'sex and the city' and the politics of heterosexual love

the ladies in season 1 episode 9, ‘the turtle and the hare’

visiting carrie bradshaw’s apartment on perry street in the west village didn’t change my life the way i thought it would. i’m not really sure what i expected. but i still gushed, i lit a virginia slim, and my best friend from high school, emi, dutifully took the obligatory pictures.

when i was twenty-one i spent three weeks in new york. i stayed with emi in her tiny apartment near morningside park. when i wasn’t with her, i spent all my time wandering around aimlessly, reading chris krauss, listening to either interpol or leonard cohen, meditating on desire, powered by countless cigarettes and cups of black coffee and bagels with cream cheese and wondering why my stomach always felt a little upset.

on my last full day in new york, i went back to carrie’s apartment alone. emi was busy being very intelligent in a classical japanese class. i was wearing cowboy boots and a butter-yellow slip dress that i had thrifted from the housing works on columbus and 74th street first thing that morning.

what i was wearing on my last day in new york

in new york, i went to many landmarks that held deep personal significance for me, and then was overwhelmed by that significance and didn’t really know what to do with all of it. usually, i would just commemorate the moment by smoking a cigarette and staring wistfully into the middle distance. even though i was meant to be thinking about all of this history and culture i was soaking in, i would inevitably end up thinking about myself, as most twenty-one-year-olds do (especially a twenty-one-year-old whose life is unravelling at the seams in spectacular fashion).

while finishing my cigarette, i ended up chatting to a man walking down perry street who thought he recognised me. it turned out we didn’t know each other at all (because of course we didn’t) but he said he thought i was beautiful and wanted me to have dinner with him.

“i can’t,” i said. “it’s my last night in new york.”

“you should have dinner with me because it’s your last night in new york.”

i shook my head. he suggested that i come back to his apartment instead. “it’s just near here. i have a view of carrie bradshaw’s apartment door from my balcony,” he said, as if this would change my mind.

i shook my head again, finished my cigarette, he pleaded, and i said he needed to learn to take no for an answer. this pissed him off, and he walked away.

then i decided to walk all the way from greenwich village to morningside drive, because i wanted to say good bye to as much of the city as i could. it took two blistering hours, but the temperature was autumnal, perfect. i spent the whole walk on the verge of tears, because men wouldn’t leave me alone. all down broadway: constant catcalling, constant obscene commentary. my whole trip i had been dreading leaving new york, but on this last day, i was finally ready to go home.

i came back to emi, who was waiting in her apartment for me, and who, in many ways, is my home. together we’ve been dealing with unwanted male attention since puberty. i was feeling weird - she was also feeling weird, for separate but similar reasons - so we walked to the bodega to buy grapes and talked about simone de beauvoir. smoked beneath the scaffolding.

really, that last night, what we were coming to grips with was this: how scared we are of men, and how much we want them anyway.

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my love of ‘sex and the city’ is no secret. it’s kind of, like, my thing.¹ one of my best friends christina says that i talk like i’m trapped in an episode of it. anyone who has dated me in any meaningful way has been forced to watch several ‘sex and the city’ episodes (one of the things i’m proudest of is how many men i have introduced the show to who are often very pleasantly surprised). whenever i’m working from home and on a deadline, i have to pretend i’m carrie bradshaw pondering manhattan and men in order to get anything done. every time i meet someone new, i can’t help but label them as one of the four women in my head. (if you must know, i am a carrie, unfortunately. not just because i have curly hair and am a writer and a girl about the town and like to wear my little outfits and used to be addicted to nicotine. it’s also because i have main character syndrome and make many stupid decisions and don’t have a lot of self-respect and rely completely on my friends. sometimes i like to tell people that i’m a samantha-carrie hybrid, but this isn’t really the whole truth, it’s just a nice thing to believe.) when i’m drunk and when i’m sober, when i’m menstruating and when i’m ovulating, i cry hysterically during various episodes, especially those in season 6.²

satc is so cold. it is so warm. it is one of the most groundbreaking shows of all time, and it also shockingly dated (season 3 episode 18, i’m looking at you). it is endlessly shallow, and endlessly enlightening. it is a piece of media that i love and has informed my worldview, and it is also a piece of media that i am extremely skeptical of, and that in many ways i inherently disagree with. though i love to watch them cavort around new york on my tv screen, i think often of how disastrous my hypothetical interactions with the satc ladies would be (with the possible exception of miranda - but even then i bet we’d have irreconcilable differences on the topic of late-stage capitalism). in my head i can picture so clearly charlotte raising her eyebrows at the visual affront of my unshaven armpits and legs, carrie refusing to believe that my sexuality exists (she infamously breaks up with a very lovely man because he happens to be bisexual). samantha would probably think i read too much andrea dworkin.

in many ways, ‘sex and the city’ is a hallmark of, to me, the wrong values to have. but somehow, it has also taught me many of the right values to have. what do you know, i guess it’s time to accept that two things can be true.

