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This piece was written for my Advanced Writing the Essay class, where we were told to write an essay inspired by a piece of art. I chose to explore the portrayal of female friendship in film and TV, with Sex and the City being the essay's inspiration.
Last week, one of my best friends got dumped. It was a Wednesday evening, probably the worst, most inconvenient day of the week to get dumped, considering you still have two days until you can rot undisturbed in your bedroom. Less than twenty minutes after texting our friend group, there were thirteen girls funneling into her room with pints of ice cream, her preferred brand of microwave popcorn (the type that’s practically greased with butter), and a collective hatred for the boy who had broken her heart.
When I think of friendship, it’s moments like these that color my memory. I think of the girl who taught me how to dutch braid on the playground over a decade ago. I think of driving to high school every day with my best friend. I think of birthday sleepovers, my first ever taste of independence, with their stuffed crust pizza and their gossip. I think of that night in my friend’s dorm room, of taking turns wiping away her tears in the glow of the New York City skyline. When I think of friendship, I think of all the girls, all the women, who made me who I am today, and continue to do so.
In 1993, researcher Ana Martinez Alemán conducted a survey-based study, during which she aimed to examine the developmental and emotional value of female friendship in college. Ten years after the original study, Alemán reached back out to the women with another survey, asking them to reflect on the role female friendships had in their development during college, as well as in their post-graduate lives.
In the second study, 48% of the original participants reported that their closest female friend in college remains their closest female friend ten years after graduation (Alemán 562).
“They saw good and bad choices that I made,” said one respondent, “they know me better than anyone” (Alemán 569).
Another respondent reflected on the ways the friendship between her college friends has grown with their lives, yet “the core remained the same” (Alemán 566). Even though their conversations may have shifted from academic struggles to career contemplations, from spontaneous talks to scheduled phone calls, there is an ever-present love that endures.
“In their post-college lives, their college women friends continue to provide them validation and support for their thinking, serve as a fund of information and counsel, and most importantly, as sources of diverse and challenging perspectives,” observed Alemán (Alemán 561).
It’s these enduring friendships that are the main subject of exploration in the nineties sitcom, Sex and the City. Just as the name suggests, the show follows writer Carrie Bradshaw, along with her three best friends, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte, and their romantic endeavors while living in New York City. Throughout the series’ six seasons, we see boyfriends, girlfriends, and husbands come and go, watching as each character takes her turn at falling to pieces in the wake of heartbreak. More importantly though, we watch as every other character picks her back up again. While we may see the lovers who leave, we are always left with the image of the friends who stay.
In one episode of the show, the women attend Miranda’s mother’s funeral, during which she is forced to confront not only her grief, but another equally unpredictable force: her judgemental extended family. The women in the group try their best to support Miranda in any ways they can, some of them more innately empathetic and caring than others. By the time the funeral comes, however, every one of the women are holding each other through tears. “There’s the kind of support you ask for. There’s the kind of support you don’t ask for,” reads a voiceover narration, “and then there’s the kind of support that just shows up” (Zuritzsky & Rottenberg 28:00-28:05).
When I hear that quote, I am reminded of all the support that has shown up for me when I needed it most. My first breakup, my first bout of homesickness, and everything in between. From the bowls of soup left outside the door to my dorm room to the lovingly crocheted giraffe that came with me all the way from California, I am surrounded with symbols of support that showed up, of friends who stayed.
With this in mind, I have trouble understanding why friendships like these aren’t typically portrayed. No, scratch that. I have trouble understanding why friendships like these are portrayed time and time again, yet only as side plots. I have trouble understanding why, when friendships like these are portrayed with careful intention and made central to the story, the film is written off as a “chick flick.”
When defining the term, ‘chick flick,’ Merriam Webster tags it as “sometimes disparaging,” while Collins Dictionary describes the films themselves as “not very serious” (Merriam Webster & Collins COBUILD Dictionaries). Why is it that the films women often see themselves most in are discredited as unserious? Is it really because the films themselves are “not very serious,” or is it because the female experience is something society chooses not to take seriously?
