Sex and the City and Christians
Some friends have blogged or commented recently about the alleged mystery of why some Christians don't like the HBO series Sex and the City, which now airs in expurgated form on TBS. (It's a nice deal for TBS -- they get a popular, award-winning series in which they can insert eighteen and a half minutes of commercials in every thirty minute episode due to "edited for television" cuts.)
I neither love nor hate the show; I've only seen two or three episodes and am not qualified to judge it in critical detail. Fortunately, that doesn't prevent me from understanding (and therefore explaining to my friends in this post) why many Christians do not like the show!
In a meager attempt to pander to all three of my regular readers, who may not share the same socio/cultural/political perspective on culture/media/morality, I will provide both a reasoned and somewhat sympathetic analysis of the question and a crass, easy-to-craft jab at the Christian right/Pat Robertson/conservative evangelical crowd, of which I am in some respects a part.
Here we go, with the fun stuff first.
Top 11 Reasons Christians Don't Like "Sex and the City"
1. It's about sex
2. It takes place in the city
3. It's on HBO (or at least it used to be)
4. There's sex in it
5. Liberals like it
6. Main characters are unchaste
7. Don't want the kids to see it
8. It glorifies sinful alternative lifestyles
9. On too late
10. Did we mention the sexual immorality?
11. Owned by HBO Productions, a subsidiary of BigCorporateMedia Entertainment, which owns through several layers of shadow corporations a book distribution firm in New Jersey that used to sell pornographic literature to Barnes & Noble and now has an exclusive media supply contract with a New Age bookstore/coffee shop that runs Disneyworld vacation promotional contests (or so we heard, anyway).
I was going to add a 12th entry, "It might lead to dancing", but that one's not funny if you don't know the joke.
Now for the serious part: Generally, many Christians don't like the show because:
1. They believe it glorifies immorality. Note that you don't have to watch the show to believe this. If you know it's about four thirtysomething single women in the big city and their relationships, and the name of the show is "Sex and the City", it's not implausible to conclude that it doesn't present a Sunday School version of sexual relationships and is better left unwatched. Now, I've heard enough "sophisticated" Christians talk about the series, and even seen just enough of a few episodes, to
believe that this accusation is not entirely fair. They say, and I've seen a glimpse of this, that the show seems to deal with the dilemmas and challenges facing the main characters as a result of their life choices. This doesn't mean that their lives would have been all joy and happiness had they "settled down" and married "nice Christian men". Just that the show is, to some degree at least, honest about the real results of life choices. But I'm not sure this makes the series a morality play.
2. They fear it will lead to immoral thoughts. Hey, it's got "sex" in the title after all. Since most of the episodes I've seen have been on TBS, I can't say for sure, but I learned at an early age that HBO was the place to go for spicy programming. (That was in the days before Cinemax and the internet, of course.) Some of the women in the show look pretty good, and they are frequently portrayed in a suggestive/sexually explicit manner, so it's silly to argue that a man (or a woman, for that matter) trying to guard his thoughts and his heart shouldn't just watch something else. Or read a book. But the same can be said of Desperate Housewives or just about anything on E! Entertainment Television. Maybe it should be?
Well that's pretty much it. "It's the immorality, stupid!" say the values voters, and it's hard to argue that they're out to lunch on this one. Some of them may be hypocritical, of course, but most of us are hypocritical in one way or another. Some may oversell how bad this particular series is and underrate the immorality of other shows. But it's not entirely fair to accuse them of being "obsessed with sex" when that's a pretty big part of the show under discussion. That would be like accusing liberals of being obsessed with race when they criticize Amos 'n Andy reruns. If there were Amos 'n Andy reruns, of course, which there aren't, which is one thing we can all be thankful for.
I neither love nor hate the show; I've only seen two or three episodes and am not qualified to judge it in critical detail. Fortunately, that doesn't prevent me from understanding (and therefore explaining to my friends in this post) why many Christians do not like the show!
In a meager attempt to pander to all three of my regular readers, who may not share the same socio/cultural/political perspective on culture/media/morality, I will provide both a reasoned and somewhat sympathetic analysis of the question and a crass, easy-to-craft jab at the Christian right/Pat Robertson/conservative evangelical crowd, of which I am in some respects a part.
Here we go, with the fun stuff first.
