What's wrong with living like a fictional character?

Ann Althouse has had a couple of interesting posts up the last few days about people who were so inspired by Sex and the City that they tried to have the life. She frames this as "living like a fictional character". I think someone could reasonably accuse me of sometimes promoting living like a fictional character in writing about Mad Men Brideshead Revisited and the novels of Jane Austen. What's my response?

The first thing I'd note is that the people (some of them men) who sought to live Carrie's life as depicted in Sex and the City were inspired more by the life than the character. Carrie gets lots of sex and romance and, while she doesn't have much money, she gets to do a lot of things that cost a lot of money in New York City. How exactly she manages that is not entirely clear although her willingness to have sex with men who will pick up the tab has something to do with it.

And that raises an issue that is worth discussing. Carrie Bradshaw trades sex for what she wants. She likes sex and would probably do it anyway but it's part of the deal. You might be tempted to dismiss her on those grounds but I don't think that's fair. Jane Austen is far less explicit about it but all her heroines are offering sex as part of the deal. One of her characters is named "Fanny Price" and it's interesting to speculate whether Austen made the pun intentionally (in British English, "fanny" carries the same connotations as "pussy" does in North American English) but only a willfully blind reader could miss that whom one has sex with and under what conditions one has this sex is a central issue for Jane Austen's characters.

Someone could be attracted to Don Draper or Charles Ryder because they want the life rather than because they want to acquire the sort of moral character these men have. Both have money and get lots of sex and romantic adventure. Both also, like Carrie Bradshaw, pursue marriage although, and this is very important, we don't see their actually getting it as essential to their personal development the way we do with Carrie.

Althouse remarks, 'I got to that article via Instapundit who seems to accept Allison's blaming "Sex and the City" for the fact that Allison's career of being a Carrie type eventually got played out.' Glen Reynolds and I, both men, see something Althouse doesn't here. Are we right or is Althouse?

In any case, it seems pretty clear that seeking the life is eminently mockable as Althouse claims. Oddly enough, this isn't because you can't have it. Most people don't get to live the life but it is possible for those who are good looking and intelligent. An ex-girlfriend of mine who is roughly Carrie's contemporary lived a rough approximation of it with the singular difference that the guy she ultimately married isn't fabulously wealthy. The first Althouse post was in response to an article by a woman named Julia Allison who said she had lived the life but that it was a lie. The funny thing, for me, is that it does not seem to have been a lie to me when I read the article. She got all the things that Carrie got. Except Mr. Big that is. Here are two facts about Julia for your consideration.

1. The first sentence of her Wikipedia profile with added emphasis on one word: "Julia Allison (born Julia Allison Baugher on February 28, 1981) is a former journalist, television commentator, public speaker and BRAVO star."
2. If you do the math, Julia Allison is 37 years old.

In real life, the physical attractiveness that makes such a life possible for some women depreciates steadily after age 25 no matter how carefully it is managed while the wealth that makes the men attractive to them often does appreciate if carefully managed.

Years ago I read a study that had been done of adolescent conversation patterns. There was something that girls tended to do a lot more than boys, although boys did it sometimes. That something was to gauge what was the best behaviour by observing the way your friends react to stories you tell about what others have done. Fifteen-year old Cindy tells her friends that another girl she knows texted a nude picture of herself to a boy. The other girl can be real, someone she made up or a real girl about whom she has made stuff up. Whether her friends approve or disapprove will determine whether Cindy would consider doing likewise.

When you get right down to it, that's how every episode of Sex and the City works. You have Carrie who is attempting to live what the show's creators, and a lot of women of my generation, believed to be a life that balances feminism and femininity or, to put it in virtue ethics language: who tries to be a) a good woman and b) good at being a woman. To help us gauge her success, she tells stories about her three friends. On the show's terms, success is to be a feminist and still get lots of good sex, glamour, romance and, ultimately, a happy marriage. And the contrasting characters? Miranda is feminist but is reserved both sexually and romantically. Charlotte and Samantha both err in being post-feminist. In addition, Charlotte is sexually reserved while Samantha is romantically reserved. The dramatic tension turned on the fact that the show's fans all wanted to be Carrie but were scared of actually turning out to be a Miranda, a Charlotte or a Samantha.

Like all good fiction, character is what counts. All the women pursue sex and romance and get a lot of both. We judge them on the character they develop from those experiences more than the individual choices they make. That is as it should be.

