The Bitch Report: A Non-Fan's Defense of Sex and the City

Let me start off by saying that I am not a Sex and the City fan. Many of my friends are, and I’ve seen perhaps ten episodes here and there (the Post-It one was pretty amusing), but I have zero to negative interest in the show. That said, I don’t hate the show, and in this current environment that seems to make all the difference.

Empress Eve at Geeks of Doom posted a piece last week about the fact that no, not all women are Sex and the City fans, and the reasons why she herself is not one. Her main charges against the show are these: it presents a false vision of Manhattan luxury as affordable and easily attainable; the characters are “narcissistic, superficial slut[s]”; and its portrayal of the characters’ lifestyles and relationships is entirely implausible. With all due respect to Eve, a fellow blogger and personal friend, I disagree with her criticisms of Sex and the City, even as both of us confess to not caring for the show that every vagina owner is supposed to love.

  Yes, Sex and the City is unrealistic. So is Friends and Seinfeld, and for that matter House, Ugly Betty, Grey’s Anatomy, Gossip Girl, and almost everything else on television including “reality” television. That’s not a problem; in fact, that’s the show’s biggest selling point. Sex and the City is a posh escapist fantasy. No one really believes that Carrie can afford an Upper East Side apartment full of Manolos on one column a week, or that all Manhattanites do is shop and fuck and have brunch with friends. (If you do believe that, give me a call so I can tell you about my friend the Nigerian prince.) I’ll admit that to a city-dweller, it occasionally stings to watch Carrie throw back $20 cosmopolitans after a really hard three hours of writing about nothing, when I’ve just talked myself out of wasting $4 on a Starbucks latte. But it also hurts a little to realize that I’ll never really be able to fly over the Manhattan skyline with Nathan Petrelli, and that doesn’t mean Heroes should keep him grounded.

As for the charge that Carrie is self-obsessed and materialistic, all I can say is: Absolutely. She is the single most annoying thing about the show (Charlotte’s exasperating idealism is a distant second). She’s not the only whiny, self-centered protagonist out there—hello Meredith Grey, hello Jack Shepard—but the fact that she has a badly written column feeding her ego and her bank account just makes it worse. On the other hand, who says people need to be austere and profound all the damn time? Everyone, including Carrie, has what Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman calls a “holy right to be cosmetic, acquisitive, and—yes!—superficial.” It’s not for me, but fans seem not to mind.

Eve’s other points primarily have to do with the portrayal of sex on the show, and this is where our viewpoints differ most. Personally, I don’t think there’s really such a thing as too much sex when the show is called Sex and the City. Call the show what you will, but you can’t accuse the title of being misleading. On a more serious level, I take issue with the argument that Carrie is a “slut” who in real life would be “blowing some guy under the bar for free drinks or coke.” First of all, I find the usage of the word “slut” problematic here, as in most cases where it is used as a derogatory term. What is so inherently bad about a woman who sleeps around? This word’s function in our language is to keep uppity women in their place. It’s historically been used to shame any woman who dared test the sexual mores of her time and place—indeed, any woman bold enough to question the model of ideal femininity—and I am uncomfortable with tossing it around to place judgment on another woman. Even if she is fictional.

Further, there’s nothing about the experience of sleeping with men would automatically make a woman unqualified to forge a strong female bond. It’s not as though men dislodge some sort of empathy chip while they’re poking around in there. Eve’s “Slutty McSlutterson” may eschew female company in favor of flirting with men, and her description certainly reminded me of a few girls that I’ve met—but I could think of just as many counterexamples. I’ve seen girls bond over sex and even over having hooked up with the same guy, completely without malice.

Similarly, it’s unfair to predict that Carrie, because she is a sexy, materialistic party gal, would necessarily be a drugged up whore. Crack whores are people who are battling dire issues of addiction and self-esteem, which Carrie is not. From what I’ve seen of the show, Carrie sleeps around because she enjoys it, and she enjoys it for the same reasons that everyone enjoys sex. Perhaps some of those reasons aren’t completely pure and innocent, but I think any of us would be lying if we said all of ours were.

Contrary to what’s usually shown in mainstream media, it is possible for a woman to enjoy and desire sex for its own sake. And it is possible for a woman to have a healthy approach to same, which in my book means a high degree of self-respect as well as the usual safety precautions. I’m not naïve enough to believe that any person with a positive attitude is going to come out of a sex binge completely unscathed, but it’s equally misguided to assume that sex will automatically equal unwanted pregnancy and disease. There’s always a risk of course, but people who take measures to minimize those risks by and large are able to get away with quite a bit of fucking. Finally, there’s the argument I submitted a few paragraphs ago: This is a fantasy. Carrie won’t get gonorrhea because audiences don’t want her to.

I see where Eve is coming from. I’m with her when she concedes that it’s not her cup of tea but that it’s objectively a decent show, and doubly so when she expresses her irritation that people like us are expected to be all over this movie just because—I don’t know, because the Fab Four are female and so are we, I suppose. Where we differ is on what, exactly, we find distasteful about the show, and that’s admittedly a subjective topic. Me, I’m just not into the glamour-girl lifestyle. Regardless, she deserves credit for laying it out there. Scoffing at Sex and the City is easy; analyzing it takes thought and effort.