Top 11 Reasons Christians Don't Like "Sex and the City"
1. It's about sex
2. It takes place in the city
3. It's on HBO (or at least it used to be)
4. There's sex in it
5. Liberals like it
6. Main characters are unchaste
7. Don't want the kids to see it
8. It glorifies sinful alternative lifestyles
9. On too late
10. Did we mention the sexual immorality?
11. Owned by HBO Productions, a subsidiary of BigCorporateMedia Entertainment, which owns through several layers of shadow corporations a book distribution firm in New Jersey that used to sell pornographic literature to Barnes & Noble and now has an exclusive media supply contract with a New Age bookstore/coffee shop that runs Disneyworld vacation promotional contests (or so we heard, anyway).
I was going to add a 12th entry, "It might lead to dancing", but that one's not funny if you don't know the joke.
Now for the serious part: Generally, many Christians don't like the show because:
1. They believe it glorifies immorality. Note that you don't have to watch the show to believe this. If you know it's about four thirtysomething single women in the big city and their relationships, and the name of the show is "Sex and the City", it's not implausible to conclude that it doesn't present a Sunday School version of sexual relationships and is better left unwatched. Now, I've heard enough "sophisticated" Christians talk about the series, and even seen just enough of a few episodes, to
believe that this accusation is not entirely fair. They say, and I've seen a glimpse of this, that the show seems to deal with the dilemmas and challenges facing the main characters as a result of their life choices. This doesn't mean that their lives would have been all joy and happiness had they "settled down" and married "nice Christian men". Just that the show is, to some degree at least, honest about the real results of life choices. But I'm not sure this makes the series a morality play.
2. They fear it will lead to immoral thoughts. Hey, it's got "sex" in the title after all. Since most of the episodes I've seen have been on TBS, I can't say for sure, but I learned at an early age that HBO was the place to go for spicy programming. (That was in the days before Cinemax and the internet, of course.) Some of the women in the show look pretty good, and they are frequently portrayed in a suggestive/sexually explicit manner, so it's silly to argue that a man (or a woman, for that matter) trying to guard his thoughts and his heart shouldn't just watch something else. Or read a book. But the same can be said of Desperate Housewives or just about anything on E! Entertainment Television. Maybe it should be?
Well that's pretty much it. "It's the immorality, stupid!" say the values voters, and it's hard to argue that they're out to lunch on this one. Some of them may be hypocritical, of course, but most of us are hypocritical in one way or another. Some may oversell how bad this particular series is and underrate the immorality of other shows. But it's not entirely fair to accuse them of being "obsessed with sex" when that's a pretty big part of the show under discussion. That would be like accusing liberals of being obsessed with race when they criticize Amos 'n Andy reruns. If there were Amos 'n Andy reruns, of course, which there aren't, which is one thing we can all be thankful for.
posted by Under The Mountain | 5:20 PM
5 Comments:
I would like to officially label myself as one of your 3 regular readers. Now, if I share the same socio/cultural/political perspective on culture/media/morality as you is for you to decide. What do you think?
I'll leave the rest to Susan. I'm expecting her to read this and comment on the show's feminist overtones. If I'm wrong, I'll do it for her.
I'm a regular reader, too!!
But, alas I don't have much to say about Sex in the City except for that many many Christians live in fear of sex in general. I received much misinformation from teachers who were trying to scare me out of having premarital sex. (I might add that you can't make someone too afraid to do something that they know people in their families have been doing since time began and that they are wired to do anyway. Unfortunately, you have to treat teenagers like people, which may be a drag, but it seems to be what they need.) Much damage was done to my relationship with my mother because of the things she said to me and the threats she made out of fear that D and I were having sex when we were dating. And we weren't, which is the irony there. She recently apologized and I forgave her because I KNOW she was acting out of fear.
Sorry. Too Much Information.
Su
Susan--
Your comments remind me of an insightful statement I once heard about why the church couldn't stop the sexual revolution of the 60s. The idea was that the church, through parents, had taught kids in the first half of the 20th century that premarital sex was wrong because (a) you might get pregnant and (b) you might get a disease. Science caught up (or at least many people thought it did) with both excuses through the pill and antibiotics. So the old reasons didn't work anymore. What the church and parents SHOULD HAVE been saying all along was that premarital sex was wrong because God hates it, that being the real reason.
Pretty good insight, I thought.
Yes! That's so very true! We have to be really honest about sex and it's implications and the reasons we believe as we do. As Christians, there are some things we have to accept with faith even if we don't see a concrete reason to do so. I don't think that our kids should be shielded from that as they make decisions about their lives. (Granted, there are many reasons to act morally outside of disease and pregnancy.)
Su
Additionally, your little Statue of Liberty Girl and Clown Boy came trick-or-treating here last night and when we opened the door, they both said "Happy Reformation Day!"
Su
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