My judgments? I've met Carries, Mirandas, Charlottes and Samanthas in my life. To be blunt, the one I'd be most interested in having a friendship or relationship with is Charlotte. I think Charlotte and Miranda would both make good bosses or coworkers while Carrie would be incompetent and untrustworthy and Samantha would be manipulative and untrustworthy. That said, as noted above, I once was in a serious relationship with a Carrie. I think you could marry a Samantha and manage happiness although you could never trust her. You could easily manage a happy marriage with a Miranda; the potential difficulty would not be trusting her so much as living up to her standards. In the end I married a Charlotte and there was nothing accidental about that. Long before Sex and the City debuted I had decided what I sort of person I wanted to marry and I found her, something that still seems miraculous to me. I'm not alone in my preferences. Charlotte is far and away the most attractive character for all the men I have ever discussed the show with. If there is a central lie about Sex and the City it is that the show never gives Charlotte much of a chance for happiness while my experience is that the women most likely to be happy in life are Charlottes. (And I'd say that the chances for happiness following her are, in descending order, Miranda, Samantha, Carrie.) But ... so what? If a woman really wants to be more of Samantha or a Carrie or, to put it another way, if she thinks those lives are morally superior to Charlotte's life, she will make her own choice.

Let's go back to Don Draper and Charles Ryder for a moment. As noted above, both are unmarried at the end of the stories they feature in. In addition, neither has done a lot to make himself marriageable. Our notion of what makes a satisfactory story arc for a man doesn't require marriage at the end of the rainbow. The makers of Sex and the City seemed to think that Carrie's story did require that. We might object, and a lot of people did, but none of us has made successful TV shows and/or movies. Is there as much of a market for female heroines whose story arcs are indifferent to marriage as there is for male heroes? You can probably guess my answer but, again, so what? Your answer is the one that should matter to you.

How does it feel to be Stephen Hawking?

Stephen Hawking has been engaging in some deep thinking lately. Here are a few samples:

... our genetic code carries selfish and aggressive instincts that were a survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next 100 years let alone the next thousand or a million.

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain on planet Earth but to spread into space.

But I am an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries our species should be safe as we spread into space

I had the great privilege of studying with William Dray and I remember him saying once that it is fascinating that when great physicists start talking about the big questions outside Physics they inevitably end up sounding like philosophy undergrads who have just smoked a joint while reading Horton Hears a Who.*

I don't mean that as the put down it might come across as. Professor Dray's point, and mine, is that these questions are great equalizers. Being really, really smart doesn't make questions regarding the meaning and purpose of life any easier to answer and being an Albert Einstein or a Stephen Hawking doesn't give these guys any significant advantages over Deepak Chopra or Shirley MacLaine.

And if we devote much time or energy to the pronouncements above, we will see that any first year student, once the effects of the joint had worn off, could blow them to bits logically and they'd be absolutely correct to do so.

For starters, who exactly do you mean as "we" Kimosabe Hawking? You and me, we're going to be dead. What comfort is there exactly in knowing that the human race will survive for a few hundred more years? Neither of us will be there.

Underlying everything Hawking says are some stunningly naive articles of faith. There is a faith that the future will be exactly like the past. Just as European civilization survived by colonizing the Americas, so too will earth's civilization survive by colonizing space. Just as technology has overcome problems in the past, so too will "we" use technology to move somewhere else when the earth comes to an end. No doubt when the universe also comes to an end billions of years from now "we" will have thought of a way to colonize another universe.

Why does he believe these things? Well, put yourself in his wheelchair, you'd want to believe in something wouldn't you?

But the very science that Hawking champions tells us that the odds against pulling off what he hopes for are well, astronomical. We do not know of a single other planet that could support human life. Even if there is such a planet, the odds are that it will be so far away we will A) never find it and B) never be able to get there even if we did find it.

Evolution is true but it is only true in certain fairly narrow conditions and the only place we know of where these conditions hold is on the earth. Species adapt but they only do so so long as the sun continues to beam the right amount of energy onto exactly the right sort of planet and only so long as one of the trillions of pieces of heavy stuff floating around in space doesn't crash into that planet. The sun would only have to change a little bit, relatively speaking, for all life here to begin, slowly or quickly, dying off.

The fact that this is the only place life exists that we know of, tells us that the odds against life surviving are very high. We are a bizarre fluke in a universe that has no place for us.

When my mother died a little more than a year ago, I found myself talking to another relative who was simply stunned at her faith. He kept saying that he didn't know how she kept on believing 'til the bitter end (and it was bitter). I said to him, "The thing about my mother was that she really believed what she really believed."

The stunning thing about Stephen Hawking is that he really doesn't. The science Hawking professes to believe in says that the odds that the human race will come to an end are almost certain. In the face of this, he comes up with a lot of sophomoric nonsense to help him deny his own beliefs. And he has done so for so long now that it would be cruel to tell him that the possibility that the universe came out of nothing, far from refuting Christianity, is actually a central tenet of the faith.

And yet, somewhere in all this there is the wonderful truth that happiness matters to Hawking. It matters a whole lot to him that people he does not know who will live far off in the future will thrive and seek happiness. There is absolutely no scientific or logical reason to believe that. There might be some genetic urge to wish for this survival but Hawking doesn't believe there is anything necessarily good about the genetic code. And yet the possibility of human happiness really matters to him to the point that he hopes it goes on after he and everyone he knows has died.



* That's my metaphor. Professor Dray said something more like "it's like Philosophy 101 at a high level, like students discussing metaphysics after their third beer."