Sex and the City is about as 'feminist' as a copy

of Playboy
By Toby Young Society Last updated: May 21st, 2010
Im greatly looking forward to the release of Sex and the City 2 next week. I've always been a huge
admirer of the franchise, but not for the reasons you'd think. Im a fan because I think it empowers
single men, not single women. The message is: No need to worry about falling in love, ladies. Having
sex with a bloke youve just met in a bar is perfectly okay.
I remember going to the launch party for the television series in New York in the mid-90s and sitting in
the audience, drinking in the behaviour of Carrie Bradshaw and her friends. As a single man, I thought
all my Christmases had come at once. It was as if a group of frat boys had got together and said, Hey
guys, wouldnt it be funny if we made a TV show that persuades attractive women in their 20s and 30s
that its fashionable to have sex with men like us without demanding any sort of emotional commitment
in return? Not only that, but well do our best to convince them that they actually have to go out of their
way to induce us to have this no-strings attached sex by spending several hours a day on
incredibly painful personal grooming procedures and then squeezing themselves into these fantastically
uncomfortable shoes. The beauty part is well persuade them that doing all this stuff for our benefit
spending their lives beautifying themselves and then submitting to our every sexual demand
without asking for anything in return is a post-feminist choice.
Sex and the City is like a version of The Female Eunuch rewritten by Hugh Hefner.
I was expecting at least some women to see through this. Not all single girls in their 20s and 30s could
be so stupid as to think that giving it away for nothing is actually a form of post-feminist
empowerment, could they? But no. An entire generation of women fell for it hook, line and sinker. Far
from being seen as sluts, women like Samantha Jones were regarded as role models. Suddenly, it
become cool for women to allow themselves to be picked up in bars by selfish, predatory males who
are only interested in one-night stands. Who cares if the men never bothered calling them afterwards? It
was 'liberated' behaviour.
One recurring theme of Sex and the City I particularly enjoy is the idea that modern single women
should have two completely different sets of standards when it comes to who they should sleep with
and who they should marry. Apparently, its okay to share your bed with any Tom, Dick or Harry, but
the only men you should marry are chief executives who look like male models and earn over ten
million dollars a year. Great! That means theyre never, ever going to get married and will continue to
sleep with less-than-perfect men without ever expecting us to put rings on their fingers.
This last point is the killer. The truly incredible thing about Carrie and her chums is that they dont
make the connection between their promiscuity and their inability to find husbands. Duh! Since time
immemorial, the way women have enticed men to make a commitment to them is by refusing to put out
until the man gets down on one knee. But if you're willing to trade access to your body for a

Cosmopolitan and a copy of Vogue, why would a man bother to spend $10,000 on a diamond ring? The
Sex and the City women are never going to ensnare the Masters of the Universe they fantasize about
marrying because Alpha males can have sex with them whenever they want and then discard them like
used towels.
So here's to Carrie Bradshaw, the best female role model to come along in a generation from a single
man's point of view. Keep on giving it up, baby, and every time you let one of us have our wicked way
with you tell yourself you're making a post-feminist choice. Meanwhile, if youve got a spare $50,000
I have a bridge you might be interested in
Stop Press: I'm glad to see that the Telegraph's very own Tanya Gold agrees with me about how
ludicrous it is to describe Sex and the City as feminist.

Sorry sisters, but I hate Sex and the City

As the sequel to the film Sex and the City opens next week,
Tanya Gold says please don't call it a celebration of feminism
Tanya Gold
7:00AM BST 21 May 2010
Sex and the City is embraced as a feminist Bible on screen. The TV series is based on Candace
Bushnells former column in the New York Observer. It is about four women in New York and their
adventures, specifically their romantic and sexual and adventures. It ran for six seasons from 1998 and
then became a feature film. And because the human appetite for watching women being idiots is
insatiable, a sequel opens next week.
Why do we cry feminist? Its because the female characters all work, earn money and talk about sex
a lot, in the way that daft teenage girls do. There is Miranda the lawyer, Samantha the nymphomaniac
and Charlotte the prig. Holding them together is Carrie Bradshaw, a journalist and supposed
Everywoman, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. But be warned, sister Sex and the City is to feminism
what sugar is to dental care.
The first clue is in the opening credits of the television show. Carrie is standing in a New York street in
a ballet skirt, the sort that toddlers wear. She is dressed, unmistakably, as a child. And, because she is
sex columnist on a newspaper, a bus wearing a huge photo of her in a tiny dress trundles past. Carrie
Bradshaw knows good sex, says the bus. And there, before any dialogue hits your ears, you have the
two woeful female archetypes that Sex and the City loves woman as sex object and woman as child.
The fact that Carrie is a journalist is supposed to imply that she is a kind of thinker, and is intellectually
engaged with the world she shops in. Each episode of the TV series is about a sex column she is
writing. She asks herself a question, spends the episode investigating it and usually comes to the

