The Gold Digger Is Back With A Vengeance

Hot on the teetering heels of the Sex and the City movies comes a French film called Priceless, which is selling itself as a "fresh re-imagining of the cinema classic Breakfast at Tiffany's", a love story for our time: the romantic tale of a gold-digger and the poor waiter who falls for her.

The movie is billed as a "charming romantic comedy" and is about a woman who seduces a man for his wealth. The opening shots feature a familiar montage of purchasing porn: diamonds in shop cases, gold high heels, Chanel bags and a male hand putting down a credit card as it is caressed by a female one.

Unfortunately, when she finds out that he isn't the millionaire she mistook him for, our heroine embarks on a spite-fuelled shopping spree and bankrupts him. Before long he is learning under her expert tutelage how to become a gigolo - because nothing says I love you like his'n'her prostitution.

And real women are increasingly encouraged to do the same - with specialised dating websites, a host of 'how to' guides and T-shirts proclaiming the virtues of such a life.

Watching this film hard on the teetering heels of Sex and the City, it was impossible to miss the parallels between them, including not just their limitless faith in materialism, but also their eagerness to embrace archaic cliches about what women want - the same cliches women once worked so hard to overturn. We've come a long way, baby: right back to where we started.

The gold-digger is back - with a vengeance.

Not all the vengeance is as literal as in Priceless, of course, although grudge shopping seems to be an up-and-coming version of girl power, as in Blu Cantrell's empowering anthem from a few years back, Hit 'Em Up Style: "Hey Ladies / When your man wanna get buck-wild / Just go back and hit 'em up style / Put your hands on his cash / And spend it to the last dime / For all the hard times."

Although we might have hoped that she had retired, along with other tired misogynist stereotypes such as the bluestocking, the spinster and the crone, the gold-digger is alive and kicking, and enjoying quite a renaissance. Indeed, she's being embraced as a role model for our times.

Once a joke or a cautionary tale, today gold-digging is being offered as a viable career choice for women, viewed with a new regard, even glamour. High-end cosmetics line Laura Mercier has launched The Gold Digger Collection this summer so we can all look like one. Walk down the local high street and you're likely to see a young woman in a T-shirt proclaiming "Golddigga", or, for those who prefer a more formal approach, "Hello, My Name is Gold Digger".

You can purchase T-shirts online that say "Sugar Daddy", "I Love My Sugar Daddy", "Wanted: Sugar Daddy. Please Submit Bank Details Upon Application". This is supposed to be ironic, but would these same women wear a T-shirt emblazoned with "Prostitute"?

The distinction is little more than semantic, and entirely dependent on the antiquated moral system in which marriage alone confers respectability upon women. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the same website selling Sugar Daddy T-shirts also offers one with a mock-70s blaxploitation record emblem, "Slap-A-Hoe Tribe - Big Pimp Daddy", which was being offered at special prices for Father's Day (oh, the irony), suggesting some of the attitudes underlying all this raillery.

Spite and contempt are never far away: Kanye West's sarcastic single Gold Digger, one of the catchiest records in recent memory, and one of the few songs in history to sell more than 1m downloads in the United States, ends on a note of pure comeuppance: "But you stay right girl / And when you get on, he leave yo' ass for a white girl." There are gold- digger games and comic books and Halloween costumes.

It's probably human nature to take the path of least resistance, but of all the imaginable options for women in the so-called "developed" world, what does it say when gold-digging re-emerges as an ambition for today's discerning young woman? Girls all over the country aspire, without a hint of embarrassment, to a life of leisure "earned" through marriage.

In the space of a few years, Wag has devolved from being a term of derision into a beau ideal. There are websites to help gold-diggers meet their benefactors: DevilCalledLove.com, has more than 200,000 members.

The free dating site promises to introduce men and women to their "ideal companion": "We all know every girl dreams of being both spoiled and pampered by a true gentleman but you simply are not in an environment that allows you to meet this type of man. By joining we give you the chance to make this dream come true by enabling you to meet a wealthy man who will adhere to your specific wants, and treat you with the respect you deserve."

