How Sex and the City
For the first time, all six series of breakthrough feminist show Sex and the City will be available on demand in NZ.
Gen X-er Sharon wishes her life had turned out differently so she could have lived her Sex and the City fantasies in Manhattan, not Wellington.
The summer of 2000, I took my first trip New York. I rode the lift at the Empire State Building an ear-popping 86 floors, caught the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and took too many photos from the observation deck of the World Trade Centre’s South Tower.
But one of my treasured memories of that visit remains the Sex and the City tour I persuaded my then boyfriend, now husband, to join me on.
I was obsessed with the show from its opening credits, when Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, gets splashed by a bus with her face on it. I was in New York, dammit, so I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to stroll past Carrie’s brownstone, to see where she and her friends drank Cosmopolitans and ate cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery.
It was, of course, as cheesy as a fondue but for four hours I lived the fantasy I was a wealthy Upper East Side princess navigating life in the urban jungle in stupidly high stilettos.
Although I wasn’t as much a fan-girl as the Texan woman who cried at the end of the tour, I could see where she was coming from. For perhaps the first time in television history, SATC was a show made by woman for women about women who were successful and powerful and not ashamed of it.
It broke taboos and made it bad-ass to be single, successful and free.
Even feminist scholar Naomi Wolfe agreed: “Sex and the City really was a turning point. There hadn’t been women at the centre of a quest narrative before. No one had ever thought women were that interesting.”
SATC ran for 94 half-hour episodes from Z and was adapted from a column in the New York Observer by Candace Bushnell, a 30-something freelance writer.
It focused on four friends who brunched, drank and shagged their way around the Big Apple. Carrie was the linchpin, a sex columnist who achieved the impossible: a sartorially magnificent wardrobe and studio apartment on a freelance writer’s salary. Charlotte was the sweet but naive princess who spent her life trying to land a rich man. Samantha was the high-flying PR with a fabulous career, home and even more fabulous sex life and Miranda was the occasionally bi- curious lawyer.
Like so many woman my age, I believed my friends were Charlotte or Samantha and I, of course, was Carrie (no one wanted to be Miranda — crazy in retrospect, given she was the only one who ended up with it all — a highpowered job, husband, baby and a house with a garden).
In reality, none of us were remotely like them: they were skinnier, richer, whiter, had more interesting jobs and lived in Manhattan. But that didn’t stop us from using SATC as a kind of instruction manual for life.
Tucked in among the gratuitous product placement — the Jimmy Choo shoes and Louis Vuitton handbags — were serious issues: breast cancer, bereavement, ageing, relationships, single motherhood, infertility, divorce and money.
But the SATC gals dealt with them with humour and sass and, when they messed up, they breezily dusted themselves off and carried on. As in the episode where Carrie realises she has spent $40K on shoes but can’t afford the deposit on a new apartment. “I ’m literally the old woman who lived in a shoe,” she laughs.
But what resonated most was
SATC ’s treatment of sex. For possibly the first time on mainstream TV, it was normal for woman to have sexual desires and pursue them, whether or not they were in a serious relationship.
The women were sexually confident and independent, but without the suggestion of being slutty or heartless.
SATC didn’t take sex too seriously, as evidenced when
Samantha found a grey pubic hair and accidentally, hilariously, dyes her whole nether region red. That was a high water mark of the six series, as far as
I ’m concerned.
Whatever their flaws — and
I wanted to slap each of them at different moments, especially Carrie who was unable to realise Big wasn’t all that — SATC has become one of the cornerstones of our pop culture.
Even Lena Dunham’s Girls, which strived so hard to distance itself, references its older sibling in the first episode when Shoshanna tells Jessa she’s “definitely a Carrie, with some Samantha aspects and Charlotte hair”.
It is 13 years since SATC ended ( let ’s not even mention the two woeful films), but seeing it though 2017 eyes, it ’s still as gloriously escapist and wonderfully nutty as ever.
As Carrie says, “Maybe some women aren’t meant to be tamed. Maybe they need to run free, until they find someone just as wild to run with.” Words to live by.
For possibly the first time on mainstream TV, it was normal for woman to have sexual desires and pursue them, whether or not they were in a serious relationship.