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last month, i spent a lot of time reading andrea dworkin. i also rewatched the latter seasons of ‘sex and the city.’³ this heady combination meant that i started thinking obsessively about the politics of heterosexual love. i worked myself into a real panic all throughout march and haven’t really come to any meaningful conclusions just yet.

in an interview with the guardian, elif batuman (absolute queen of my heart), said the following: “being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.”

kind of a hot take.

i am a woman who is attracted to men, but more importantly wants to be perceived as attractive to men. i do find this (not the act of being attracted to men, who are beautiful, but the act of being desperate to be attractive to men) to be slightly embarrassing. wanting to be able to “close the deal” with a man feels at odds with my feminist identity and my queer identity, but it is nonetheless a desire that i haven’t managed to escape.

this was already an issue that i was grappling with, and then i read intercourse, in which andrea dworkin writes, “what does it mean to be the person who needs to have this done to her: who needs to be needed as an object…who needs to be wanted more than she needs integrity or freedom or equality?”

my brain imploded in on itself. my brain continued to implode in on itself as i read on: “the brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation…she polices her own body; she internalises the demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life around meeting those demands.”⁴⁵

let’s apply this to satc: carrie, samantha, miranda, and charlotte largely construct their lives around meeting these demands. they are always made up, always well-dressed. together, they attend workout sessions in all forms (they are all rigorously thin). an ideal woman in a late-stage capitalist world, as jia tolentino writes, is “always optimising.” and carrie, samantha, miranda, and charlotte are feats of optimisation. they book waxing appointments and mani-pedis and facials. they are constantly discussing men, and constantly discussing how they can be more appealing to men. in season 2 episode 1, miranda makes it clear that she’s had enough of this: “how does it happen that such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? it’s like seventh grade with bank accounts. what about us? what we think, we feel, we know? does it always have to be about them? just give me a call when you’re ready to talk about something besides men for a change.”

satc continues the storied tradition of the husband hunt. candace bushnell was like the jane austen of the 90s. the difference here is that carrie, samantha, charlotte and miranda are all economically stable. financially, and professionally, they have it all - they just don’t have the social clout that a husband brings.

though i’m always a fan of making the jane austen comparison, i think it would actually be more accurate to compare satc to the novels of edith wharton. i mean, carrie even references her in the show’s (and the book’s) opening monologue:

“welcome to the age of un-innocence. no one has breakfast at tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. instead, we have breakfast at 7 a.m. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. cupid has flown the co-op.”

writing during the gilded age, edith wharton was constantly exploring new york society and the institution of marriage, and how what that meant was in sudden flux. this line from her novel the custom of the country honestly wouldn’t be out of place in one of carrie’s columns: '“society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. the steel shell was built up in wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in fifth avenue.” earlier in the book, the main character undine spragg says coyly to a possible suitor: “new york’s not very friendly to strange girls, is it?” that sentence right there basically encapsulates the entire conceit of satc. perhaps the gilded age is not quite so different from the end of history.

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academic and author jane arthurs argues that satc “establishes a space in popular culture for interrogation of our own complicity in the processes of commodification - women’s narcisistic relation to the self, the production of fetishistic and alienated sexual relations - that continue to undermine our self esteem and contentment.”

in the custom of the country, a minor character pontificates during tepid party chit-chat, “how do the women avenge themselves? all my sympathy’s with them, the poor deluded dears, when i see their fallacious little attempts to trick out the leavings tossed them by the preoccupied male - the money and the motors and the clothes - and pretend to themselves and each other that that’s what really constitutes life.”

in the world of satc too, against the backdrop of post-feminist consumerism-driven new york, the women are solely focused on external possessions: on, as wharton puts it, “the money and the motors and the clothes.”

