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What is SO irritating about that dreadful H*dley Fr*eman take is that sadly it is indeed true that a show/film pitched at one demographic over another does affect how it is valued/ judged both critically and in popular culture 1/
Mark Kermode approaches this question from the other end with his take on the Twilight vs Transformers films, noting that the former series received far more opprobrium at the time than the latter probably due to their target demographics (Kermode famously hates Michael Bay) 2/
But that doesn’t mean you can just dismiss any cultural preference for show/film (a) over show/film (b) as resulting from sexism, especially when (a) & (b) are just completely different! As one comment I saw put it, if she’d compared SATC with Entourage she’d have had a point. 3/
What is immensely irritating is that being relentlessly dunked on for her terrible opinion will be used to justify her position: ‘see, look at all these misogynist Sopranos fanboys silencing this [Guardian opinion writer] woman for defending a women’s show!’ 4/
Assuming she is sincere, it is also another example of Guardian-type liberalism’s very bad - and bad faith - taste, that can only ‘allow’ enjoyment of something if one can ‘identify’ with it in a very narrow and superficial understanding of identity: 5/
To them SATC is ‘about’ women while Sopranos is ‘about’ men and, therefore, it *must* follow that they are *for* women and *for* men respectively. Let alone there being no consideration of class, race, sexuality (modern ‘liberal’ feminism for you), it’s just *so* reductive. 6/
It also works to ironically reinforce the inconsistencies I opened with: if you defend bad shows/films - and note this isn’t about SATC specifically!! - solely on the grounds that they are aimed at women, do you not risk perpetuating ‘women’s shows = bad’? 7/
Defend the good stuff! Make good art! Don’t pretend to like something out of narrow, infantile, middle-class political sensibilities: ‘ooh I ought to like/dislike that’ End/
