technoculture314-09

I don’t know why I do it to myself. Having already been subjected to The Devil Wears Prada, I find myself being convinced to sit through Sex and The City: The Movie. Fixed in my anti-capitalist ways, I find both movies offer little more than a representation of conspicuous consumption.

I digress. I also dislike the movies on another level: I find that the pseudo-feminist attitudes that both movies seem portray as rather harrowing. Women are meant to feel liberated that they can now own their own pay check, buy shoes and find their own Mr Big. This is where I think Suicide Girls offer an interesting paradigm, and I think that both Sex and the City and suicide girls can offer an interesting link.

Suicide girls attempt to be subversive, that is they attempt to represent the anti-Carrie, the anti-Dress wearing, shoe loving urbanite. However I come into conflict as I feel that they both are running still on capitalist modes of consumerism. They both are attempting to procure a pay check, and they both are subjectifying themselves for an audience, be it Mr Big or Mr Goth.

I find it funny that the models on Suicide Girls are offering an alternative to the Carries of the world: that is they are attempting to portray themselves as subjects. They are subjectified objects, which are attempting to draw the Mulveyian Gaze. Who’s more feminist? Carrie or Suicide girls? I would have to argue that perhaps Carrie is, as atleast she doesn’t need to take her clothes of to exist within a capitalist society.

Both, I guess, offer a faux-feminist point of view. They exist to draw the male gaze, something that I feel subjectifies and lowers women to a subordinate role. It seems ironic that Suicide Girls, a reactionary group of women that attempt to be the ‘Anti-Carries’, actually end up being more subjectified than their ‘frenemy’.