"What Is It About Men?"

Amy Winehouse - What Is It About Men - YouTube

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzsRZx5gzWg       While reading this week's assignment, "Carrie Bradshaw's Queer Postfeminism", for some reason I was reminded of the late Amy Winehouse's song "What Is It About Men?" Amy Winehouse, dead at 27, was an entire generation removed from the feminists of the '70's.  Comfortable in their sexuality, women of this age group compete alongside men with full equality.  Yet, just as Carrie Bradshaw and her friends discovered, all is not equal in love and sex. In her song, Amy asserts her right "to take the wrong man as naturally as I sing."  Yet she finds this trait -- the troubling attractions to men, and her inability to resist them, "destructive.".  Her moral compass is askew.  She laments her "aggressive side" that compels her to take whatever she wants, regardless of the consequences. In "Sex and the City", Carrie and Mr. Bigg have an illicit affair after he has married and while she is in a committed relationship with another man (see Season Three, 'Easy Come, Easy Go').  She puts up a token resistance to this, but finds their hook-ups in increasingly tawdry hotels irresistible.  She may say she wants stability, but when it comes along, it has the face of Boring written all over it. Enjoying a sense of sexual liberation unknown to women in the 50's and '60's, thanks to their '70's sisters, these women take what they want.  But does this freedom leave them any less empty?  At the end of the day, Amy Winehouse bemoans: "my destructive side/has grown a mile wide", while Carrie and her friends just don't seem to get it -- it's friendship first, then sex, if it's a relationship you're seeking.