What a few weeks it’s been in my tiny corner of the world. All of my plans went out of the proverbial window, one of them a small aeroplane window, an escape to the sun that I’d been mulling over for months. I’ve had the ‘FFT’ as Brene Brown calls it, the F&cking First Time doing something (dealing with a sick animal), and had a light blasted on how I cope with challenging situations, without doing what I need to learn to get better at - asking for help and support. I’ve consistently returned to step 1 of emotion coaching - empathy for how the emotional rollercoaster I was riding on was affecting me. It wasn’t fun. Things have calmed down a little, so it’s back to a bit more normality.
Here’s this week’s article
The majority of information online focuses on how parenting and home life is to blame for children’s development, but I like to widen the lens to external causes that affect home life, creating a knock-on effect to how children are reared.
Societal structures and imposed narratives, the conditioning within the mainstream education system and it’s incessant focus on academic achievement with a distinct lack of life skills, creativity and a growing emphasis placed on sexual development to the detriment of emotional development, political policies and rhetoric, and popular culture all contribute massively to what happens behind closed doors and behind the eyes and skin and bones of a child’s and adolescent’s brain and body.
Staying with pop culture, and New York, I wrote a newsletter recently about a Ross and Rachel storyline in relation to emotion coaching, and today it’s the turn of Sex and the City - a massively influential piece of fiction that managed to deliver conditioning on sex (obviously), relationships and materialism.
It was my early thirties before I started to watch SATC and after a few episodes I was hooked. I used to wish I had watched it when it first appeared in 1998 when I was 22 because I thought I might have been able to learn something from it? Like what? How to reject good men and be in a back and forth situationship with an emotionally unavailable man? Yip, I did that. Or how to have frivolous, emotionless sex with strange men and not give a sh1t? Hmmm - probably not. That’s the character I’m going to emotion coach today - Sam Jones.
Sex And The City was, still is, a huge success. A story about four single women all looking for love. Except one. Samantha Jones. Her “first love” was sex. Why? Is this normal for women? I’d say no, and it’s well documented that most women need to be loved to have sex, and men need to have sex to feel loved. I can’t help but wonder if her love of sex was actually an addiction. Was she using sex as a way to feed her ego, to give her self-worth and avoid a real, authentic secure emotional connection?
Sam appeared to be a woman who was disconnected from her emotions. How do we know this? If you haven’t seen SATC there is an episode where Miranda’s mother dies. We see Sam taking in the news and being shaken by it, but she immediately swallows her sadness, and brushes it under the rug - she is dismissive of those difficult emotions.
We again see her being disconnected from her emotions when she gets into a relationship with Richard. She fights them, scared to be vulnerable. The she decides she does love him, “Hi, I’m Samantha and I’m a love-a-holic.” Then he cheats on her and she enters into behaviour that is extreme - printing flyers and posting them around her neighbourhood and telling people that her ex cheated on her. They get back together and go to Atlantic City where she becomes obsessive and we see her following him around, her insecurities bubbling to the surface until this time, she does end it. What we don’t ever see is her taking responsibility for choosing him. It was her choice to be with a man who mirrored her emotionally unavailable energy.
Then she meets Smith who seems to bring her more into her emotional world. But it starts as a sexual connection, a message I personally don’t believe is healthy for teenage girls and young women who are not making conscious choices about their mind and body and who they give those precious parts of themselves to.
We watch a scene with Charlotte pointing out that violence against women is a very serious issue, but Sam brushes it off as a fantasy and that all fantasies are healthy and harmless. Not when they are in pop culture or get into the wrong hands or are misunderstood by emotionally disconnected individuals.
I heard a story about a young couple who were in a hotel for her 21st birthday, and he was choking her because there is a narrative circulating that it increases orgasm. The police were called as a member of staff heard noises as they were walking by the room. The girl was blaming herself, “it’s my fault, he didn’t mean it.” Perhaps he didn’t but it was not her fault. They were not emotionally mature enough to be engaging in something rough and potentially life-threatening. Choking has been normalised through the sordid corridors of the ‘sex industry’, which finds its way into pop culture with subtle cues that go by unnoticed and treated as being innocent. A good time to remember that the adolescent brain is still forming up until the age of 24.
Sam and Smith become closer as she helps him to become a star, and she finally opens up to him and has a loving relationship with an emotionally available man. We see her soften. By the time we get to the Sex and the City movie, they have moved to LA and she ends their relationship claiming that she loves him, but she, “loves me more” and she has been in a relationship with herself for 49 years and that’s the one she needs to work on. This statement could suggest that she was making unconscious choices about her life and needs to connect to herself.
What if Sam Jones had emotion coached herself? Was she really happy with a life of sex without commitment? Perhaps. But she is a very emotionless, matter-of-fact character.
In order to use emotion coaching on ourselves as adults, we first need to recognise that our behaviours are not serving us. For Sam Jones, she seemed to be quite happy to have non-committal, casual sex with no emotional connection until we learn that her heart was broken by a man before Richard who she never talks about. Did she turn towards casual sex as a way to avoid her emotions and to protect herself from being hurt again?
If she had used emotion coaching to figure herself out, she might never have got involved with Richard, her energy would not have matched his emotional unavailability. She wouldn’t have gone up the lift with him into a bathroom to be f*cked by him, her face dejected staring back at her in the mirror, as Smith waits on her in the lobby, as he wants to make sure she gets home ok. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I hate myself for doing this to you”, she says stepping out of the lift, her eyes wet after her brief, perfunctory encounter with a man who treated her poorly. Carrie narrates that it was the first time she saw him, which in itself is toxic, as he was consistently good to her.
In real life, leading with sex is a red flag. I don’t care what toxic messages have been dispensed about women’s sexual liberation equaling promiscuity or drunken impulsive sex, there is no girl or woman I have ever known who has been able to disconnect emotions from sex or who has had a one night stand, FWB, or a casual sex without the aid of alcohol or other substance. I’m sure they are out there, and if those choices are not masking insecurity, low self-esteem or a need to gain the attention of a man or as a way to make him like her, then that’s great for them and there is no judgement here.
What I challenge is messaging being used by society to trick girls and young women into thinking that they need to do something they would rather not in order to be ‘cool’ or that if they don’t they are frigid or a prude or boring. Or that they are doing something that doesn’t feel good to them because they have been conditioned to pander to men, and society and the education system does not talk anywhere near enough about emotions-first sex and how to have strong boundaries that align with our own set of values and morals. And that the adolescent brain is highly influenced between 12-24 years of age by what goes on outside the parental home, more than what happens inside it.
I wonder what Kim Cattral thinks of the character now that she’s older and wiser?
To peace and prosperity,
jaxx x
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