No TV show has meant more to me than Sex And The City, which this month celebrated its 20th anniversary, and the honest to God truth is no show ever will. Partly this is a matter of timing. The first time Carrie was splashed by a bus, I had just celebrated my 20th birthday; by the time it finished six years later, I was working as a columnist, in a job not a million miles away from Carrie’s. My dad, born 40 years before me, had his early adulthood soundtracked by the Beatles. Mine played out to the HBO logo and the opening notes of Sex And The City, and it is now impossible for me to imagine those years without the shadow of that show, like taking the brandy out of the fruitcake, the stiletto off the shoe.
SATC came along just when I was looking for guidance about how to be a grownup in the modern world. Claims like this generally prompt sneering today, now that there is next to no credibility in being a SATC fan: too basic! Too white! Too materialistic! And I understand the criticisms, I really do, and, oy vay, don’t even get me started on the films, which are genuine crimes against women. But I’m so glad I got to grow up alongside a TV show that celebrated difficult, prickly, independent women, and that depicted single life in the city as something fabulous and female-centric, not tragic and male-obsessed. And I’ll tell you something else, I have a reliable rule of thumb when it comes to art made for women and largely by women: if men sneer at it, the problem isn’t with the art but with the men. Nothing scares a certain type of man more than art that isn’t for him, and Sex And The City was always, unapologetically, for women. This, too, is a good thing.
SATC didn’t teach me everything, but it taught me the stuff that matters. Sure, there was a lot about shoes and casual sex, but these were embellishments with value: SATC showed me that women should see fashion and sex as fun, like toys for adults, instead of feeling oppressed or defined by them. Funny how the same people who accuse SATC of being interested only in shallow surfaces are themselves looking only at the shallowest surface of the show.
Despite its reputation for being an unrealistic fantasy, Sex And The City was rooted in the everyday and, my God, that show dug deep. It taught me 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 from the planet Crazytime (writer Jack Berger, the worst and truest of Carrie’s boyfriends: your lessons will never be forgotten). No one else talked about stuff like this back then, and every single one of these lessons came in handy over the next decade.
No question, the show lost its way, over time panicking like the thirtysomething women it had always vowed not to be. It bought into the idea that each of the female characters had to end up in a relationship, no matter how improbable (Samantha and Smith) or insulting (Carrie and Big). But even the final series offered invaluable life lessons, not least that a woman should not trust a man who diminishes her when she’s funny (“You are… comic?” a pretentious artist says to Carrie when she dares to laugh at performance art. This has joined the pantheon of great quotes my friends and I still say to each other in times of need, up there with “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right” from When Harry Met Sally, and “Only women bleed” from Bridget Jones’ Diary.)
Yes, of course the show was too white, but it fascinates me that people never make this complaint about, say, Cheers, Seinfeld or The Sopranos but always about Friends, SATC and Girls. Similarly, I’ve never read an article griping about why Tony Soprano was such a narcissistic murderer, but I have read four articles this month in which the writer felt the need to apologise for Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe habit. We are as hard on anything made for women as we are on women themselves, castigating female characters while giving male characters who are far worse a free pass.
Women loved SATC because it featured some of the truest writing around, the sharpest observations, the most original fashion and the funniest jokes. Yes, some parts of it are dated – that’s because it was made 20 years ago, and I’m afraid I can’t really get with the current vogue of castigating art from the past for not being more up to date. Heck, all of us are showing our age these days and, as SATC taught us, only fools try to hide that. SATC made a whole generation of girls the women they are today, and for that I thank it, from the bottom of my Manolo-shaped heart.