In part, sociologist Lillian Rubin says this is due to the mysterious quality of friendships between women, at least from the perspective of men, and the assumptions made as a result. “women have been invisible from public life throughout the ages,” said Rubin, “so their private relations with one another have been unseen as well” (Fischer 219).
Historically, friendships between women were not honored in the way friendships with men were. Female friend groups were often seen as nothing more than “girls trooping off to have lunch in a tearoom.” However, friendships between men have always been “valorized,” said writer Lucy Fischer, bringing up the stories of Achilles and Patroclus, of Roland and Oliver (Fischer 219).
Homophobia also has a lot to do with the devaluing of female friendship, both historically and in the media. The emotional intimacy often found in female friendships was something men often associated only with their relationships with women. While women are commonly both physically affectionate and emotionally vulnerable with their closest friends, the same isn’t always said for men. According to Rubin, they often “turn to” women to fill this gap (Fischer 221).
Although most of the female friendships portrayed onscreen are purely platonic, it makes sense that men would be threatened by the very idea–much less the public portrayal–of lesbianism. At its core, says philosopher Ann Ferguson, a romantic relationship between women “acts as an alternative” to the conventionally accepted straight couple, challenging the notion that a woman’s association with a man does not define her–socially, economically, or sexually (Ferguson 164). The portrayal of women existing in spaces without men is a direct threat to the patriarchy, and may very well be part of why “chick flicks” are devalued to the extent that they are.
Despite the diminishment of chick flicks, it’s a well-known fact that women, particularly young women, are a profitable audience. In her paper, “Reimagining Girlhood: Hollywood and the Tween Girl Film Market,” writer Peggy Tally describes the spending power tweens, as well as young women as a collective, have in the economy.
She describes the act of sharing beloved books and movies with one another as a facet of “girl culture” that film studios often capitalize on. Word-of-mouth advertising, backed now by the use of social media, is low-cost and low-effort for film companies, and young women are the perfect targets for this advertising. While young women are not only believed to be high consumers themselves, they are also observed to have a lot of spending power in regards to their parents’ money. Studios and executives began to recognize that they could most successfully harness this spending power if they created films specifically for young women (Tally 314).
“The success of Legally Blonde and female titles show that when girls feel a connection to a movie, they come out in droves,” said Nancy Utley, the former co-president of Searchlight Pictures (Tally 317).
Just like movies of other genres, films and series marketed towards women take advantage of certain creative tactics to connect with audiences the way Utley refers to. The use of voiceover as a storytelling device is an important component of chick flicks, as it “makes public what we often keep private,” says writer Ashli Dykes in an analysis of Sex and the City, “particularly in regard to female sexuality and desire” (Dykes 50). While the goal of voiceover, regardless of genre, is often to voice inner thoughts or motivations, Carrie’s voiceovers in Sex and the City hold a different significance.
“Carrie’s voiceover functions as part of the larger project of the series to give voice and visibility to women's issues.” says Dykes (Dykes 55).
While the series itself doesn’t necessarily embody ‘empowering’ ideals as we define them today, its candid discussion of women’s issues in the form of a situational comedy, otherwise known as a sitcom, helped to shift Hollywood’s perception of young women as a viable audience, as well as furthering the exploration of female friendships on screen.
In fact, the show’s success as a comedy is revolutionary in itself. In “Girl Talk: The Postmodern Female Voice in Chick Flicks,” film scholar Heidi Wilkins connects the use of comedy in shows such as Sex and the City to feminist theory. She introduces the idea with an observation from Nancy Reitke, a feminist scholar. Reitke states that “the threat to male dominance isn’t women laughing at men; the threat is women laughing with other women” (Wilkins 163). Films and series like Sex and the City, which center female laughter, make the statement that the friendships between women are unique and, more importantly, extremely difficult for men to infiltrate–and in that, dominate.
