When it first aired on HBO back in 1998, “Sex and the City” was a revolutionary show given its content (a whole lot of sex), the way said content was explored (openly, without the use of any beeping) and whom it was explored by (four thirty-something, mostly single women). Like all things revolutionary, it contended with a whole lot of criticism throughout its six-year run. So yes, “SATC” taught women a lot about fashion and sex. And yet, one of the core aspects of the series seems to resonate more than ever when visualized through the prism of a time defined by sadness, anxiety, panic and an almost complete disregard for our mental health. It taught us the importance of female friendships.
I couldn’t help but wonder… why making friends — better still, making girlfriends and keeping them — is one of life’s most underrated skills? Having siblings is great (from what I’ve heard), but there’s something even more beautiful about nurturing and maintaining a relationship that has no reason to exist but for the fact, you and your friend really want it to. “SATC” is a powerful reminder of the power of female friendship. The lengths, trust, honesty and, my heavens, THE TIME. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte had a bond that wasn’t mythical or baffling. These women shared the greatest love story any of them ever truly experienced – with each other.
Despite its reputation for being an unrealistic fantasy, “Sex And The City” was rooted in every day and, my God, that show dug deep. It taught us how to react when you’re in a taxi and your friend tells you she has cancer; what to say when you’re in a waiting room with your friend before she has an abortion; how to find friends who won’t judge you for having an affair (but also how to find friends who won’t let you entirely off the hook for having an affair); what it’s like to have a baby when you’re not a baby person; how to deal with your friend having a baby when you keep having miscarriages; how not to lose your mind when you’re dating a guy who looks normal but is actually a raging narcissist. No one else talked about stuff like this back then. Charlotte once beautifully said, “Don’t laugh at me, but maybe we could be each other’s soulmates? And then we could let men be just these great, nice guys to have fun with?” A sentiment echoed in reality for so many real-life girlfriends. “Sex And the City” taught us how to be real, brave, honest friends over and over again, and their lessons on friendship certainly live on. The notion that “Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates”, proposed by Charlotte in season 4, gained huge traction over the subsequent 20 years, with a variety of celebrities eulogising and declaring love for, not their partners or husbands, but their female friends, and making appearances alongside them on the red carpets of LA’s biggest awards show. Maybe my favourite is former “Dawson’s Creek” actresses Michelle Williams and Busy Phillips. In an interview with People magazine in the US, Williams said that Phillips is “proof that the love of your life does not have to be a man.” Drew Barrymore, meanwhile, described Cameron Diaz as “more than a best friend, she’s my sister.”
Early-aughts pop culture artefacts like “SATC” (see also: “Friends”, “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”, “Bridget Jones’s Diary”), helped shape millennial women’s expectations and understanding of adulthood. They also are comforting because they follow a formula: bad dates, brunch, and repeat until you get a happily ever after surrounded by best friends. We’ve been so focused on chasing new firsts and the sort of relationship milestones we’ve all been taught to expect before settling down, that we forgot to prepare for the acute loneliness that comes from being the only single person among our friends. Here is where I say, we love our married friends and our friends in serious relationships, and we really mean that. We do not want them to be single for us; they’ve found partners that make them happy, and that’s all we want for one another. Somehow, “SATC” overlooked one part of female friendship that happens when one friend is married and the other isn’t: The married friend stops talking about sex (exception: when trying to have a baby). In fact, they share a lot less about their relationship entirely. So, in turn, we feel silly sharing news of our first dates with them, as if we’re putting ourselves on display even when we’re ready to gush about something promising. “SATC” wanted to make single women in their 30s feel more seen and less alone. But that’s the point. Many single women in their 30s, even today, do feel left behind. Most of their friends are married and have children. We see one another less. We have fewer meandering, intimate conversations over brunch. The idea of four friends who stay both single and tightly bound well into their 30s feels almost as extravagant to me as the show’s iconic clothing budget. But I couldn’t know this watching the show in my formative years. Now that I am dangerously approaching the characters’ age, I can see clearly what a superficial construct it is. But did “SATC” really fail us, single women? No, because it did get this right: Friendship can, and often does, transcend relationship status. My friends, whether or not they are with someone, have slept over when they’ve had too much to drink and spent time with me after bad days and surprised me with random gifts and food they thought I would like. Just as I will always be there for them.
Recently, I was on a second date with someone and was facing a table of eight friends, all young women seemingly from all walks of life. Throughout the evening, traces of their conversation made their way to me. It sounded as though they were mostly single and were definitely commiserating about meeting decent men in Paris. A waitress came by with a trayful of prosecco as seven women sang “Happy Birthday” to their friend. At this specific moment in time, it occurred to me that while those early-aughts pop-culture artefacts might have ultimately left us feeling alone, real life is there to remind us that we’re not.
Two decades on from the show’s first episode, everything is fast — food, work, phones, education, marriages, travel. Most things are about how quickly we can access the “final goal”. But even now, this show has continued to remind us that creating and nurturing a friendship, could very well be one of the greatest masterpieces of our entire lives.
Even though, the show is very much a creation of the late 90s and early 00s: and as such – while it might still be clever, insightful and funny – it is no longer thought of as the feminist tour de force it was considered to be at the time. In the years after “SATC”, the themes covered in the show are now commonplace. Women are getting married later than ever, earning more than ever – despite there still being a gender gap, which is a different article – and the female movement is raging intensely. For those young Gen Xs/mature millennials women (pick your poison), the impact made by their favourite show was a deep one. Thanks to an imperfect set of protagonists, provocative fashions, and relatable storylines inspired by the actual lives of female writers, women have been free to seek satisfaction through self-development, careers and friendships, rather than relationships alone.
Carrie Bradshaw couldn’t possibly exist in 2022. And yet… maybe we couldn’t exist without her. Regardless of its now-apparent shortcomings in terms of sexual, ethnic and class-related relations, “SATC” still broke countless boundaries – and not just its matter-of-fact depiction of women talking about sex. It showed a miscellany of female experiences on the small screen, carefully weaving illness, infertility, bereavement, ageing, motherhood, domestic abuse, infidelity, sexual discrimination and divorce into its storylines. We learned that we don’t need to have all the answers and that we should start putting ourselves first (“I love you,” as Samantha once told Smith, “but I love me more”). Above all else, though, we learned that women are more powerful when they stand together. And that is an incredible legacy that will always be in fashion.
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