Sexts and the City: single girls of today still love the show’s panache, but not its politics

by Nat Pitcher

Four successful, sassy, single women living it up in the big city, and trying to balance ‘having it all’ with finding love: it’s become such a trope that it’s difficult to imagine this was ever a ground-breaking concept, but at the time of its airing, HBO’s Sex And The City was considered radical. Sex-positive, seemingly LG–friendly (the absence of B, T, Q, and I from the acronym is no accident), and oozing second-wave (read: white) feminism, Darren Starr’s glitzy (and admittedly, at times, frivolous) series proved that stories driven by women can be fun, but they needn’t be all fluff.

 

Despite the cultural shifts that have occurred in the two decades since it first premiered, SATC has enjoyed an enduring appeal, helped along in the social media age by the proliferation of fan accounts like @everyoutfitonsatc, which features bite-sized analysis of the show’s personal and political sartorial statements. Like a lot of young women, I have returned to the show over and over throughout my 22 years. As an inner-city cis woman who dates mostly men, I find the depictions of dating and relationships endlessly relatable, and have come to view the series as a how-to guide to my twenties (though in some of Carrie’s more neurotic moments, or in the case of anything that Charlotte does, what not to do). But when the time of my annual re-watch came around again this year, the enjoyment I had come to expect from the show was marred by a niggling discomfort that I could no longer disregard. While the show was groundbreaking for its time, many of the cultural norms perpetuated by the series have not aged so gracefully. I couldn’t help but wonder: if the elitism, heteronormativity, and overwhelming whiteness of SATC is so unpalatable to our ~delicate millennial sensibilities~, why are we still so drawn to it? In the age of swiping, sexting, sidechicks, and ghosting, are millennial audiences yearning for the perceived simplicity of the analogue dating experience? Or, à la Carrie Bradshaw – are we just too narcissistic to care?

 

Some things have changed in the nearly twenty years since the scintillating series hit screens — we’ve traded in speed dating for Tinder swipes, booty calls for ‘dick appointments’,  oh, and casual slurs about gender, sexuality, race, and class are no longer in-vogue. That the once-progressive show has come to be regarded as problematic is a testament to the strides we have made toward social awareness in just one generation. Just as columnist and socialite Carrie was gobsmacked at being labelled “single and fabulous — question mark,” I was equally outraged as she flippantly dubbed bisexuality “a stop-over on the way to Gay Town.” The fetishised caricaturisation of Samantha’s African American lover, Chivon, (one of only three lovers of colour to appear across 94 episodes and 95 sexual partners) seems particularly distasteful considering the persistent lack of fully rendered roles available to non-white actors two decades on. And then there is the extremely troubling behaviour toward trans characters — from deliberate misgendering, referring to trans people as “half-men” or “half-women,” to actually knocking the wig from a trans woman’s head. If these scenes had played out on a series streaming today, the would have been axed.

 

The transgressions of SATC cannot be excused, regardless of the time in which they happened.  Though for all its flaws, the central characters of SATC pushed the boundaries of how women were expected to live their lives on television. Surrounded by loved-up, condescending couples, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) remained a staunch supporter of a woman’s right to remain single, proving you can be happier alone than winding up in an unsatisfying marriage entered into out of fear of loneliness. She implored her girlfriends to invest in their friendship, like an “emotional retirement plan,” for when they inevitably outlive their husbands (should they ever find them). She also showed that women don’t need to be mothers to be complete human beings, and shouldn’t be shamed for choosing to remain childfree — a decision which still draws outrage from people whom that choice has nothing to do with.

 

On the flip-side of this, the no-nonsense lawyer Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) proved that women needn’t turn into baby-crazy hens or adhere to predetermined gender-roles when it comes to motherhood. In one scene Carrie teases Miranda, “I never thought I’d see the day,” when she discovers photos of newborn Brady plastered over the fridge. Miranda replies “I didn’t even take those, they’re Magda’s,” — the doting housekeeper and embodiment of the traditional feminine competencies Miranda eschews.

 

A PR powerhouse with a bottomless libido, Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) was perhaps the most disruptive of the bunch. While she exhibits some problematic hyper-capitalist tendencies (which in the context of today read like an eerie precursor to the scourge of the #GirlBoss mentality), a sexually active woman over the age of 40 on-screen was rarer than a well-shaped set of eyebrows back in 1998.

 

What about Charlotte York (Kristen Davis), you ask? Literally the only ‘groundbreaking’ thing in her character arc was converting to Judaism, I’m not going to waste words on that queen of the basics.

 

These days, we demand the content we consume to be as ‘woke’ as we are, which is ultimately a good thing. It’s now recognised that the representations we see in the media have real consequences for the communities they depict. We can’t demand that SATC hire more diverse writers, or cast more inclusive characters  — it’s in the past now (though it was touch-and-go for a while with rumours of a third film in the works — blessedly torpedoed by Kim Cattrall). But perhaps there is still a place to acknowledge the indiscretions of the show’s politics for 21st century viewers. Companies like Amazon and Apple have taken the step of including content warnings on Tom and Jerry episodes:

 

“These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”

 

It’s not glamorous, and it certainly doesn’t fix the problem, but it would be a step in the right direction — towards greater accountability for harmful behaviours that for too long have been perpetuated in the media.