Brain or bimbo?

Bushnell’s latest book, Lipstick Jungle, adds a decade of age and success — thinly disguised beneath new names and characters — to the lovelorn likes of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte, Bushnell’s Sex and the City heroines.

The scenario could scarcely be more appealing to anyone who followed the tortured antics of New York’s most celebrated thirtysomething manhunters. Did those gloriously glamorous party girls ever find a way of combining babies and success? Nowadays there is a new question in the equation, however. What is to become of the new generation of post-Sex and the City party girls, who were too young to have fun in the Nineties but now head off to distant beaches to get drunk and sleep with whoever they fancy — including, often enough, each other? Bushnell is just one voice in this debate, as I discovered when I set out to discover What Women Want.

The good news for Bushnell’s admirers is that Lipstick Jungle’s women are older, richer and even more fabulously costumed than Sex and the City’s, with ruthless ambitions and flawed behaviour that neatly reverse traditional male/female roles. The bad news is that money and success don’t seem to help when it comes to solving women’s life/work dilemmas.

Bushnell’s latest trio of heroines are led by Wendy Healy, an Oscar-nominated film producer and workaholic whose three children ignore her and whose husband wants a divorce.

Victory Ford is a neurotic unmarried fashion designer whose futile pursuit of New York’s most eligible bachelors has got her nowhere and whose latest clothing collection has suffered scathing reviews. Nico O’Neilly is a cutthroat magazine editor manoeuvring furiously for the chief executive’s job while cheating on her husband with a male underwear model.

Isn’t it a bit depressing, I suggested to Bushnell, that after all that agonising in their twenties and thirties, her characters, now wealthy and in their forties, still haven’t escaped the pressures of relationships, family and careers? There isn’t a truly happy woman among them.

“Whether or not the audience finds it depressing, the characters don’t have it all figured out,” she acknowledged in her gravel-voiced drawl. “But that’s the reality of life”.

It’s enough to make any young woman pour another margarita and head for Ibiza for a spot of mindless sex with a man she won’t ever see again. If relationships are really such a burden to ambitious working women, why bother to get serious about men at all? Why not just slake your lust on an occasional holiday Spaniard? Better read Female Chauvinist Pigs first. Ariel Levy, a spirited 30-year-old journalist, casts a sceptical eye in this new book on women who claim the path to liberation involves silicone breast implants and lots of casual sex.

While Bushnell is preoccupied with the rarefied pleasures of Jimmy Choo-wearing, chauffeur-driven female executives lunching at Cipriano’s, Levy is concerned about the broader mass of ordinary working women whose lives seem to have taken a tawdry turn in the pursuit of purpose and pleasure.

Levy calls it “raunch” culture, a phenomenon she studied in America but which increasingly seems also to apply in Britain. It’s a world where young women gaily flash their breasts in public places. They wear T-shirts that say Porn Star or have the Playboy bunny emblazoned across the chest. They enjoy going to strip clubs — as patrons, not performers. They simulate sex — and sometimes don’t simulate — for baying crowds of young men.

Levy thinks they have mistakenly concluded that raunch culture is cool, that it’s “a way both to flaunt your coolness and to mark yourself as different, tougher, looser, funnier”.

Levy, like Bushnell, is part of an intriguing tide of what might be described as post-feminist angst — a sense among many educated women that for all their advances in the pursuit of equality, the ghosts of a chauvinist past still haunt them.

“I’m just against a culture-wide obligation for women to have to look and act like porn stars,” says Levy. “We’re saying to men, well, you’re going to have to compete with me for a job and a university place and a (pay) raise, but don’t worry, there’s a porn star buried within me.

“But porn stars by definition are women whose job it is to imitate sexual pleasure. And acting and imitating sexuality is not the same as experiencing it. It ends up being a very boring and limiting situation for both men and women.”

Barely a week goes by in America without another new voice expressing concern about the continuing sexual and professional dilemmas that remain stubbornly unresolved.

Take the case of Terry Martin Hekker, a sixtysomething grandmother who caused a nationwide stir in America when she declared before Christmas that she had made a terrible mistake with her life. In 1977, when the women’s liberation movement was at its most vocal, Hekker published a dissenting commentary in The New York Times, insisting that women did not need to work to be happy.

“I wrote it from my heart,” she recalled the other day. “I was thoroughly convinced that homemaking and raising my children was the most challenging and rewarding job I could ever want.”

She became a well travelled spokeswoman for the stay-at-home brigade, and wrote a successful book encouraging women not to feel guilty about looking after husbands and homes.

Then, on her 40th wedding anniversary, her husband dumped her for a younger woman. She found herself abandoned with no marketable skills. She sold her engagement ring to pay for repairs to her roof.