carrie, charlotte, miranda, and samatha are totally self-absorbed. they are rabidly individualistic, and they are rabid consumers. carrie in particular is branded as the ultimate cosmopolitan hyper-feminine consumer. in season 1 episode 5, instead of actually writing while she’s on a deadline, she acts on a theory she has about “shopping as a way to unleash the creative subconscious.” she has canonically spent $40,000 on her beloved shoe collection.⁶

these women are materially successful, but spiritually unfulfilled. they are walking gentrifiers (season 3 episode 18, i am once again looking at you). they are unabashedly white and unabashedly ignorant.

in season 2 episode 10, the women discuss miranda’s boyfriend steve’s lack of ambition and wealth while nail technicians massage their feet and buff their toenails. charlotte calls steve working class, which the other girls rebuff her for. she argues, “but you’re trying to pretend that we live in a classless society. and we don’t.” she glances at the women tending to their feet. the camera pans out. yuppie guilt settles across the screen. “thank you,” carrie says sheepishly to the woman massaging her feet, who nods mutely.

in her brilliant video essay on the series, broey deschanel acknowledges that we cannot ignore the “myriad” times that satc failed marginalised communities. but she also posits that the show “actually says a lot about the human condition under capitalism, and ideological numbness.” by virtue of their capitalistic success, the women of satc are largely alienated from authenticity and human connection and are, at first, looking for fulfilment in all the wrong things. carrie thinks she can find it in a pair of manolo blahniks. charlotte thinks she can find it in a clean-cut circumcised hedge fund manager. samantha thinks she can find it in sex detached from feeling. miranda thinks she can find it by relying solely on herself. of course, it eventually comes to pass that none of these things can be true.

in the early seasons of satc, heterosexual love is not love at all, it is merely a series of transactions. but new york changes, and carrie, charlotte, miranda, and samatha change too. they discover that basically the whole point of anything at all is to rely on others, and to be there to be relied upon.

satc is ultimately so emotionally resonant because it allows you to watch four women build community with each other over six impossibly complex seasons. in part one of the season finale, mr. big meets with charlotte, miranda, and samantha to see if he still has a chance with carrie (even after she has run off to paris with mikhail baryshnikov in what is probably supposed to be some kind of cold war allegory). he says to them, “you three know her better than anyone. you’re the loves of her life. and a guy’s just lucky to come in fourth.”

in season 1 the women are grappling with the “the end of love” in manhattan. by the end of season 6, they realise that love doesn’t always look the way that in does in vogue and cosmopolitan, and they choose to open themselves up to that.

one scene in particular demonstrates to me the way the show chooses to uphold these values.

in the season finale, the once cold, self-absorbed, individualistic miranda takes in her mother-in-law (who she has famously never been a fan of) after she has suffered from a stroke. the maid, magda - who has been part of miranda’s life for years now - watches miranda lovingly sponge off her confused, sick mother-in-law in the bath.

later, magda comes up to miranda when she is alone. she says, “what you did - that is love. you love.”

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sex and the city hurts to watch sometimes. i am so deeply different from these women onscreen, but in an extremely confronting (and occasionally comforting) way i am also the exact same as them. ultimately, i have actually learned a lot about myself from watching the show several times, though i’m sure there are different things i could be doing with my life. for some reason, this silly, complicated piece of media has undeniably been an anchor for me.

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the next day, i left new york. sometimes i think i miss the city terribly - and i suppose i do - but really i miss the friend that was in it most of all.

1. but i’ve never watched an episode of ‘and just like that’ and probably never will. there’s just no point without samantha, sorry.

2. the finale always send me into a weeping frenzy. but in general i mostly cry about samantha: i always cry when smith shaves his head for her when she’s going through chemo. i always cry when carrie keeps trying to take her mind off of breast cancer and samantha says to her, “let me talk about what i’m afraid of. please.” i always cry when samantha says to smith in the series finale, “you have meant more to me than any man i have ever known.” kim cattrall 4eva <3

3. my tolerance break had gone on long enough.

4. though i would still recommend it, intercourse is an extremely complicated and divisive book. dworkin is right about many things and wrong about others.

5. sorry about all these footnotes, by the way. i feel like david foster wallace.

6. this is in 2001. accounting for inflation, that would come to about $75,000 now. USD!!!