National Post (National Edition)
Sex and the City alive again
Two decades ago, television came up with an excellent comedy series called Sex and the City, which generated substantial audiences and notable controversy. It was about four good-looking and articulate young women — Samantha, Charlotte, Cynthia and Carrie, the last one being Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. It ran for 94 episodes over six seasons, was praised by Time magazine and TV Guide as one of the best TV shows ever, and spawned two not-so-hot feature films, Sex and the City and Sex and the City 2.
It’s come alive again now because Candace Bushnell, whose columns in the New York Observer inspired the series, has written a memoir, Is There Still Sex in the City? (Grove Atlantic). The publisher brought it out two weeks ago, making it one of three books on this subject.
Bushnell, conscious that she’s now twice the age of her heroines, does her best to keep up with her generation. “One of the great
things about middle age,” she reports, “is that most people become a tiny bit nicer.” That’s because they have learned a few things. “How bad stuff is going to happen to you, no matter how hard you try to be perfect. But mostly how the things you thought were safe and sacred suddenly aren’t.”
Keeping up with recent innovations, she explored Tinder, most fashionable of online dating services. She seems to have avoided expressing herself in an age-appropriate way: “Being an old coot myself,” she says, “I really didn’t want to hook up with another old coot.”
What interested her about Tinder was the curious opinions it generated. “Everyone was on it, but nobody seemed to like it. Is that how dominant technology is? Nobody likes it, yet we are obliged to use it?”
She cites the adventures of her friends with much-younger men, and her own struggle to feel sexy amid the unsexy realities of late middle-age. “This is the part of the story that no one ever tells anyone. You get to the happily ever after, and this is really what happens after the happily ever after. If the happily ever after doesn’t work out, how do you get through that?”
Deborah Jermyn, who lectures on film and TV at Roehampton University in England, wrote the first academic book on this subject, called simply Sex and the City (Wayne State University Press). She notes that early critics found the series an unlikely “vision of a post-feminist world where women have formed their own support network, are educated and economically independent, but nevertheless recurrently talk about men, sex and shoes.”
Actually, men, sex and shoes seem quite appropriate to me as subjects. On the whole I remember the series as fresh and, from time to time, hilarious. Talking about it recently with one of my adult daughters, I realized that I missed its sharp-edged depictions of privileged New Yorkers.
It was attacked, at the time, as a failed attempt to create “the first global female epic” and instead produced “feminism-lite.” Jermyn takes it more seriously, and certainly her detailed accounts of the crucial episodes will please nostalgic viewers.
Of all those who have written about it, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong was the most enthusiastic, her feelings overwhelmed by gratitude. Her little book, Sex and the City — and Us (Simon and Schuster) concerns how the show affected women, Armstrong most of all.
She fell for it when it premiered on HBO in 1998. “I was trying on selves,” she writes. She was searching for an identity beyond what her upbringing in a Chicago suburb gave her.
“I wanted a nameplate necklace like Carrie Bradshaw’s and a distinct, authentic, messy identity go with it. Sex and the City helped me find myself. Sex and the City became my oracle. The show provided a guide to what I should or could do, wear, eat, and buy.”
It even created arguments with her boyfriend. “I was scared to voice even my most basic concerns, like wanting to go out on a Friday night instead of staying in to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation.”