Sex and The City: An Anthology of Thoughts
Episode 1
Recently, there’s been a resurgence of discourse surrounding our most beloved 90’s-2000’s shows. And oftentimes, this discourse morphs into these strange takes and discussions that appear to be from an alternate universe. Unfortunately for the hot single ladies of New York, they’ve fallen into the very centre of it.
Now, this isn’t to say that many of the criticisms of this show aren’t valid. However, it’s evident that many of the people talking about these shows are doing one of three things:
Misremembering the plot and premise of the series
Mimicking talking points they've seen online without actually engaging with the show itself.
Completely misunderstanding the show and its characters
Now, there are two talking points I see often that I will be working to address during my rewatch of our beloved, Sex and the City. The first being that Carrie Bradshaw is a bad friend, the second being that this is not a feminist show. Both of which are, in my opinion, complete bullshit.
Let’s look at the first episode for instance. While there is the occasional use of ‘being gay’ as the only reason a man could possibly be kind, or caring that is typical to this period of television, we need to take their meaning a step further. While it is a patriarchal idea and this type of rhetoric perpetuates the foundations of toxic masculinity, that anything perceived as feminine is gay, it is used to set the standard for the show that men simply do not care about women. With that out of the way I’d like to pull back and look at the entire first episode.
We are introduced to four strong, beautiful, and independent women. One of whom wants to ‘have sex like a man’, which is to say have sex without an ounce of care or respect for their sexual partner, one who feels entirely opposite, one who is willing to give it a shot, and one who is indifferent to men altogether. On the flip side, the only men who are awarded any depth outside of being ‘Toxic Bachelors’ are Skipper, a self proclaimed ‘nice guy’, and Stanford, Carrie’s gay best friend. Flipping the standard set in shows dominated by men. Sex and the City doubles down on what it is like to be a woman on screen as seen through the eyes of men and gives the audience what they want; a chance to eye fuck the men on screen without a care in the world, because without depth they’re nothing more than a piece of ass. As Miranda says to Skipper that first night in Chaos, women can be beautiful or they can be interesting but to men, they can’t be both. Sex and the City has fought back against this not only through the character interactions and their dialogue, but it takes it a step further through the eradication of depth for nearly all male characters. It awards men what they so often give women, nothing.
Simultaneously, it introduces a world of queerness through subtlety that the 90’s was not known for. While most shows at this time that had a gay character threw them into the ‘token gay’ pile and washed them down into a cleanly polished sex crazed highly fashionable diva, Sex and the City doesn’t. They celebrate a meal served to them by drag queens, clearly within a queer space, and there is no mention of it. They do not objectify them, leer at them, or make a joke out of them. The drag queens simply exist, they are characters in the show operating as the every day people that they are. Rather than making a spectacle out of them, Sex and the City does something quite radical for their time, they allow queer people to just be, to exist within spaces outside of clubs and sex scenes. It awards them agency and the understanding that they are simply people living their lives.
Episode 2 - The Model Dilemma
And there it is. Only two episodes in and the 90’s does what the 90’s does best; shame beautiful women.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don't completely disagree with the premise of the episode. I just disagree with its execution. It is a well known fact amongst women that there are womanisers and there are, as Sex and the City calls them, modelizers. The type of men who have a fetish for getting with women that are models. And with the rise of the internet and social media we’ve seen a new breed, the wanna-be-modelizer, you know him, your friend's boyfriend that follows a suspicious amount of women with lean bodies, big boobs, and fake tan. But that's beyond the point, let's get back to the episode.
SatC takes two classes of women, Carrie and her friends (the normies) and the models, and it pits them against each other. Neither Carrie, Miranda, or Charlotte have a positive thing to say about the models, nor do they have a positive thing to say about themselves. It is only Samantha, who Carrie describes as ‘the only woman who believes that proximity to beauty makes her more beautiful’, that seems to have no issue with the models that plague Manhattan.
Then we have the modelizer’s and the complainers themselves. Not that these women have nothing to complain about. The beauty standards are absurd, the hunt for a good man when it seems all they want is a hot young thing on their arm is tiring. But they seem to place the blame in all the wrong places. Sure, there is the occasional “modelizers” and “men” followed by a slight eye roll. But then there is Berkley, a man who shows Carrie footage of non-consensually filmed sex with half of the models in Manhattan. When Carrie asks if they know about this and all he says is “maybe”, all Carrie can do is ask for a light and watch on in awe. So here she stands, complaining about the very men she surrounds herself with, does not hold accountable, and actively partakes in their sick perversions. All the while maintaining the moral high ground simply because she is not the models in the videos.
On the parallel there is Samantha, who actively seeks out Berkley in order to be one of the women on screen. And while this signifies her desire to be close to beauty and acknowledged as one of the beauties seen on the billboards around the city, it reduces her to, as Berkley calls them, nothing more than “a beautiful thing”.
On the flip side of the female model, there is Derek who we are introduced to after a montage of shallow female models who say that beauty gets you everything. Reducing them to shallow, self obsessed divas, whose only form of reading is skimming a magazine cover to cover. But Derek, oh dreamy underwear model Derek, he is given something more. Upon spending the night with Carrie and asking to just talk, Carrie has the epiphany that she ‘“never thought someone so beautiful could be so lonely”. And while I agree with the sentiment and the point they were trying to make, the only thing that this episode does is reinforce the ideas that men want hot women, hot women are bimbos and gold diggers, hot men are the only attractive people with depth, and women are against one another. When in reality, the reason beautiful people are lonely is because of two things:
Men do not view women, especially beautiful women as anything more than objects for their pleasure.
Men do not form close relationships with the people around them who aren’t women. And when they use their looks as a means of ‘conquering’ the women around them, their lives become shallow and trivial.
However, this episode makes neither of these points and instead gives men a free pass with nothing but an eye roll to condemn them, and leaves women climbing the ladder behind a stiletto heel that won’t stop stabbing her in the eye.
