I’ve seen Sex and the City from beginning to end more times than I care to admit. Like many superfans, I grew up watching the series and wanting to be like the characters. More than any other film or television show, the women of SATC had a profound impact on who I aspired to be—what to wear, which cocktails to drink, where to eat, who to sleep with, and how often and in what ways. The fact that I became a sex columnist with a love of impractical footwear, a drinking problem, and wound up living in New York, a mere two blocks from Carrie’s actual stoop, was not an accident.
Most of all, Sex and the City made me want to fuck my way to enlightenment—and I imagine I’m not alone here. The series made casual, spontaneous, often absurd sex with a rotating cast of relative strangers seem glamorous and empowering. I’d watch the show and think: Can I really consider myself a modern woman if I haven’t banged a sociopathic investment banker in the bathroom of the hottest restaurant in the Meatpacking District? I’d say not. Revisiting the series 25 years on, I couldn’t help but wonder…did Sex and the City change the way we have sex?
I first watched the series when I was 13, sneaking episodes with friends after our parents went to bed. We didn’t understand half of what was going on, but we’d certainly never seen this kind of unabashedly sexual woman on screen. (Remember, this was the era when Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson were staying virgins until marriage. Wow.) Back then, it was crazy to think that women would have sex just for fun, like men do. Instead, promiscuous women were generally portrayed as evil or disposable. Like, have you ever noticed that in basically every horror movie, any woman who dares to even wink at a man is the first to get stabbed or eaten by zombies? Yeah, that’s not a coincidence. Even in the late 1990s, when SATC first aired, slut-shaming was ubiquitous—both in reality and fiction. From The Scarlet Letter, to Monica Lewinsky, to Paris Hilton, “sluts” have been getting fucked—literally and figuratively—since basically the dawn of time.
But then along came the SATC clique, like slutty beacons of light. Rewatching today, the show’s portrayal of female sexuality often still feels progressive, which can make it easy to take for granted just how groundbreaking it was, in 1998, to see women talking unapologetically about orgasms, threesomes, and casual teabagging at brunch. (Whereas now, it’s hard to find a show where the female characters aren’t discussing anal over Aperol and avocado toast at least once an episode. I guess that’s called progress?)
The ladies were dining in S&M restaurants more than a decade before Fifty Shades made sadism basic. Back in 1998, when season-one Charlotte became addicted to the now infamous Rabbit vibrator, there were only a handful of high-end sex toys on the market, and having one was still considered pretty taboo. But after that episode aired, there were stories of sex shops with actual lines around the block of horny women desperate to buy the Rabbit. SATC gave women permission to do and say things that previously seemed too scandalous, embarrassing, or, ya know…whorish.
Now, from our (occasionally woker-than-thou) 2023 perspective, the show clearly wasn’t always so sex positive. Take, for example, Carrie’s now-famous line: “I’m not even sure bisexuality exists. I think it s just a layover on the way to Gay Town.” To which Miranda responds: “Isn’t that right next to Ricky Martinville?” I mean, that one’s objectively funny. Less hilarious, however, was the fact that Carrie was a kink-shamer who referred to trans sex workers as “half-man, half-woman, totally annoying,” and used “hooker” as her preferred insult—perhaps not ideal qualities for a sex columnist.
Then there was the time Carrie publicly mocked her politician boyfriend in her column for wanting her to pee on him. This was really messed up, in my opinion—like, how dare she pass up the opportunity to pee on someone as hot as John Slattery? A tragedy. Or there was the episode where she slut-shamed Samantha after walking in on her blowing the World Wide Express guy, to which Sam responded with the truly iconic line: “I will not be judged by you or society. I will wear whatever and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe—and kneel.” Of all the characters, Sam’s sex positivity ages the best—which is interesting, given that Carrie is allegedly the “sexpert.”
But for all of the perverted enlightenment that SATC offered us, there are some things about the show’s idea of sexual liberation that can feel a bit, well…soulless? Yes, it was revolutionary to see a group of happy, successful women in their 30s and 40s being hoes from hell; however, they tended to treat emotional sensitivity like it was a particularly bad strain of HPV. These were women who—with the exception of Charlotte—often seemed allergic to romance. Holding hands, sleeping over, and having vague maternal instincts were generally portrayed as regressive and basic. Literally, the goal Carrie sets for herself in the pilot episode is to have sex that’s completely casual, void of any emotion—to have sex “like a man,” as she puts it. Apparently, there’s nothing less cool than having feelings.
In one sense, it was exciting to see female characters whose aspirations weren’t to have the perfect wedding, move to the suburbs and pop out a few kids. However, the show often treated women who do want those things as Trad losers. (See: “The Baby Shower” episode, where the girls travel to Connecticut for their friend’s shower, only for Samantha to smugly remark that “it’s sad the way she’s using a child to validate her existence.”) But isn’t there another option, between sex without feelings and hellish domestic boredom? Sure, as the series went on, romance was increasingly embraced—but only to a point. The women were looking for love, but Carrie was still puking at the sight of a wedding ring, Samantha still referred to monogamy as a disease, and Miranda still basically hated her baby.
And I—and I’m sure some of you, too—subscribed to their worldview. I aspired to be “above” knowing how to fry an egg, instead preferring to go out every night, use my stove for storage, and blow random delivery men while wearing $500 Manolo Blahniks bought in lieu of making rent—this, I thought, was being a modern woman. This was “making it.” But then you reach your mid-30s, and it suddenly hits you that being a jaded adult baby with a dislocated jaw and credit card debt isn’t as chic as it once seemed. You realize there might be something appealing about growing the hell up, boiling some pasta, being vaguely stable, and not jumping into a hole in the sidewalk (à la Samantha) to avoid holding hands in public. (I’m still working on that last one.)
Progress often swings like a pendulum: We overcorrect, and then land somewhere in the middle. SATC presented two extremes of womanhood, but maybe neither option is the final form. Our beloved female foursome figured out how to ask for the kind of wild sex lives they wanted. But maybe we should be wishing for something more complicated than sex vs. baby—and I think we might be getting there. It seems, to me, that we’re reaching a place where we can be free to live our slutty truths, but also read Brené Brown, wear sneakers, master Alison Roman’s bean stews, avoid calling our friend’s baby “an asshole,” and not beat ourselves up for having the occasional feeling—and perhaps even feel glamorous doing it.
