"Your One Beauty!:" Little Women, Sex and the City, and Foucault's Repressive Hypothesis

In The History of Sexuality (1976), Michel Foucault writes about the "repressive hypothesis" - that, in human desire to become fully liberated and the masters of sexuality, their overbearing discourse and need to tell about it has actually made us more subject to it than ever. This example of duped self-owning can perhaps best be seen in two works about nauseatingly zesty women written over two centuries apart: the March sisters (Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy) of Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) and the "fashionistas" of HBO's Sex and the City (Miranda, Carrie, Charlotte, and Samantha). While all of these women openly discuss their liberation, one cannot help but notice their slavery to the heteronormative white male regime. And above all: none of these women can really grasp how truly annoying they are because of this.

Carrie Bradshaw/Jo March are writers: by nature, they reveal all, and think their lives are the braver for it. Carrie writes orgasm after orgasm and metaphor after metaphor, and Jo writes demure romances and vampire stories (which, updated on scale to today's standards, are probably similarly soft-core). Carrie/Jo assume all the stylized zest that comes with being a "writer:" having witty reparte with men, claiming their genius, wearing progressive clothing, and being incredibly selfish. And yet, they trick themselves into denying how backwards they really are! Carrie, by writing about sex, is obsessed with it. She tells all day, and is utterly controlled by men and their opinions of her. Jo is, simply put, a hypocrite. While she is a teacher in a male profession and writes her memoirs and urges her sisters to be strong - especially in the film version - she does not achieve true happiness until she is married to Friederich Bhaer, and, when she inherits money, she opens a school...for boys. Jo is "so the Carrie" - with all her big words about changing the regime, she only works to further it. The more these women talk about their control, the more it slips away.

The other sisters, too, fall neatly in line. Meg and Miranda are fussy and goal-oriented and work hard as a governess and a lawyer to save; but the louder Miranda speaks her liberation ("You two are crazy to get married. Marriage ruins everything," loudly promoting her vibrator), but she is the first to become ensnared in a marriage, and punished from a fun lifestyle with pregnancy and her husband's infidelity. Meg resists her suitors but then suddenly finds herself with twins and a redheaded bore of a husband. This is what being sarcastic and practical and voicing your aspiration yields: proof of lack thereof. The more they claim to like being old maids, the more they silently freak out and ultimately settle to solve their husbandless crises.

Amy and Charlotte are young, foolish, pretty, and fanciful. They loudly profess their spoiled natures and their desires to be a lady in a way that is similar to a sexual repressive discourse: as they discuss their aspirations of delicacy and admirations of nice things, they admit their utter lack of charm. Amy, to be a sophisticate and a show-off, steals citrus fruit, proving herself an utter rube; Charlotte claims to be worldly but still treats all gay men as novelties and accessories. Charlotte works in an art gallery and discusses art all day without producing it herself, and Amy produces maudlin landscapes for consumption in tea parties and other domestic atmospheres. They are also extremely reliant on men, although they insist otherwise. While Amy talks about travel and art, she quickly rushes into a marriage with drunk Laurie with little urging. While Charlotte pretends to be a fierce and independent city girl, she also rushes to intense relationships and marriage with any man she meets; many of whom are far below her standards (one is bald and Jewish, and she is punished for not marrying a normative Gentile with - gasp - an adopted Asian baby).

And finally, there are Beth and Samantha - both characters of much derision, but, I would argue, the only characters with any sense of irony about how fucking awful their cohorts and existences are (for which they are rewarded with consumption and cancer). Beth is a wimp and does not pretend to be lively or vivacious like her other siblings do. She knows her place is to gather rolls and sew. She does not talk about her freedoms or her goals, and thus retains some shred of likeability, and goes to heaven for it. Samantha Jones is a joke, a drag queen, and entirely one-dimensional - but unlike the other Sex and the City girls, she competely realizes this and winks to the camera. Her delivery is camp, unlike Carrie's earnest "if men were pairs of shoes..." monologues. She is Mae West among Doris Days. She is loathesome and when she talks about sex she admits she is entirely its subject and controlled by it. When Samantha coos a painful pun you wince, but it's just because of the bad script writing, not because, like the other three girls, she is living a lie. When Beth dies, you're sad, not because the character dies in such a sappy way, but because that's one less character to buffer yourself from the others; repressed even by the the standard of the 1800's.