when you clone an article again and again, the dna begins to mutate

Another SATC article in the NY Times. But this one goes where no SATC article has gone before.

One of the more unusual views of the show's appeal is held by Elaine Showalter, author of "Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage." "This show is a total fantasy space in which you ward off danger with clothes," she says, theorizing that the characters' Prada handbags and Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo shoes are really fetishes to guard against the dangerous consequences of sexuality. She cites Freud's essay "The Medusa's Head," in which he uses the term "apotropaic" — from the Greek, meaning safeguarding against evil.

"In my view, the world has not changed all that much," she says. Female sexuality is still punished. "If you look at the newspapers it doesn't seem to have changed — this female body found, that one raped," she says. "I do think the cultural message of the show is about what feminists used to call `pleasure and danger.' It's about sexual adventurousness and its risks."

The "Sex and the City" syndrome seems not quite so dangerous — or symbolic — for Constance Penley, a professor of film studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of "NASA/Trek, Popular Science and Sex in America," a study of erotic fantasies about the "Star Trek" series. Like traditional romance novels, she says, "Sex and the City" is all about women trying to understand men, or "the semiotics of masculinity."