SATC: Fairytale or Cold Hard Facts?

(Photo of my NY roomie Krissy and I with New York's finest, Halloween 2006.)

When I was living in New York, I turned to the put-together gals of Sex and the City to take my mind off moving 3,000 miles from my comfort zone. I thought I could channel some of that New York sparkle into my own life. My roommate and I would watch re-runs each night at 11 p.m., and Samantha, the most adventurous of the bunch, was my favorite. She was wild, free, exciting—everything I’ve decided I’m not.

As we continued watching night after night I found that instead of being progressive pop culture fixtures, the SATC women soon started to resemble Ariel and the rest of the Disney princesses more than the fabulously free women I remembered them as.

At the beginning of the series, the main character Carrie compels her pals Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha to “date like men,” i.e. sleep around without getting attached. When I was 19/20, watching SATC squeezed in with my sorority sisters on our houses overstuffed peach couches, I envied these women. They had great jobs, great clothes, and tons of sex. Good sex. Not the kind I was having at the fraternity down the street. Even then, they didn’t need anyone, least of all a man, to make their lives happy. They had the Rabbit if all else failed.

Yet, watching again at the wise old age of 23/24, I started picking up on something different. I realized I had been duped. Being single wasn’t fun. Being in New York (as I learned firsthand) wasn’t that easy. Once I got past the Manolos and Cosmos, I saw a different side of thirty. Turns out that the show’s star Sarah Jessica Parker knew she was fooling us young women. We watched the show in our late teens and early twenties with so much hope in our eyes, yearning for nothing more in life than a shoe-filled closet and endless amounts of lunch dates with friends, not yet worrying about old-fashioned ideas like marriage. Parker told Time magazine in 2007 that she tells her pals, “how boring married life is and how much luckier they are to have freedom and fun.” But, according to the happily married Parker, “It’s [really] just a fun thing to say to make single people feel better.”

And as they say, life imitates art. Marriage, I came to see, was the most talked about goal on SATC, not retaining the carefree single life or becoming a power-player in the office. Of course Samantha was on hand to provide some much-needed crassness, but I would say that Charlotte more than balanced her out. Miranda points out their lopsided goals in one episode, snapping at her friends, "How does it happen that such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?" but this query is never really answered. The show, while in some ways progressive, stopped far short of throwing marriage out at the end goal of a woman’s life.

Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People wrote in The Guardian in 2008, as part of an article of male opinions about the show, that old-fashioned ideals are disguised as freedom on SATC with chic accessories. Young said, “forcing your feet into a pair of six-inch heels as you tramp from one singles bar to the next is not a form of torture that these women are forced to endure in order to attract a husband; rather, it is a post-feminist 'choice'.” Meaning, these women make desperation look good. Young notes that under a superficial veil of couture, women are, “expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic wellbeing. [The show] conceals its brutality behind a veneer of cocktails and laughter. In reality, female friendship is the first thing to be sacrificed in the cut-throat competition for rich husbands.”
At it’s core, the show I thought was most advocating carefree lifestyles for women boils down to: yes you should have that freedom, but not for too long. We all have to grow up, eventually. And stop being selfish. That we must grow up. Ew.

When I learned this, I got a little scared. It didn’t help that, while I was religiously re-watching the show through more “mature” eyes, I was not only unsure of the future of my relationship with James, I was also sharing a dingy studio and schlepping it on the subway each day in shoes I bought at the Astor Place K-Mart--a far cry from the West Village, Manolo-wearing glamourpusses I had first seen on screen.

The more I watched, even with their Manolos, I started to feel a little sorry for the fab four, how desperate they were. More than that, I felt for them. I knew what it was like to wonder when I would get engaged, crabby when people keep asking me the answer to something that should be personal, but isn’t. Most of all, I knew I didn’t want to end up sad and alone wondering if my hypothetical Mr. Big was ever going to commit.

Luckily, it turns out okay for the SATC gals. By the series finale, Charlotte is married, Miranda is about to be, and Carrie and Samantha find soul mates, both of whom we assume they will eventually tie the knot with. (And even in the SATC movie, only Samantha ends up staying single, and her breaking point in her relationship with her boyfriend Smith came after she started gaining weight. Put two and two together and it’s still not a progressive message!) Just as in those infamous Disney movies, the happy-ever-ending is when a ring is on your finger and your marital status is presumably set for life.