(For those totally unfamiliar with the entire Sex and the City franchise, a sincere congratulations. Stop reading. Seriously, enough. Get off of this page. Click here instead. You'll thank me.)

          Faster than Cynthia Nixon's agent can say "Cynthia's free for a third go-around if anyone else is, by the way" returns the Hindenburg that is the Sex and the City film franchise. Indeed, today marks the debut of Sex and the City's cleverly-titled sequel, Sex and the City 2, starring four women who are good at nothing except making everyone with the slightest bit of depth angry at their continued and unfathomable pop-culture relevance.

          Sure, it's become somewhat trite and definitely easy to take shots at the ladies - particularly Sarah Jessica Parker, who looks like what Alec Baldwin turns into at the end of "Beetlejuice".
  

(That WAS easy!)

         But listen - there was a day where I actually sat and watched the first movie on HBO. I did. All the way through. Mind you, this was during a phase of my life where I was extremely unemployed and my day took on some chronological form of food consumption, midday naps, masturbation, "looking for jobs" and playing with my dog. When I woke up before 10am, that was considered an accomplishment on par with some form of company promotion. If I put on anything other than sweatpants, my parents (whom I lived with sans paying rent) assumed that meant I had big plans for that day. Here's the point: It wouldn't have taken much to entertain me for three hours on a Tuesday afternoon.

         Put it this way - it's very difficult to make me angry; after those three hours, I made this kid look like a little girl getting a puppy on Christmas morning:



         

             So yeah, the movie was bad. But was it bad enough to directly affect the societal progress women as a whole have made in the last 200 years? In his essay The Hurt Knockers: Feminine Origami Folding Under the Pressures of Everyday Life, Associate Assistant to the Deputy Vice President of the Ancillary Studies of Women at The University of El Paso Online, Sir Dr. Ryan A. Walls argues,

         While most historians and current members of the neo-fem movement would argue that this movie endorses women's rights and promotes the empowerment of women, I would have to say that not since November 1988 when Senator Harlan Chubbsby (D-LA) attempted to pass legislation to enforce women to ride sidesaddle on all moving objects (bicycles, cars, trains, skis, etc) has the women's movement been so threatened. By elevating an individual like Sarah Jessica Parker to the level of spokesperson for this new generation of free thinking women, the mainstream media and everyone who buys a ticket might as well be paving the glass ceiling over with broken glass -infused cement; hell, you might as well feed Hillary Clinton Susan B. Anthony's ashes, then toss her IN the wet cement. Anyone who sees this movie has blood on their hands. Women everywhere should use their right to choose (While they still have it! Watch your back Alito!) to go see something else instead, or maybe just stay at home and after you've cooked dinner, rent 'Confessions of a Shopaholic'.      
        
        Sir Ryan's arguments hit home on many levels. But EXACTLY how much have women been set back by the four horse-faces of the apocalypse? Scientists have been baffled for generations asking this question; here at Shatterfaced, we're not so confused. By creating an easily quantifiable mathematical equation, it quickly becomes quite simple:

(Domestic Gross of the first Sex and the City film) x (Number of seasons for the Sex and the City television series)
                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
 ((Amelia Earhart's speed record) X (Billie Jean King's margin of victory over Bobby Riggs) X (The length, in seconds, of the Kim Kardashian sex tape) X (Diane Lane's Age)), penalized - 30 million points for Sarah Palin's rise to prominence

or...

152,647,258 x 6
                                                           = 13.205 years
(((184) (8) (1500) (45))  - 30,000,000)


Yep, thanks to Sex and the City, women have traveled back to the dark, dark ages of March of 1997. Look in the mirror, Sarah Jessica Parker. You did this. You.

SOURCE - WALLS: The Hurt Knockers: Feminine Origami Folding Under the Pressures of Everyday Life (2007, Highlights for Kids). All rights reserved.