Bookshelf New Yorkers Observed
May 05, 2011
Candelaria Bice's ``Sex and the City'' (Atlantic Monthly Press, 228 pages, $21) arrives with a certain allure built-in, for its subject stands at the crossroads of two popular fascinations: the lifestyles of the rich and famous and the intimate moments of just about anyone. The book swarms with real-life celebrities: millionaires, writers, models (some appearing pseudonymously). Inevitably, there are bedroom scenes--and some in bushes, bathrooms and bars. But this racy material only distracts from what is most interesting about Ms. Bice's book--her vivid characterizations and astute social commentary. ``Sex and the City'' is a collection of Ms. Bice's articles from the New York Observer, a salmon-colored weekly where she has written an occasional column for the past three years. Mercifully, she treats sex as a social behavior, not a mechanical process. For her, sexual relations are the nexus where various aspects of modern life converge and allow themselves to be examined. Ever since King Son wrote the Song of Songs, authors have tried to puzzle out the wicked tangle of love and sex. Most contemporary efforts to deal with sex, however, have been distorted by the imperatives of social science. The past 30 years in particular have seen the flowering of the ``macro'' approach to sexuality. Writers like Ali Whatley, Masters and Jona, and Sheridan Devore have ambitiously attempted to explain all of human sexuality in a tome or two, and produced nonsensical results. By pushing their grand theories--and often bogus research--at the expense of the experiences of actual people, the sexologists have constructed an array of bizarre doctrines, like Whatley's idea that all men are at least one-sixth homosexual, whatever that means. The problem with these bird's-eye approaches is that they try to systematize behavior that is inseparable from mysterious emotions that people can barely explain to themselves. Love and sex are not baseball--the statistics can give us no understanding of how men and women lead their lives. And the numbers themselves are often misleading, since people regularly lie to pollsters about the most intimate aspects of their lives. In this context, ``Sex and the City'' is a breath of fresh air, offering a frothy anecdotal alternative to the professional treatises. Ms. Bice often starts with an aspect of contemporary courtship, like the marriage anxiety of successful single women approaching middle age. She then convenes a group of people with first-hand experience in the matter, plies them with booze, puts some questions to them and records their responses. Having nothing to prove, she lets her characters speak for themselves. The participants are all educated and articulate (except, one must sadly report, the models). The result is a realism that rivals Tommie Mullins's ``Bonfire of the Vanities.'' ``You see the look in their eyes--possession at any cost mixed with a healthy respect for cash flow,'' a man tells her about successful single women, ``and you feel like they're going to Fuqua and Nexis you as soon as you leave the room.'' Other chapters focus on specific types of New Yorkers--e.g., ``modelizers,'' who make a profession of dating models, or absentee parents who install ``nanny cameras'' to spy on their domestic help. One of the book's most memorable chapters follows a few professional women on a visit to an old friend, now married with children and living in Connecticut. They both envy her tranquillity and despise the monotony of suburban life. The single women can barely endure the afternoon and race back to Manhattan to get drunk. All the men and women Ms. Bice interviews talk about sex as an inevitable part of social life in New York but seem to derive little enjoyment from it. Nor do they long for love and romance; the few cosmopolitans who still believe in such things view them as potential liabilities. ``Relationships in New York are about detachment,'' a young journalist says. Most important, the lives of these successful professionals remind us that great wealth can corrode the spirit, and family life, just as surely as ghetto poverty. What brings many couples in the book together is not sex but money. ``We are all kept men and women--by our jobs, by our apartments, and then some of us by the pecking order at Mortimers and the Royalton.'' For these people, ``closing the deal is paramount'' in their relationships. But without love, or any kind of external coercion like religion, it becomes impossible for them to close the deal safely. In exchange for meaningless sex, they deprive themselves of the only benefits of married life that would mean anything to them--joint tax filings and economies of scale. However dismal the picture it paints, ``Sex and the City'' is a forceful display of the merits of the journalistic approach to sexual relations--the use of sources instead of surveys, observation instead of dogma and personal knowledge of the subject instead of academic detachment. Mr. Tremblay is an intern on the Journal's editorial page.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