When did it become generally accepted that every girl dreams of being spoiled and pampered? Last year, MSNBC reported that in the US seminars were being offered "on marrying rich", using "a 14-point system" to help women snag multimillionaires.

Classes with titles such as "Gold Digging 101" are breathing new life into the old joke about women going to university to get an MRS degree. If you can't afford the seminars (which cost upwards of £300 an hour), you can buy advice manuals with titles such as How to Join the Club of the Rich and Famous, How to Marry Money and The Gold Digger's Guide: How to Marry the Man and the Money.

That title says it all: women are wedding themselves to commodities, because diamonds are a girl's best friend. The Russians are going a step further, evidently, with a veritable explosion of books teaching women how to catch an oligarch and become a "bitch" to be reckoned with, including Bitches' Table Book, Bitch Seeks Man and The Bitch's Beginner Course.

The beginner course for a whole generation of English-speaking women on both sides of the Atlantic was, of course, Sex and the City, a television series that began, like Priceless, with the presumption that Breakfast at Tiffany's is what women really, really want.

But in both the book and the 1961 film, Tiffany's was primarily a symbol of security, a place where "nothing very bad could happen to you". The modern gold-digger tale takes the metaphor and reduces it to its most crassly literal level.

For all that the series Sex and the City insisted it was about women trying to juggle careers with romance, its opening voice-over was a string of longing references to stories about women who use sex to get ahead: "Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at 7am, and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount.

Cupid has flown the co-op. How the hell did we get into this mess?"By wishing for a world that died out half a century ago, for the most part: all of these stories, from The Age of Innocence to An Affair to Remember, are about sexual economics, in which manipulative women trap deluded men or kept women meet the gigolos of their dreams and are reformed by love.

In his 1958 novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote has Holly Golightly describe the distinction she makes between herself and "whores": "Some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts. I mean, you can't bang the guy and cash his cheques and at least not try to believe you love him."

Fifty years later, and Sex and the City is making the same disingenuous bargain, convincing itself that banging men and cashing their cheques is love.The immense success of Sex and the City has shocked Hollywood with the unsuspected fact that women-and older women at that!-can actually make a film a hit, if you give them something they want to see. With such an attitude, it's hardly surprising that Sex and the City represents the best on offer.

The belated opening of Priceless, which was released two years ago, looks like an attempt to capitalise on the Sex and the City effect. Since Priceless is French, it responds to its heroine's choices with a little Gallic shrug.

In fact, it can't think of any other choices. In a climactic scene in which her erstwhile sugar daddy locks her out of their hotel room on the French Riviera, our heroine is left shivering for a few hours in a bikini by the pool, before being rescued, at which point she says tragically: "I can't go on. The pool was too tough. I can't end up like that again. I'd rather ..."

Our hero breaks in, asking her how he can help; we never find out what she'd rather do, but presumably it didn't involve getting an actual job. The idea that shivering by a pool in a bikini constitutes the acme of suffering says it all. It reminded me of nothing so much as Heather Mills, having just been awarded £24.3m, insisting, "If I was a gold-digger, I would be a very wealthy woman now. And I'm not."

Sex and the City has a more conflicted relationship to women, power, sex and money than Priceless or Heather Mills - that damn Puritan work ethic keeps getting in the way of all the fun. It's an odd experience watching a film in denial, much like seeing a person in a destructive relationship: Sex and the City doesn't think it's about gold-digging, but its women have only two interests, which it announces in the film's opening frames: "labels and love".

The more the film insists that it is about true love, the more it offers a vision of happiness defined by a rich man giving a woman a beautiful apartment, a giant closet and shoes.The TV series was considerably more realistic, and less insulting, in its assessment of its women's desires. When Carrie first met Mr Big, in the early episodes of the show, she described him as "major tycoon, major dreamboat, and majorly out of my league".