The experience persuaded Hekker that she had been wrong to commit her life to being a wife. “I have eight granddaughters, and I think they should all have an education that will allow them to have a safety net, because you’re going to need it,” she said. “I just was so unprepared”.

Hekker’s words have echoed in the debate over what exactly it means to be a feminist these days, and whether a woman who decides to be a housewife can in any way be said to have made a feminist choice.

In a long essay in The American Prospect magazine last month Linda Hirshman, a former Brandeis University professor working on a book about “marriage after feminism”, launched a scathing attack on what have become known as “choice” feminists.

If staying at home was a real choice, Hirshman argued, a lot more men would choose it too. Angered by surveys indicating that half the wealthiest, best-educated women in America had “chosen” to stay at home with their babies rather than go back to work, she dismissed arguments that the trend is a “feminist option” and questioned whether any woman at home could truly be said to be “flourishing”.

“The family, with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks, is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or government,” she wrote. “This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust.”

When I canvassed women acquaintances last week about what they wanted most from their lives, one of them replied: “More ice-cream”. She was joking — I think — but many other women prefer to dodge the babies v careers question. “I’ll think about it only if I have to” is a common refrain.

Yet the one thing that links the fiction of Bushnell, the reportage of Levy, the real-life experiences of Hekker and the academic studies of Hirshman is a shared belief that all women badly need better information about the dilemmas they may all one day face.

“Women who want to have sex and children with men, as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power, need guidance and they need it early,” concludes Hirshman. A lack of that guidance may be encouraging the reckless raunch that Levy suggests is a warning sign of how much women still have to learn.

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THE first page of Female Chauvinist Pigs contains the words lap dance, orgasm, babes, undulating and jiggle. The second page mentions Brazilian bikini waxes, feminist strippers and Pamela Anderson, the pneumatic American sexpot.

It occurred to me too late that a crowded Greenwich Village cafe was possibly not the most private place to talk to Levy about women and sex. When she launched into an animated discussion of the clitoral orgasm, our neighbours’ heads swivelled.

Levy’s interest in her subject was first piqued by cable television programmes “explaining how best to lap dance a man to orgasm”. She sat bewildered through episodes of a wildly popular MTV show called Girls Gone Wild, featuring college students partying — and humping — at the beach. It will appear on British television soon.

Girls Gone Wild, as Levy described it, is “composed entirely from footage of young women flashing their breasts, their buttocks, or occasionally their genitals at the camera, and usually shrieking ‘Whoo!’ while they do it”.

Add to all that a recent surge of enthusiasm among women for what Levy calls “torpedo” breast implants and she began to wonder, “why were women into this, what were women getting from this?” She went on: “How had we all accepted that this was totally fine, and evidence of the (success) of the women’s movement, when in fact it looked to me like the antithesis of the women’s movement? Raunchy and liberated are not synonyms.”

Levy took her questions to Sheila Nevins, a powerful television executive. Her programmes have won 13 Hollywood Oscars and 71 television Emmy awards, but she is also behind a show called G-String Divas, a semi-documentary featuring lots of scantily clad strippers detailing their exotic sex lives.

Feted by adoring women at a lunch in her honour in New York, Nevins was surprised by a single female questioner who wanted to know why such an influential figure had chosen to devote her formidable creative powers to producing a show about strippers.

“You’re talking Fifties talk! Get with the programme,” Nevins retorted, according to Levy. “I love the sex stuff, I love it! The women are beautiful and the men are fools. What’s the big deal?” For Levy it makes no sense that a woman flaunting herself for the amusement of men — or watching other women do the same thing — could possibly be enjoying “the most authentic, pleasurable, liberating expression of her sexuality”.

She believes that the waning of feminist influence over the past two decades or more has left today’s generation of young women without a helpful ideological framework to guide their choices about sexual behaviour.

Many young American women don’t know what feminism means and rarely attempt to analyse their own actions and desires, she claims. Instead, “it’s obviously, well, I must do that because that’s what everyone else is doing”.

The female chauvinist pig, according to Levy, “has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn’t mind cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality and she doesn’t mind a cartoonishly macho response to them . . . we are all Tarzan now, or at least we are all pretending to be”.

Yet something about the tarty new Janes just doesn’t add up for Levy. “Women are gradually penetrating the highest level of the workforce,” she writes. “We get to go to college and play sports and be secretary of state. But to look around, you’d think all any of us want to do is rip off our clothes and shake (our bodies).”

There was no “Eureka” moment when Levy woke up and suddenly realised that women were losing the feminist plot; it seems to have been the cumulative effect of — among many others — Britney Spears and her musical gyrations, Paris Hilton and her home sex videos, and the Hollywood soft-porn remake of the television series Charlie’s Angels — “the quintessential jiggle show”, says Levy.

