Charlotte was about to come, but that Carrie had absolutely terrible, fumbling, shit sex - with no orgasm, obviously. 

I would argue the only difference between the two scenes was that the writers decided in one that the story was 'shit sex' and the other that the story was 'normal boyfriend/girlfriend sex.' The first isn't expected to be orgasmic for ladies and the latter is. The reality is that there is such ignorance around how women actually orgasm, that writing lady-gasm into stories is just plain wildly inconsistent and often unrelated to actual physical things happening to them in that story. It's a mess. We wouldn't expect a dude to come from a great session of only ball licking with no penis stimulation. And, we certainly wouldn't depict two different relationship scenarios, both with this type of ball-lick 'sex,' and reasonably expect the audience to blindly accept that one was orgasmic because, I don't know, it was romantical or emotionally connected or whatever it is that makes audiences blindly accept scenes like Charlotte's.

It's not just this show, either. It's all too common to depict a woman in a TV series getting pounded against a wall for 2 minutes into an orgasm one episode and the same basic thing happens in the another episode, but it's suddenly shit sex because of her mood or the dude's character or something. I'm not discounting state of mind when it comes to arousal, I'm just pointing out that despite a complete lack of sensible physical stimulation, it's common to depict a woman orgasming just because there is a sense that the sex in the scene should be viewed as 'good' (aka depicted as orgasmic) for her.  

Anyway, Sex and the City was always doing that. Sometimes basic in-out sex was orgasmic and sometimes it wasn't, and there was no rhyme or reason to it. So, if there's an idea out there (and there most definitely is) that female orgasm is unpredictable, deeply contingent on love or mood or the romance of the partner, or that there's not real understanding of how it happens, be sure that these ridiculously inconsistent and physically incorrect depictions play a huge part in that.