Sex And The City sold my generation of women a LIE
by CRISTINA ODONE, who for years fell for its fantasy that casual flings could be as fulfilling as commitment
MY MOTHEr telephoned, scandalised. It was 1999 and she was living in Washington, where a new TV show was the talk of the town. It starred, she said, a sex- mad, shopaholic, thirtysomething journalist who trotted around Manhattan with her three equally self-absorbed best friends. All of them, she added, were single.
I could hear the worry underlying the disapproval in her voice. Please, please tell me this is not what it’s like for you, my thirtysomething, single, journalist daughter.
I knew from the first moment I watched Sex And The City why my mother hated it. I felt I was overhearing four intelligent adult women talking, without inhibition, about what they got up to — both in bed and out of it.
I also knew that millions of women would adore it. Here was a sitcom designed to make them feel good about being single, solvent and sexually active. It was also funny, clever and irreverent.
But as the cult series marks its 20th anniversary, I wonder if Sex And The City left the fans it so entertained at the time with a somewhat bitter legacy.
After all, we are now looking at an unprecedented sociological landscape, where the majority of British women are unmarried.
Figures from the Office For National Statistics show that only 49.9 per cent of women in England and Wales are tying the knot. And earlier this year it emerged that those women who do make it to the altar are waiting longer than ever to wed, with the average age passing 35 for the first time.
Of course, there are many factors which lead women to delay marriage, from prioritising careers to finances.
Not to be ignored either is the increasing difficulty of forming committed relationships — the central theme of Sex And The City, which the show did not so much bemoan as glorify.
The sitcom, based on Candace Bushnell’s column for the New York Observer, ran for six seasons from 1998 and was broadcast the world over. It was a battle cry of single thirty- and fortysomethings everywhere.
THISwas a group of liberated women voicing subversive thoughts: sex was fun even when there was no emotional attachment; women should use men for their own sexual satisfaction.
I hailed the series as edgy social commentary and its stars as groundbreaking feminists. Carrie & Co were revolutionaries, the Che Guevaras of the upper East Side, sipping cocktails and donning killer heels as they threw hand grenades into the established code of love, marriage and babies.
They were role models for my generation and showed the strength of female bonding.
Their friendship survived tragedies, humiliations, even brutal honesty, as when in season three Miranda challenges Carrie about her on- off lover, Mr Big: ‘ Jesus, every time you get near him you turn into this pathetic, needy, insecure victim. And the thing that p****s me off the most? That you are more than willing to go right back for more.’
These feminists undermined the patriarchy, too, with sly jokes about a date’s kinky obsessions, a male colleague’s professional jealousy, or a boyfriend’s underwhelming performance in bed. A string of husbands were revealed as unfaithful, predatory or both.
Maybe this was why none of my male friends could bear to watch it. I also never met a man who found Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) attractive: she was too thin, quirky, loudmouthed — the exact qualities that made women long to be her.
Sometimes, I, too, found Sex And The City made for uncomfortable watching. It wasn’t because as the years passed, our heroines inhabited a darker and more complicated world (divorce, infertility, adoption, breast cancer, adultery, miscarriages, sexually transmitted infections and debt).
I’d begun to worry that in its rendering of relationships, the series was selling a lie.
What if women of my generation were fooled into buying it, and risked losing out?
Sex And The City’s world was one of infinite possibilities: Carrie might wake up alone, but who knew with whom (or where) she would be sleeping that night?
Being single meant being unapologetic about midnight feasting in the kitchen reading fashion magazines (no husband to tell you off) and working out in the gym at all hours (no boyfriend to beckon you home).
Ourfoursome felt no shame about their sexual habits. I found their attitude as tantalising as the gleaming Manhattan skyscrapers featured in every episode — but just as alien.
I remember a group of us playing ‘Which one are you?’, where we tried to pick out which character fitted us best. Was it our narrator Carrie, the trendy journalist whose love affair with Mr Big provided the emotional pull for the whole run?
Or Samantha, the brassy vamp with her own Pr firm who seeks no-strings sex?
What about Miranda, a brilliant lawyer, independent and resourceful enough to have a baby on her own. Or Charlotte, the posh art dealer whose romantic ideals look positively straitlaced in contrast to her friends?
‘You’re Carrie, of course,’ my friends said. Wasn’t I a journalist?
But I remember thinking, no thanks. I envied Carrie’s quirky fashion sense, but she was no role model. Because Carrie was lying to herself.
She may have talked like an urbane, free-thinking singleton, but she shared the same oldfashioned goals of love and marriage as every female heroine since Elizabeth Bennet.
Carrie sensed that life was about more than cocktailinduced one-night stands or a sale at Saks Fifth Avenue. She recognised that promiscuity would fail to satisfy her.
Her life was a con — and, ultimately, so was the show.
At about the same time I, too, began to wonder if the show’s mantra of ‘happy, single, for ever’ was not a fantasy.
It was one thing to have been a girl about town in my 30s. But turning 40 brought home how much I yearned to settle down.
To feel fulfilled I needed to care and be cared for. When I found my own Mr Darcy and had a daughter, I knew I had finally out-grown my TV heroines.
The series, I realised, held out a hollow promise: that women could lead a self- centred existence, replete with sexual adventures, for as long as they wanted.
Charlotte, conservative and conventional, was the first to realise. She realised that what matters more than being wooed in a horse-drawn carriage is the desire to build a strong and longlasting relationship.
Miranda and Carrie also finally faced the truth. By the end only Samantha failed to capitulate.
But while each of the four heroines found happiness of sorts, what about their fans? Twenty years on, how many are still single and childless, with no one now asking them if they want a drink?
SExAnd The City drove home the message that no one need ever feel sorry for themselves just because they were thirtysomething and unmarried.
That’s great. But the sitcom normalised, even celebrated, some less attractive trends.
One was a coarse view of relationships as vehicles for sexual pleasure and nothing more. The talk of orgasms and sex toys that was heralded as bravely taboo- breaking also reduced intimacy to mechanics.
The other trend was a boundless self-indulgence that made the compromises demanded by family life seem unappealing.
Like all well-paid professionals, Carrie and friends were proudly independent. But the show pushes this autonomy to excessive lengths: it’s all ‘me, me, me’.
It inaugurated the ‘selfie’ culture by showing women boasting about splurging on facials, silk lingerie, Brazilians, and Manolos. Nothing but the best would do.
Very few of us can be Park Avenue princesses in real life, yet that didn’t stop the show becoming a cultural phenomenon.
An estimated 10.6 million tuned into the finale in 2004. Today, its impact is still felt.
Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda, is running for Governor of New York; Carrie’s writing desk sits in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC; and actresses Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall, as well as Manolo Blahnik — the designer of those exorbitantly priced shoes — have become household names.
But as for the show’s message, to a generation of millennials this gang of four will seem shallow materialists rather than glamorous idols. And despite the fun we fans had over the years, that’s no bad thing.