SATC Mania: Are we really all vapid consumers? Is it really just 'crushing sameness'? Can I really not be a feminist who loves blue Manolos??!

I generally like David Carr's column that runs in the New York Times' Business section on Mondays, and at first reading today, this one struck me as quite smart, too. It's basically about how the media business community is finally taking notice that women are particularly strong web community users and that it can translate into dollars for them. 

But it also takes issue with the idea that this demographic has used its strength to literally buy into the idea that their buying power (of shoes, of clothes, of the wonderful lives of four women in New York...) is real power rather than just a means to keep corporate structures (often run by men) and sexist stereotypes (women love to shop) in place. The argument against this is that perhaps, through new media and the revolutionary discourses that could be created through new media, women's web sites might lead their community of followers into doing something new and more revolutionary than Manolo envy.  Even if this is somewhat unrealistic for reasons I'll talk about later, this is a great point. In fact, this column has one of my single most favorite quotations about women and new media production that I've read in a long time from Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr.com. I'll give you the excerpt leading in, too:

...Besides, I realize we are all, like it or not, having a moment with “Sex and the City,” 

no more or less frivolous than the Super Bowl. It’s just odd that while there has been a significant advance in sites by and for women, much of what is being produced replicates, rather than revolutionizes, the template set down by women’s magazines for decades.

“The lack of evolution is disappointing to me,” said Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr.com. “Back in 1996, it was going to be this brave new world where women were finally going to take control of their stories, and to me, it is often more a crushing sameness.”

Even so, she is unsurprised that in an era built on communities of interest, women are on the rise. “It is a rule of Web development that if you want a vital community, it has to start with women. It is just a higher level of discourse and behavior. If a site starts male, it stays male.”

(This is me talking now:) We should acknowledge that try as we might, it is pretty difficult to manufacture and rally around exciting new paradigms that transcend any stereotypical gender norms (to quote a really awful stand-up comedian in "The Nutty Professor" with Eddie

 Murphy: "Women be shopping!" Really, is there a stronger message about femininity than the fact that we love to buy shoes? "SATC" just mirrored and celebrated this. The show and film definitely didn't come up with it.)

But I grapple with this notion that our consumption of popular culture, and our celebration of the fantasyland portrayed in "SATC," is all bad, which is the main thing that I get from this column.  Yes, we could and should do more with the online medium and indeed, if you believe that we can truly and fully escape hundreds of years of cultural ideas about what it means to be female (as a follower of Foucault and Althusser, I have my doubts), then yes, the fact that beyond-snarky Jezebel live-blogged from the "SATC" premier in New York is a little depressing. However, the fact that we can indeed rally and celebrate media and make sense of it on our own and use it to our own ends is something. Actually, it's something important. (The whole phenomenon of "SATC" community is startlingly like Janice Radway's ethnographic research on romance readers and how they used the act of reading in their lives.)

Bringing it back to the younger girls, though (that is what this blog's about, after all): Are the arguments the same? Hannah Montana is probably a far bigger franchise with a far more rabid community  (of consumers) than Carrie Bradshaw when you think about it. Again, girls are not necessarily using online communities or new media to transcend dominant cultural discourses to counter Hannah's own stereotypically girly image, but they are actively making sense of her and using this imagery in various ways, both helpful and possibly harmful (I'd argue that buying and listening to Miley Cyrus' music could be doing harm to anyone's ears who happen to listen, but this is from a person who played in a Def Leppard cover band in junior high, so what do I know?).  Even if it is "crushing sameness," I like to think that it's not totally without merit. Then again, it's difficult to counter that we aren't just grooming today's Miley Cyrus fans to be the"vapid"  "SATC" fans of the future.