Not to be outdone by Thelma and Louise co-star Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon is making headlines this week. Rumor has it that she’s a cougar on the prowl … and her prey is a 31-year-old ping pong player. Although Sarandon’s publicist claims that her relationship with Jonathan Bricklin is strictly business, the gossip is flying.

The first question, naturally, is what kind of “business” a 63-year-old movie star has with a “ping pong aficionado.” I mean, is she researching a role? Seriously, what other reason would there be for playing with balls of with a young guy?

Joking aside, People reported in April that Sarandon is indeed business partners in a ping-pong club with Bricklin.

Sarandon and Bricklin, who are co-investors in SPiN, the New York City ping-pong bar, have denied rumors that they’re an item. Sarandon split from her longtime partner Tim Robbins in December and tells Entertainment Weekly that while …

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Seems like every industry is jumping on the Twilight bandwagon.  The sex toy market is now offering “The Vamp,” a dildo that literally sparkles in the sunlight.  Salon recently spoke with Jon Condit, inventor of the, uh, Cullenesque cock, and it’s pretty interesting stuff.

On creating a “realistic” vampire penis:

The color was the biggest thing. It had to look like vampire skin.  It took me and the head of production two and a half months to get the color we were looking for. She has 10 other ones that are various shades that didn’t work. Way too pink, way too pale, it took a long time to make a pale flesh tone. The other problem was the sparkle: It had to sparkle in the sunlight. If it didn’t sparkle in the sunlight, the whole idea was dead. It was kind of poking fun but it’s also supposed to tie into the whole fantasy. The glitter on hand didn’t sparkle in the sunlight, so we had to have some ordered specially. We did have people write in and tell us that Edward was bigger than that.

Edward is bigger than that?  Wow, I must have missed the subliminal message in the book that he’s buying KYNGs or something.  And this, of course, begs the question of who is actually buying and, uh, using these products.

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With the recent release of the second Sex and the City film, I thought it would be interesting to consider these fictionalized women … and, like it or not, their place as role models.  They all exhibit traits that everyday women can relate to, and it’s really pretty cool (almost like one of those personality tests) to contemplate which you most identify with (or are attracted to, if you’re interested in dating women).

Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is a writer, most notably as a newspaper columnist, and fashionista (let’s all say “Manolo Blahniks,” now).  Her exterior appearance hides someone who cares far less about her home than she does about her shoes.  While her relationships are depicted in her column “Sex and the City” (creative name, that), she is ultimately unable to avoid the infamous “Mr. Big,” who seems to come into her life just when she needs him—and often when she doesn’t.

I can actually relate a lot to Carrie.  There’s the whole writing thing, natch, and I have my own Mr. Big.  You spend  so much time agonizing on whether he’s your soul mate and if that concept even really exists and blah blah blah.  And then, just when you’ve given him up as a lost cause, there he freaking is again.  It’s crazy!

Kim Cattrall’s Samantha Jones, on the other hand, is far more in-your-face.  She’s strong-willed and entrenched in the business world.  Samantha refers to herself as a “try-sexual” and clearly does not share Carrie’s angst over the soul mate thing since she’s more interested in sex itself than the bells and whistles (and balls and chains) that can potentially go along with it.  She is diagnosed with cancer when she goes to get breast implants and experiences many of the menopausal issues that women do.  Basically, she’s the quintessential cougar.
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I’ve never really sat and watched multiple episodes of Sex and the City enough to really gain a solid perspective on the ladies and their story lines and I’ve never seen the SATC movies, either.  From what I’ve gathered, the four stars of SATC have pretty much conquered various aspects of neo-feminism, all the while retaining their femininity.  Did feminism need a television show to really reboot everything that’s been set in stone over the past few hundred years? It’s negotiable, but I guess every genre has to have it’s “moral” of the story. SATC, from what star Kim Cattrall states, has encompassed everything that a modern woman stands for.

Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy interviewed Cattrall about the upcoming SATC sequel and Cattrall had some interesting things to say regarding the show and its pertinence to feminism.  Cattrall states:

”Post-feminism has been really confusing.  It influenced so many women to leave a lot of their feminine qualities behind and assume the business suit… That’s why it’s captured so many women’s imaginations. It’s truthful and it’s real and it’s now; it’s not dated, and it keeps evolving. These four women really make up one complete woman.”

While I th0ught certain characters in the episodes that I have seen to be the vapid type of woman that I really can’t stand, let alone want to emulate, she makes a good point.  I’ve gained enough perspective from these woman to “see” what they’re like in conjunction with their story lines and in reference to one another; by Cattrall stating that the four characters encompass one kick-ass woman, I have to kind of agree.  If you take the best (and worst) of the four female leads, you would get one amazing lady.

The show was supposed to portray four successful women living in a large city and how they adapted to constantly-changing environments in their personal and professional lives.  While the show sometimes drifted in and out of what it was to be a “sad-sack” single woman, its good points kind of renegotiated its relevance to modern-day feminism.  The women were fun, flirty, sometimes promiscuous — everything that pre-feminism had shunned with its big, brusque man’s index finger.

The women show what it is to be what they want to be — whether its a housewife or a woman who’d rather use their oven for storage instead of cooking with it.  The show also tackles “traditional” female issues such as breast cancer, miscarriages, failed relationships and surviving thereafter.

After kind of delving into the unknown here, I think I might have to recapture some of the mystique surrounding Sex and the City.  My husband (a totally metro and non-traditional male) loved the long-running sitcom and could probably give a pretty good synopsis for each season — I might have to sit down with him over an espresso and pick his brain.  Then maybe, just maybe, check into purchasing the first season.

You know, just for scientific purposes.