When helpfully reminding me of the fact that one of these columns was due today (owning, I imagine, to an imagined case of barbeque-induced amnesia) Steve, my co-loser and boss, suggested that, if I didn’t have time to finish, I could just write the first paragraph and pass it around for the rest of the office to finish, telephone-style.

“It can’t be hard,” he said. “I just have to talk about geisha girls and tequila shots. Heh, nah, not even you could figure out how to work them into a fitness column.”

Oh, ye of little faith.

Shockingly, I was already thinking about geishas earlier this week. Or, more broadly, standards of beauty derived from Japanese visual culture. This occurred because, I think, I am the only human being in America without a Y chromosome who has absolutely no interest in seeing the Sex and the City movie. (Has this been random enough yet? Trust me, I have a point).

 Anyway, yes, Sex and the City. Call me antediluvian, but I don’t see what a bunch of self-involved bottle blondes reducing themselves to paper dolls chasing after men and Jimmy Choos has to do with feminism. Or entertainment. But as I said, I’m apparently the only woman in America this connection is lost on, because the women in the show are on the cover of absolutely every magazine right now. And they’re, to put it indelicately, old.

I have nothing against people over 40, as long as they’re not asking me to fix their computer, but yes, Sarah Jessica Parker has one or two more crow’s feet than Katie Holmes or Scarlett Johansson. Not that you’d know it from most of the cover shots...because it seems that any property worth its ill-deserved feminist cred needs to be represented by women airbrushed to plastic sheen, with their waists reduced through the magic of Photoshop to proportions last seen in a Studio Gainax title featuring an octopus.

Sex and the City may not have had anything to do with feminism during its TV run, but the movie could have justified its existence if it showed four women getting old unapologetically, wearing their wrinkles like warpaint and notching their bedposts like Mata Hari with a bottle of fiber supplements. Doesn’t look that way. I wonder if the inevitable sequel will show them getting Botox and silicone facial injections.

Where did it come from, this obsession with bony, childish smoothness? I’m 26 and I have more wrinkles than Kim Cattrall does in her publicity pictures. And she was playing a Vulcan when I was still in elementary school. I don’t know if I can answer my own rhetorical question; obviously America has always had a fascination with youth, but if you look at pinup art from the ‘50’s the women are curvy, almost plump, and their faces bend in a natural fashion. So it must have come since then, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume fascination with geisha and other eastern things might have played a part.

I first learned about geisha by reading a book called Geisha, A Life, an autobiography by Mineko Iwasaki, who was probably the most famous geiko of her day. I found it fascinating and horrifying at the same time...much like my reaction, now that I think about it, to Sex and the City. In fact, in a lot of ways Iwasaki’s life parallels Carrie Bradshaw’s.

Both are ostensibly involved in creative professions, but most of their time seems to be taken up with getting dressed in needlessly complicated outfits, dealing with catty, jealous professional rivals, and engaging in complex relationships with men. Sure, I’d rather wear a kimono than a Vera Wang sheath, so that probably prejudices me a little bit in Iwasaki’s favor, but on the other hand Carrie Bradshaw wasn’t sold to a tea house at the age of five.

This was the stuff, aside from the shallowness, that really got me; how restrictive and serious the geisha life was and at what ages. I guess the only comparable experience would be to be a prima ballerina in one of the really exclusive European touring companies; Iwasaki never finished school and was a professional maiko by age 15. By 30 she had retired, having worked herself half bald and into a two month hospital stay from kidney failure.

Along the way, she transitioned from maiko to geiko at 17; that means, according to the standards of beauty held for geisha, she was no longer young enough to appear in public in her own face. She had to paint it white at all times, with paint thick enough to fill in any wrinkle. When wearing the paint, you can’t open your mouth wide enough to eat (geisha are never supposed to be seen eating) and even talking is hard.

Think about it. At an age when girls are still considered too young to marry in America, geisha are considered so old they can’t walk down the street without a pound of face spackle. I can only assume that the Japanese, if they stumbled upon an untranslated copy of the Sex and the City movie, would imagine they were watching a postmodern production of MacBeth which only featured the Witches running around in flower pins.

This is probably not fair, but very little in the realm of stadards of beauty is. And, as you may have noticed (if you were looking closely), I get the teensiest bit annoyed when anyone in pop culture, Western or Eastern, tries to present a ridiculously restrictive standard of beauty as the sine qua non for women, and if you’re outside size 4 (or over 17 years old) you’re unacceptable. Particularly if they also try to bill themselves as feminist - which both Sex and the City and, to a lesser extent, Iwasaki try to do.

Although,  guess I would have to acknowledge one good thing Sex and the City did. Naturally, I’m talking about alcohol. Before Sex and the City, I think there was a preconception that it wasn’t very ladylike to drink. Wine might perenially have a pass, as long as it was cheap, pink, and came free with a never-ending pasta bowl at the Olive Garden. Ditto for (gag) wine coolers, or their red-headed stepchildren the malt beverage.

This baffles me. I do know the historical connections between women’s and temperance movements, but come on. This isn’t the Depression. We’ve learned to vote and wear pants, we should at least get to knock back a sidecar every now and then, if for no other reason than liquor is the best diet aid known to man. As long as you don’t tart it up with a bunch of sugar syrup and fruit juice, mixed drinks are low in calories, low in carbohydrates and the buzz you get off them isn’t the kind that usually lends itself to ordering bucket chicken at three a.m.

So Sex and the City comes along, and all its hyperfemale characters drink hard liquor all the time, and suddenly every girl I know is throwing out their Arbor Mist and learning to order martinis. On the whole, I’d have to call this a good thing. It does have its drawbacks - being the only girl at the party willing to do tequila shots with the boys does give you a certain je ne sais quas (HAH! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Steve). And if I wax too rhapsodic about the psychosocial benefits of alcohol I realize I’m going to sound like a slightly crazy person.

So instead I’ll say this; the well-mixed cocktail has always been a bit of a gentleman’s club thing. They’re the stuff of three-gin business lunches, rewards for finishing the back nine. If women can learn to imbibe with the same facility as their male colleagues, well, that’s a wall of separation knocked down. Never a bad thing.

So thank you, Sex and the City, for making sure that I can get a decent Cosmopolitan at even the scuzziest backwoods, cat-hair-strewn watering hole in Appalachia.