conclusion that she has no conclusion. She is, simply, the worst journalist in the history of the world.
Her self-exploration is a joke.
This is acknowledged when, towards the end of the series, she washes up at Vogue, the worst magazine
in the history of the world. She claims to hang out in the library but, in six series and one film, the only
book she ever picks up is Love Letters of Great Men.
What Carrie does do is shop shop and shop and shop. She prances through Prada, stretching out her
arms for what she thinks she wants. Shoes. Gowns. Shoes. Jewels. Shoes. In one episode Charlotte,
played by Kristin Davis, exchanges sex play for shoes. In another, Carrie realizes she is homeless
because she has spent $40,000 on shoes and does not have a deposit for an apartment. (In this crisis,
she cries and borrows the money for the deposit what child would do anything else?)
So, you can become a whore to get your shoe or you can live in a hedge to get your shoe, but you must
always have your shoe because without your shoe, youre nothing. These women are the Four Shoe
Women of the Apocalypse. And can you walk in these shoes? No. They are the walking-on-a-pin
variety, which thrust out your pelvis like a too-knowing doll.
Sex and the City is really an advert for the fashion industry, which would be fine, except it does not
advertise itself as such. And it pushes shopping not as pleasure or renewal but as self-annihilation. At
one point Carrie says that in her early days in New York she starved herself to pay for her copy of
Vogue. When offered the choice of whether to eat or read Vogue, she chooses Vogue.
Feasting on Vogue, Carries shrinks before us. At the beginning of the series she has wild hair and spots
and almost-normal clothes that is, she looks as much like an ordinary woman as an actress ever can.
But, as season bleeds into season she becomes paler and thinner and blonder, segueing into a straight
haired, botoxed, yoga-ed-out wraith. By the end, she looks so synthetic she could fold herself into one
of her drawers between the tissue paper. She has become not a writer, but a Pilates sock.
Extreme slenderness is vital for the women in Sex and the City to be of normal dimensions is to
check out from Planet Earth. I only spotted one plump woman in the entire run, and she was black. (If
you are black it is OK to be fat because you are not as valuable to advertisers.) When Miranda develops
baby-weight she collapses in a puddle of existential grief. When Samantha, a glorious beauty played by
the British actress Kim Cattrall, puts on a few pounds due to sexual deprivation, her friends panic:
Sweetie, what have you done to yourself? It is as if Samantha became a crack addict just by eating
guacamole.
Sex and the City stole its feminist credentials, I think, by showing female sexuality. The women have a
lot of sex with different men, its true. But its an add-on to the handbags and dieting and the reductive
feminine helplessness it seems like just one more thing they go shopping for. And they pay for it too.
After Samantha, the warmest and hottest character has a lifetime of no-strings sex, she develops
cancer and it feels like a punishment. The happiest character, Charlotte, is by far the most conventional
rich husband, children, no job (by the end), a Park Avenue palace. She plays by the rules and is
rewarded.

And what about men? Sex and the City is supposed to be about the search for love. And it is the
search for a fathers love, not an equals love. Carrie calls John, the alpha male she chases through the
series like a head in search of a wall, Big. That is his name. Big the name a child would give a man.
(He, meanwhile, calls his raddled Lolita Kid.) Big is, obviously, a super-rich businessman because
men with ordinary jobs are despised in Sex and the City. When Miranda, played by Cynthia Nixon,
marries a kindly barman, she has to move to the-hell-that-is-Brooklyn. That is her punishment.
Big, played by Chris Noth, is part carer, part paycheck. Carrie screams and shouts for her shiny things
Just tell me Im the one! and he absorbs it with a smile, because hes Daddy and thats what
daddies do. We watch Carrie as child in every episode. In one, her friends cant make her birthday party
and she sinks into gloom. In another, she loses her Carrie necklace and sobs this from a career
woman in her forties. She leaves Big at one point to move to Paris with another man but because he
doesnt pay her attention 24/7, she storms back to Big. She finally proposes marriage when she realizes
that, should he dump her, she wont have a cent. And where will the shoes come from then, Daddy?
So watch it, if you must. But dont call it feminism at heart, it is nothing more than Stepford Wives.