She also found that the women around her were developing unexpected enthusiasms. Some of her female friends liked going to strip clubs for men. Her best friend from her liberal arts university — where “you could pretty much get expelled for saying ‘girl’ instead of ‘woman’” — became obsessed with pornography.

One of the first things Levy encountered when she started exploring the “raunch” phenomenon was “this feeling you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting free-floating torpedo breasts”.

For all the warnings about the dangers of implants, breast augmentation surgery has increased in America 700% in the past 10 years. The same is true in Britain. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons revealed last week that boob jobs increased by 51% last year.

“This is serious surgery, but people were just doing it like it was not a big deal, and doing it more than once. And what does this say about women? That we all want to look plastic?” Levy says she spent two years interviewing hundreds of women for her book, “and I wouldn’t have written it this way if they were all really having fun”.

She acknowledges there may be women like Madonna who genuinely enjoy raunchiness. “Fantastic. I’m happy for them.” But she doubts that “the great majority of women . . . want to imitate strippers. It just doesn’t make any sense”.

There is another aspect of raunch that has not gone unnoticed. The rise of the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon has largely coincided with the spread of right-wing religious conservatism in American politics.

Levy has received numerous e-mails from right-wing Christians who mistakenly seem to believe she might be an ally in their campaigns for sexual abstinence. (What she really wants, as she announced in a loud voice in the restaurant, is for women to have better sex.)

BACK at the Soho House, Bushnell’s triple-decker sandwich had arrived. “I may have to tuck in a little, because if I don’t tuck in a little, I may, you know, fall over,” she said endearingly.

As most of her interviewers have noted, Bushnell looks every inch a character from Sex and the City. She is blonde, slender and gorgeous. We began by noting the fashion details that are apparently de rigueur for every article ever written about her.

Her black lace-trimmed shirt is by Carlos Miele, as is her skintight jeans. Her shoes are by Michael Kors. “They are old, kind of high-heeled snowboots,” she said, showing off the rubber soles. They are certainly the first snowboots I’ve ever seen with black stiletto heels.

Lipstick Jungle has not sold well in America – after a heavily hyped start it is languishing in 1,523rd place on the Amazon bestseller list. I suggested to Bushnell that while she captured the 1990s zeitgeist with Sex and the City (which spawned a library of so-called chick lit imitators), America may be tiring of stories about high-powered Manhattan women.

That could be bad news for the NBC network, which has signed up Bushnell to make a television version of Lipstick Jungle. Also overshadowing the venture is the success of the rival ABC network’s Desperate Housewives.

Has Bushnell been overtaken in the move to Wisteria Lane, the home of those desperate housewives? And does anyone in the real world still care about glamorous “poweristas” who seem to have it all yet who still make a mess of their personal lives? “My feeling is I’m writing about a new reality for women,” Bushnell declared. “There are a lot of role reversals in the book, you might like it or not but that is going to become more and more the reality of life. Women and men are going to be more equal in the sense that women are going to be the ones going to the office and men are going to be the ones staying at home taking care of the kids.”

She took a big chomp at her sandwich. “Sex and the City was a bit ahead of its time and I think Lipstick Jungle is too.”

Where Bushnell agrees with Levy — and many other post-feminists — is that women should think harder about the choices they face. In her twenties, Bushnell confesses, she was “incredibly confused, like all twentysomethings. One doesn’t understand where one fits in, what one is supposed to do.” In her thirties she was focused on her writing career.

By the time she met and married her husband, Charles Askegard, a 6ft 4in ballet dancer from Minneapolis — a literal Mr Big — she was in her forties and it was too late to have children. The couple were married in 2002 after a whirlwind seven-week romance.

“I found the right person and I was smart enough to marry him,” said Bushnell. “That might be the most important thing.”

At the same time she acknowledges that not every woman can wait that long and still hope to find the right man. “If you’re in your forties and you still have that kind of fantasy (about meeting Mr Big) you’re probably going to end up being a lonely and unhappy person,” she said.

None of which can be especially encouraging for any young woman beginning to consider her life choices, feminist or otherwise.

Like the women dreamt up by Bushnell who “don’t have it all figured out”, few of those interviewed by Levy have found easy answers to complicated lives. Yet if identifying a problem is a first step to solving it, the New York school of post-feminist writers has done everyone a favour.

“How to fix everything and make men and women actually equal and have women’s sexuality be as unencumbered as men’s? I don’t have the grand solution and nobody does,” said Levy. “But I do think in terms of recalibrating things. The best I could come up with was to write a book.”