Carrie godmother
SATC’s Bradshaw couldn’t exist in the #metoo era. But we couldn’t have got here without her
TWENTY years after “Sex and the City” debuted, watching it now feels like a fairy tale. A woman whose primary concerns were largely confined to sex, shopping and whether or not her millionaire on-again-off-again boyfriend would finally commit seems wildly unrealistic in a post-9/11, post-recession, post-Trump world.
More than 10 million viewers tuned in for the 2004 finale to find out if Carrie Bradshaw would live in Paris with her rich artist beau or return to New York with the rich financier.
Now, in the era of #metoo, it’s hard to imagine anyone being so invested in such trivial pursuits. The women of “Sex and the City” — who were only concerned with politics insofar as they were an excuse to dress up as Jackie O — seem so out of touch they would register as delusional.
Even Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Bradshaw, seems to think so, claiming at a Wall Street Journal event last week that New York “has changed an enormous amount politically and economically and socially and I think it would be a different show, honestly.”
No, Carrie Bradshaw certainly could not exist today, except as some kind of figure to be mocked.
But we also could not exist without her.
“Sex and the City” changed the way women viewed premarital sex in the late ’90s and early 2000s in much the same way Playboy changed the way men viewed premarital sex in the 1950s. Just as Hugh Hefner pitched sex as something sophisticated men did between listening to jazz and drinking scotch, so “Sex and the City” made sex seem like a glamorous part of a single woman’s life, to be sampled between shopping sprees and going to new restaurants.
In 2015, researchers analyzing data from the General Social Survey found that in the 1990s, only 42 percent of Americans believed premarital sex was not immoral (in keeping with the same percentage number from the 1980s). By the 2010s, 58 percent of Americans felt that premarital sex was not immoral.
That 16 percent jump may be due to many factors, but one of them is almost certainly that an incredibly popular TVshow focused on sexually active women that viewers liked and related to. People didn’t think the characters on “Sex and the City” were shameless sluts or sinners or women to be scorned. Many viewers viewed them as aspirational figures who were having fun, exciting lives.
It’s also important to note that the sex on the show seemed fun. The characters were enjoying sex as much as the men they slept with, barring the episodes where the men were comically inept.
The characters’ sexual encounters may not have ended in marriage or even committed relationships, but both parties wanted them to happen. Young women watching the show grew up internalizing the message that sexual encounters were supposed to be positive for both people involved (or all three people, if an episode focused on Samantha’s sex life).
That was a pretty revolutionary message, considering the fact that marital rape only became a crime in all 50 states in 1993, five years before “Sex and the City” first aired.
That’s a message that has shaped the millennial generation’s view of sexual relations. Before the show launched on June 6, 1998, for example, many Americans shunned and even blamed Monica Lewinsky for sleeping with the president. Now, she’s seen as a heroic survivor, who people rightly defended on Twitter last week after she was disinvited from a party when Bill Clinton RSVP’d.
“Sex and the City” only touched on issues of women’s rights in the lightest possible sense. There was always a feeling that we were experiencing “a very special episode” when the girls took a break from shopping to discuss abortion or breast cancer. Certainly, there were a lot more episodes focused on fashion accessories than there were on harassment.
But it’s hard to imagine that we’d be having the conversations about consent and sexual harassment we’re having today if the majority of the population didn’t think unmarried women should be having sex outside marriage in the first place. Or, if they did, men should just treat them however they saw fit because those women were sluts.
Those are not things we believe anymore, and in part, that’s because of Carrie Bradshaw.
Although her character would have no place in 2018, she helped escort us to a new threshold in those beautiful high heels.
And that’s worth raising a Cosmopolitan to.