Novels about dating don't have to be full of sex, as Randa Abdel-Fattah explains.
Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of No
Sex in the City: "There are many paths to love, all equally valid, often
wonderful, and always
comedic"
In the television show, Sex in the
City, Carrie and her friends seem to have it all: successful
careers, deep pockets (of the designer kind) and sexual freedom. It says
something about the messages about feminism constructed in this popular series
when the main characters are all white, wealthy and sexually active.
I always found it odd that the series concentrated on the lives of four white
women in the most diverse city in the world. These women were depicted as the
ambassadors of "good" feminism, and any woman alienated by these women’s class
or lifestyles was assumed to nonetheless buy into their narratives because
Carrie and her friends’ search for Mr Right was arguably supposed to cut across
such social divides.
But what if their experiences don’t resonate? What if, in addition to class
and lifestyle, the very search for Mr Right plays out in very different ways, in
accordance with very different norms and values? In short what if the search for
Mr. Right involves no sex in the city?
I wrote No Sex in
the City because I wanted to present alternative
perspectives on the themes in the television series – friendship, the search for
a life partner, career fulfillment, sexuality as a single woman, family
politics, financial independence. My feisty and intelligent narrator, Esma, who
is Australian-born of Turkish Muslim background, is balancing her traditional
beliefs with modernity. Some of her lifestyle choices don’t conform to majority
Western norms, whether they be about dating, pre-marital sex or living with
one’s partner before marriage.
I set out to take a fun look at life and love from the point of view of four
young women in their late twenties who would be perceived by predominant Anglo
standards as quite conservative. By focusing on the lives of four women of
Muslim, Jewish, Greek-Orthodox and Hindu faith, I wanted to give space to a
diversity of experiences, as well as make it clear that there is no normative
"Muslim" or "Hindu" experience. But what inspired me even more as a story-teller
were the rich narrative possibilities that such experiences offered me, and how
I could draw on my own (and those of friends and family) to write an authentic
story about a dimension of "dating" that is grossly misunderstood or, worse,
fetishised as "exotic".
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