Reflections off the flat screen...

One blogsite I check pretty frequently is www.jezebel.com. Jezebel, part of the Gawker blog family, advertises itself as celebrity, sex, and fashion without the airbrushing and draws about an 85% female readership. The writing is smart, the posters are all very bright, and although the subject matter could be seen as shallow, the reactions to it aren't.

I like it because I'm an interested rubber-necker (although not a participant) of current fashion. I used to buy one fashion mag a year, and then even that became too onerous. I began to see all women's publications as little handbooks entitled Here's How To Go Nuts. It occurred to me that Elle, Vogue, Cosmo and Marie Claire could publish one archetypal issue a year, and that would be plenty. Diet advice, sex advice, make-up and hair tips, and the latest in fashions are not as changeable as you might think.

Jezebel has caught onto this too, and weighs in snarkily with a regular feature called Mag Hags. When so much of popular female culture is seductive, maddening, and nonsensical, I can start to feel a bit unsteady. Reading Jezebel's posts, I see I'm not the only one.

So today there was this posting: What Do Bradshaw, Plath, And De Beauvoir Have In Common? An Addiction To Egotistical Men. And one thread of the discussion dealt with Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City.

The debate was over whether Carrie Bradshaw should be considered a feminist icon on par with Sylvia Plath and Simone DeBouvoir. The original post observed that major feminists like Plath and DeBeauvoir had latched onto rotten guys. And since Carrie loved mean old Mr. Big, did this mean she was a feminist front-runner too? Here, I had to stop reading and take a very deep breath.

Here's the thing. Only one poster pointed out that the whole discussion was idiotic, since Carrie Bradshaw is a made-up TV character.

These long commentaries between intelligent women were like arguments I had in the fourth grade. If Superman fought The Hulk in an alligator pit, who would win? If Marilyn Monroe was a jet plane, could she drop an Atom Bomb on Russia?

And that truly depressed me.

Or maybe I just need more sleep.