SEXUAL TENSION
Now 20 years on, why do today’s feminists hate Sex and the City?
Fans of Sex and the City have a fresh excuse to get out their box sets and pour themselves a cosmopolitan. It’s been more than 20 years since TV viewers first saw Carrie Bradshaw sashay down a New York street in a tutu before a passing bus splashes water all over her. Comedy with a self-deprecating edge was the show’s hallmark and since that debut in June 1998, the four female protagonists — Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte — have become part of the zeitgeist, while Manolo Blahnik has become a household name and the show itself has spawned two big-screen adaptations
But a significant section of the female population — especially those under age 35 — aren’t celebrating the anniversary. For many of today’s feminists, the show is too consumerist, too white and too obsessed with pinning down a man to be worthy of eulogies. Many young female critics now dismiss Bradshaw — whom Naomi Wolf once praised as “a pop culture philosopher” — as annoying and a poor role model.
There is also an entertaining meme called “Woke Charlotte,” which rewrites scenes from the show recasting prudish romantic Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) as that very 21st-century creation, an intersectional feminist (a feminist conscious of other types of prejudice, such as racism). So when Carrie wears her ghetto gold jewelry for fun, Woke Charlotte responds: “That statement is deeply classist and displays a complete lack of awareness of your privilege as a white woman.”
I can’t help feeling the harsher critiques are missing the point. In the final analysis, Sex and the City is an all-too rare show about the consolations of female friendship. It was also one of the first popular comedies to properly explore the fact that remaining single in your 30s and 40s is normal for today’s career women — and that, therefore, unabashedly seeking sex was an equally normal aspect of modern dating.
It may have been inspired by Candace Bushnell’s essays about New York dating, but there was a greater sense of female solidarity and wisecracking in the TV version. It made you realize that before SATC, your best hope of watching a gang of women in a comedy series was The Golden Girls. And there’s little doubt the show helped pave the way for other innovative, sexually frank TV series such as the BBC’s Pulling and Fleabag, and HBO’s Girls.
In these shows, drunken onenight stands that end badly and porn-obsessed men who want demeaning forms of sex are commonplace. When you compare SATC to these edgier shows and their self-destructive but borderline-unemployable protagonists, it’s easy to become nostalgic for the sharp professionalism of Carrie and Co. The women may have been unaccountably wealthy and obsessed with shopping, but they were also optimistic and living life on their own terms.
They policed their own and each other’s sex lives and made sure friends walked away from degrading suggestions, such as the lover who called Charlotte a “filthy whore” at the point of climax. Even Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), with her upfront sexual appetites and fondness for experimentation (she termed herself “try-sexual”), seems wholesome by comparison to today’s generation of anti-heroines. She had sex on her own terms rather than any man’s. Whatever the vagaries of daily life, the SATC crew seemed to be in charge of their destinies. And if they made a serious mistake — as with Charlotte’s long unconsummated marriage to Trey (Kyle MacLachlan) — they remedied it.
And it kept apace of trends (and not just sexual trends) with such a keen, quick eye for New Yorkers’ evolving tastes that sometimes it seemed prophetic.
And then there was stylist Patricia Field’s contribution to the show. Her eye steered Carrie’s wardrobe and introduced viewers to Fendi baguettes, Manolo Blahniks and a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress worthy of Versailles. The show also raised important issues, including Charlotte’s fertility troubles, Miranda’s struggle with breastfeeding and Samantha’s breast cancer. No one’s claiming the drama was up there with Chekhov, but the writers knew they needed grit in the oyster.
Yes, there were downsides. The rampant consumerism was consistently the least appealing quality. It also became ever harder to ignore the fact the show was resolutely white, wealthy and, in terms of sexual orientation, orthodox. The decision to make all four women straight when in real life one (Nixon) is gay seems particularly perverse. Yes, Samantha briefly had a female lover — but you never doubted she would return to men.
Even so, the upsides and whipsmart repartee far outweigh the quibbles. Television connoisseurs have tended to think so too. It was one of Time magazine’s 100 Best TV Shows of All Time, and over the course of six seasons it won seven Emmy Awards and eight Golden Globes. It has become part of popular culture.