The series regularly poked fun at ladies who lunch, but the film has transformed all four of its aspiring middle-class career girls into a retrograde image of high society. It's a depressing spectacle, in large part because Sex and the City has defined aspirational femininity for a whole generation of women.

Until Sarah Jessica Parker made them an object of desire, most middle-class women hadn't even heard of Manolo Blahniks; Sex and the City gave shoes a new iconic status as must-have accessories, but it knew they were just accessories. The film sees them as a plot, and a raison d'être, stringing together fashion-show montages and an already infamous level of product-placement. It's not a film; it's a magazine come to life.

And although the women's professions were never at the centre of the series, the movie has gone a step further: three of the four former career women now support themselves via their relationships: Charlotte is a stay-at-home wife and mother; Samantha has gone from high-powered PR executive to full-time agent/manager of her boyfriend; and Carrie simply sells the story of her love life, which has made her a bestselling author.

The only woman whose means of support doesn't relate to sex, Miranda, is also far and away the unhappiest and least glamorous of the three, living in exile in Brooklyn with the least-attractive partner, and with the least-luxurious lifestyle. According to the story's value system, this makes her the least successful of the four.

The TV show began with the premise that women came to New York for careers; the film says that they came to New York for labels. In 10 years, that's how much ground we've lost in the depiction of women.Welcome to the brave new world of postfeminism, in which life is defined by transactions. It's no accident that these stories are all sold as feel-good romantic comedies, because comedy is the escape clause: it's just entertainment, it's a fairy tale about desire, and anyone who objects to it is a humorless, priggish killjoy.

Otherwise known as a feminist. So to be clear: I'm all for divertissement, I love romantic comedies, and I'm not suggesting the films would have been improved by turning to Karl Marx for inspiration. But I'm disheartened by the fact that the romantic comedies of the 1930s - films such as The Thin Man, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby - have a more robust and progressive idea of what it means to be a woman.

Nor am I immune to competitive consumption - far from it: my shoe collection is something to behold, but it's not all I think about.Taking feminism for granted, our standards have slipped, and we permit ourselves to be patronised: a Warner Bros studio head has responded to the success of Sex and the City with "Bring on the sequel, girls."

And women everywhere are lapping it up, "because they're worth it," without apparently noticing the narrowing of options, or their relentless superficiality.We're told that women today can "choose" whatever they want: and yet increasingly we are presented with stories in which the only profession they choose is the world's oldest. As Kate's father asked in Blackadder 20 years ago: "Why go to London when you can make a fortune lying flat on your back?"

An awful lot of daughters seem to be asking themselves the same question today, without discernible irony. Twenty years ago, Mike Nichols' hit film Working Girl, with its punning title and plot that punished ball-breaking career women while rewarding whispering blondes "with a mind for business and a bod for sin" opened the doors to jokes about what professional women were really working at.

But it was Pretty Woman that kicked off the orgy - equating shopping with love, and making heroines out of whores. These stories sell themselves as Cinderella tales, but really they are about the ugly stepsisters who were spoiled, entitled, vain, and shallow. Cinderella was a hard worker. In a recent survey by Scottish Widows, some 20% of respondents under the age of 24 said that they would consider marrying someone only for their money and to obtain a luxurious lifestyle. This group included young men, and overall the survey found that nearly twice as many men as women would marry for money. So where are all the films about male gold-diggers?

The hapless waiter in Priceless becomes a gigolo because he's a victim of love, far too naive and romantic to engage in such meretricious dealings on his own. Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman announced last year that she is remaking How to Marry a Millionaire, the 1953 film starring Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable, the title of which tells you everything you need to know about the plot.

The producers assure us that the story will be "completely overhauled" to keep it in line with modern values. So no more gold-digging? "The original Millionaire was about a girl who was, frankly, kind of fat," the producers explained. "Nicole is thin and perfect."