Post-feminism and Gossip Girl

I'm having some difficulty with post-feminism as an idea. As I understand it, it seems more like a catch-all for the various responses that dissatisfaction with third-wave feminism. The Negra and McRobbie articles seemed to offer up different definitions of a post-feminist ideal. Negra connects it (not exclusively) to neoconservative efforts to return women from the working world to the home. McRobbie sees it as--and this is the way that I've learned it in other classes--a new kind of illusory gender/sexual independence that is dangerous because it tends to ignore the fact that the world is still quite patriarchal.

I like the comparison we've created between Sex and the City, which is oriented toward adult women, and Gossip Girl, which is oriented (somewhat horrifyingly) toward teenage girls. While marriage does not seem to hold the same obsessive value for the high school students of Gossip Girl as it does for the four women of Sex and the City, the show does place a lot of moral value in monogamy, especially for the two main female friends/rivals. This is an easy double standard to point out, but the guy who sleeps with Blair and Serena is held far less responsible for his actions than the girls (and their social circles) hold them.

Regardless of whether a particular program is advocating neoconservative family values or the image of the independent career woman, clearly both Sex and the City and Gossip Girl are structured to promote the value and femininity of consumption, particularly of fashion consumption. Sex and the City seems to approach this in two ways: that consumption is both the duty and the play of the career-oriented woman, and that fashion consumption is ultimately intimately connected with the ability to find a mate. Gossip Girl is even more brazen with its product placement and foregrounding of the importance of dressing right as a means to fit in with other girls. I wonder about the significance of the (excuse me while I wiki this) Dan Humphrey character, who seems to prize values running contrary to the excess consumption practiced by Blair and Serena--perhaps someone who has seen the series can enlighten me as to his character arc and traits. I particularly liked McRobbie's reflection on her studies of women's magazines in the '90s. These magazines can promote the image of the independent woman all they want, but at the end of the day such an image is directly connected to a complex marketing strategy meant to encourage further consumption. All in all, post-feminism seems very suspect to me.