“Each of the women displays female wit, intelligence and the capacity to talk at speed,” says Wilkins, “but, unlike classical screwball comedy, they frequently display no real desire to enter into this type of interchange with male characters” (Wilkins 182).
We see a similar approach in female characters’ use of language when referring to each other, with many characters in situational comedies, as well as comedy films, referring to one another using derogatory terms, typically reserved for enemies.
In the 2012 film Bachelorette, we see the “Bitch Faces,” a group of former high school friends, reunite for a friend’s wedding. In one of the flashbacks to the women’s high school years, we see loving, yet profane notes scrawled in a yearbook. “Love you, slut,” reads one of the notes, “Bitch Faces forever!” reads another (Headland).
While the use of demeaning terms as loving nicknames is commonly understood as a reclamation of words once used to disempower women, it is also important to note that the connotations of the words shift completely in these all-female settings. However, when taken outside of that context, the words themselves still exist as weapons of the patriarchy. This shift in connotation and context, much like the united front symbolized by female laughter, leaves little space for men to participate in the use of derogatory terms that they not only originally perpetuated, but that they continue to use as demeaning. It is a “coded way” to discourage male characters from being part of these conversations (Wilkins 182).
Within film, much like how the portrayal of lesbianism can be seen as a threat to patriarchy, the reclamation of formerly demeaning terms, as well as the very presence of female laughter, can also be seen as threatening to the traditional model of womanhood and its relationship with–or, some may say, dependence on–men.
And I wish I could say that this would change. I wish I could say that if we continued to make films about female friendship, if we continued to try and legitimize films about female friendship, if we continued to support films about female friendship, they would finally be taken seriously. But they might not. At least, not for a while.
That doesn’t stop us from doing any of those things, though, nor does it stop us from cherishing those friendships with one another, however ‘unserious’ people perceive them to be. Because those moments of vulnerability, of support, of laughter–they mean something.
“It is my women friends who keep the starch in my spine,” says actress Jane Fonda, “without them, I don’t know where I would be” (Miller 8). From the bouncy castles of childhood to the dorm rooms of college, I am who I am because of the girls I once grew up with, and the women I am still growing up with. My life is colored by memories of Kool Aid split ends, of Taylor Swift lyrics sung loud enough to make our voices hoarse, of things that, if put in a film, Collins Dictionary would define as “not very serious.” Those are what keep the starch in my spine.
Works Cited
Martinez Alemán, Ana M. “College Women’s Female Friendships: A Longitudinal View .” Journal of Higher Education, vol. 81, no. 5, 2010, pp. 553–582.
Zuritsky , Elisa, and Julie Rottenberg. Sex and the City , Season 4, episode 8, HBO, 15 July 2001.
“Chick flick.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chick%20flick. Accessed 9 Dec. 2023.
“Chick Flick Definition and Meaning | Collins English Dictionary.” Collins Dictionary, Harper Collins, www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/chick-flick. Accessed 9 Dec. 2023.
Fischer, Lucy. “Girl Groups: Female Friendship.” Shot/Countershot, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989, pp. 216–249.
Ferguson, Ann. “Patriarchy, Sexual Identity, and the Sexual Revolution.” Signs, vol. 7, no. 1, autumn 1981, pp. 158–172.
Tally, Peggy. “Re-imagining Girlhood: Hollywood and the Tween Girl Film Market.” Counterpoints: Seven Going on Seventeen: Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood, vol. 245, 2005, pp. 311–329.
Dykes, Ashli L. “‘And I Started Wondering....’: Voiceover and Conversation in ‘Sex and the City.’” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 49–66.
Wilkins, Heidi. “Girl Talk: The Postmodern Female Voice in Chick Flicks.” Talkies, Road Movies and Chick Flicks, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh , Scotland, UK, 2017, pp. 149–183.
Headland, Leslye, director. Bachelorette. Hopscotch, 2012, Accessed 2023.
Miller, Julie. “Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin Talk Friendship, Career Flops, and the Female Problem in Hollywood.” Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair, 27 Jan. 2015, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/01/jane-fonda-lily-tomlin-sundance.
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