I DREAM OF HAGGIS

"Welcome to the brave new world of postfeminism, in which life is defined by transactions"

Wow! If you have 15 minutes, you absolutely MUST read this article in today's Guardian called, "Material Girls"; it pretty much sums up everything I disliked/ found hard to swallow in the Sex and the City film (and I am a HUGE fan of the show).

Just one of the many awesome nuggets from the article:

Taking feminism for granted, our standards have slipped, and we permit ourselves to be patronised: a Warner Bros studio head has responded to the success of Sex and the City with "Bring on the sequel, girls." And women everywhere are lapping it up, "because they're worth it," without apparently noticing the narrowing of options, or their relentless superficiality. We're told that women today can "choose" whatever they want: and yet increasingly we are presented with stories in which the only profession they choose is the world's oldest. As Kate's father asked in Blackadder 20 years ago: "Why go to London when you can make a fortune lying flat on your back?" An awful lot of daughters seem to be asking themselves the same question today, without discernible irony. Twenty years ago, Mike Nichols' hit film Working Girl, with its punning title and plot that punished ball-breaking career women while rewarding whispering blondes "with a mind for business and a bod for sin" opened the doors to jokes about what professional women were really working at. But it was Pretty Woman that kicked off the orgy - equating shopping with love, and making heroines out of whores. These stories sell themselves as Cinderella tales, but really they are about the ugly stepsisters who were spoiled, entitled, vain, and shallow. Cinderella was a hard worker.

In a recent survey by Scottish Widows, some 20% of respondents under the age of 24 said that they would consider marrying someone only for their money and to obtain a luxurious lifestyle. This group included young men, and overall the survey found that nearly twice as many men as women would marry for money. So where are all the films about male gold-diggers? The hapless waiter in Priceless becomes a gigolo because he's a victim of love, far too naive and romantic to engage in such meretricious dealings on his own. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman announced last year that she is remaking How to Marry a Millionaire, the 1953 film starring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, the title of which tells you everything you need to know about the plot. The producers assure us that the story will be "completely overhauled" to keep it in line with modern values. So no more gold-digging? "The original Millionaire was about a girl who was, frankly, kind of fat," the producers explained. "Nicole is thin and perfect."