Sex and the City

Sex and the City has become an unspeakable name among guys.  You can't mention it, watch it, and especially not like it.  You Man Card is immediately taken away, no questions asked.  I felt this way about the show for years, because without every seeing it, I came to loathe it.  I knew many other fellows who felt this way, all for the same reason.  None of us cared that there existed a show that showed women making a living and craving sex.  My generation was raised in an environment which encouraged the talents of boys and girls, and most of us got the message.

No, what made us hate the show was the message it was conveying as seen in the actions of the young women who watched it.  When the show was airing, it looked like they walked away from it thinking that life not merely can, but should involve drinking expensive cocktails, buying insanely expensive shoes, and being pampered by themselves and the men they choose to have in their lives. Guys felt threatened, not because of the idea that their girlfriends or wives might out earn them, but because they feared they would never find a wife or girlfriend without being part of the Manhattan-esque upper crust of society.

At this point, you can take my Man Card away.  I have watched the show extensively lately, with my fiancee. However, I don't really care if anyone wants it, because I'm glad to have seen it.  Sex and the City isn't the best show I have ever seen, but it isn't at all the one it was made out to be.

Okay, it is somewhat the show it was made out to be.  But the messages that people are taking from the it are only half the story.  You can't bring up how the characters knock back Appletinis and bash men without pointing out that the women aren't portrayed as saints. Some of the things they say are meant to be enlightening, but others are meant to show that they are just as bad as the fellas, either in the same way, or in an equal but opposite fashion.  On a whole, its worldview finds the behaviours of both men and women to be frustrating.  The gender, and personalities of the main cast are important, I think.  It makes us accept the fact that women are here to roll with the boys, and the dynamics of society are now changing.  But rather than just stating this as fact, it wants men and women to take a good, hard look at this changing world, and figure out how to live in it, before our own bad tendencies drive us to ruin.  The show has always been pitched to me as antagonistic, but I don't see it here.  It's about as cooperative a take on modern dating as anything I have read or seen.

I also find that the show's glorification of shopping is exaggerated.  I'm not sure if the show changes greatly over the years, but at the very least, the early seasons go to great lengths to show how Sarah Jessica Parker's character can't go buy shoes without maxing out credit cards.  Of course, they'll still show her spending again some episodes later, but I wouldn't say that this means the show is ignoring its actions.  How many times have you seen a sitcom in which an adult loses a bet, and forks over wads of cash to the child they wagered against.  Do we expect the show to remember this next episode?  Comedies tend to play fast and loose, and it doesn't stop them from making a point one moment, and moving on to another.  Reasonable men and women should be able to watch Sex and the City and understand that the show isn't glorifying spending beyond your means.

Maybe that's the problem, then.  The show is a work a fiction, but perhaps not everyone takes it as one.  The setting is real, the stereotypes are familiar, and so people take it that this is some sort of accurate depiction of Manhattan socialites.  I don't think it is, and even if that were the case, the ratio of Manhattanites to the rest of the nation's population is tiny. That isn't our world, and I don't think the show assumes that it is, or that it will be.  It's a good setting for the show's premise and its flavor of humor, and I think it works well.  Unfortunately, there is only so much the show can do with a viewer who can't separate fact from fiction, or who cherry pick all the fun things in the show while ignoring the struggles.  Sex and the City tries to hold a mirror up to its characters, to get them to change for the better, but I feel it has become warped by an audience who can't help but look into the mirror and admire themselves.