Modern Woman as Love Machine: The Post-Feminist Landscape, as Projected by 'Sex and the City'

If you stand outside on quiet Sunday nights, with your ears turned in the right direction (that is, toward Manhattan), you can hear the faintest of echoes wafting in from up north: the death rattle of HBO's "Sex and the City" program, whose last season (its sixth) began June 23. And none too soon; the sooner it starts, the sooner this farcical bitch-slap to the feminist legacy will be finished.

I write having seen every episode to date, and I was eager to see if the show's plot trajectory stayed on its usual course before writing this. Now, being fairly confident that its creators are unlikely to end the show on any kind of redemptive note, I am empowered to make this single point: "Sex and the City" is quite possibly the most viciously misogynistic television show of all time. Now that's saying a lot, given that the exploitation of women is a fundamental trait of pop culture, but I don't think I'm going too far here.

For the uninitiated, "Sex" is told from the perspective of Carrie Bradshaw, who writes a sex column in New York City. (Carrie is based on one Candace Bushnell, who wrote the book upon which the series is based; she also dated Bret Easton Ellis, the ever-sensitive author of American Psycho.) She likes clothes, she likes boys, and she loves her friends: Miranda, a lawyer; Charlotte, an art gallery docent; and Samantha, a high-powered publicist. Carrie and her friends are presented as people to envy, because they're stylish, because they get into all the important places and occasionally meet celebrities. They are also 30-somethings who drink to excess and exist to be laid by guys who, this being Manhattan, have no incentive whatsoever to love them. Not that love really matters in the real world anymore; it's all about money and power and control. Love, as a modus operandi, is a pursuit best left to those for whom it is their only salvation from a life at the bottom of productive society.

The show is either about the characters' quest for love and satisfaction, or else it's a dismal, existentialist critique of Manhattan's elite and their influence on the whole of American life. Either way, it only reinforces the damage done to women as a social and political force since American feminism peaked in the early 1970s. As the saying goes, You've come a long way, baby – to the point that their unequivocal advocacy of preemptive infanticide is now the only real position they seem willing to take. That, and the firm belief that teenagers should be allowed to wear thong underwear in school. Freedom!

The modern American girl eats food pumped full of BGH, steroids and other chemical additives that make their bodies develop sooner. They are likewise fed a battery of propaganda from various entertainment conglomerates that shows them exactly how to use their bodies to get attention that they are increasingly unable to attain by other means. Music videos, especially, portray them as sex machines, all high heels and bikinis and makeup and skin, because "it takes skin to win," as they say. The result is a youth culture that more or less forces girls to put out, lest they be deemed unpopular by the only person whose opinion has ever really mattered – the alpha male.

On "Sex and the City," there are few if any consequences to sleeping around. We've seen no scenes of the assorted paramours trading details of their encounters with the women, clueing each other in as to how best to bag one lady or another. Concepts such as restraint, decorum, reputation and (watch out!) feminine virtue are scarcely mentioned. The awkward exit that often caps an urban one-night-stand is only alluded to in the show's opening sequence, which shows Carrie hobbling on her heels, hailing a cab in last night's finery. Because she's an independent woman, with her own money and (we assume) goals, it does not matter what happens to her reputation in the most densely-populated place on Earth. Watching her is like watching a young Helen Gurley Brown, certain in the knowledge of what she would become.

In six sexy seasons, those responsible for "Sex and the City" have provided next to nothing in terms of character development. Any changes the characters go through tend to result from the flaws of the men they associate with, and any emotional trauma resulting from those changes are alleviated by other men. Any points to be made about the nature of sexual relations in modern America have been obscured by free-love frivolity, although apparently unprotected sex is okay as long as one does so only with wealthy white males one has met at a trendy nightspot. The idea that three of the four characters have had abortions and regretted it is floated only to persuade the fourth that single motherhood in New York City is a better option. All told, the show has done less to advance the study of sex as an extension of the human personality than the "Brenda Chenowith" character (played by Rachel Griffiths) did in just 13 episodes in the second season of "Six Feet Under." (But they were trying.)

None of this, mind you, is to be taken as criticism of the thespians who bring the characters as close as possible to life each week. Indeed the cast, led by Sarah Jessica Parker, has come close to genius at times. They have made a money-machine out of material that had no business ever getting on TV. In fact, it's arguable that "Sex and the City" would have never aired had it not debuted as part of AOL/Time-Warner's campaign to run one of the broadcast networks onto the auction block. This campaign has led HBO to run some of the most brutally subversive programming ever to reach the viewing audience, but that's another subject for another time.

HBO claims that 93,000 girls aged 12–17 watch the show, often with the approval of their parents, which perhaps explains why parents are irrelevant these days. As a 16-year-old wrote to Sarah Hepola of the still-esteemed New York Times, "I am so Carrie!" This is apparently a phenomenon worth celebrating in the nation's paper of record, which neglects to mention the stake they and others in the media have in propagating the values inherent to "Sex and the City." The show gets such good press because it's about New York and New York's consumer-goods industry. It is a shameless advertisement for the kinds of businesses that would buy time to push their wares and their agenda if HBO didn't run commercial-free. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of young women (by which I mean those 21 and under, though it's been said that one hasn't truly "matured" until age 25) in less cosmopolitan locales are getting the subtle message that sexual promiscuity is not just cool and fun, but absolutely essential to marrying up. And men are learning that marriage is for suckers. These lessons, internalized, will comprise the core values for this and succeeding generations of Americans, further impairing their ability to sustain the promise of America in these dangerous times.

June 30, 2003

Shelton Hull [send him mail] is a columnist and writer based in Jacksonville, Florida. His work has appeared in FolioWeekly, Counterpunch, Ink19 and Section 8 Magazine.