I'm reading this review in The Stranger (Seattle's alternative weekly paper) of the new Sex and the City movie. The film is horrible. Culturally donkey and embarrassing. I get that The Stranger wants to get a rise out of people by pushing offensive buttons, but the review reads like it came out of VICE Magazine's Dos & Don'ts section. Here are some excerpts from the article:

" ...essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls."

"Samantha, being the prostitute sexual revolutionary that she is...

I was thinking about this class I took in college on womens' sexuality, about the articles we read and the feedback given by the class participants. It often felt like we were trying too hard to find answers to questions that shouldn't have been posed in the first place. Is "straight sex" oppressive to women? Is "sex work" oppressive to women? Should women who like women be called lesbian or queer? At some point during the class, I had to let out a quiet scream at our desire to fit women into a box. Assuming half the population, we're talking 3 billion people, not ants.

Point being, yeah, the movie was ridiculous. But nothing's sadder than using a humiliating movie about women to justify misogyny. First, the movie makes women look stupid. Then a woman reviewer writes a scathing and incendiary review about the stupidity of the movie. THEN a bunch of misogynist commentators write mean comments about the woman who wrote the critique being an ugly lesbo. Which prompts folks to take on defensive arguments about the merits of the stupid movie. Which just makes women look dumber. And the misogynists become meaner.

It's the catch-22 of modern feminism that blogger Pam Cash really gets on a regular basis. Also, reference just about any blog post written about Sarah Palin's wardrobe during the 2008 election, including mine where I compare Palin to Paris Hilton. What was I thinking?

Or, from the comments section of The Stranger article:

"Oh great. Another bunch of assholes making me feel bad for wanting to pretend I'm in Oz for a while. Guess I'll go back to obsessing about the death of the wetlands, the unrest in Israel, my son's recent vaccinations, my daughter's ingestion of pesticide and hormone filled foods, the mass in my sister's breast, the lack of my sex drive, my Teflon-covered pans, [or] cutbacks of ALL programs at the college where I work."