Sex in the City- A Man’s Take

This surprisingly enough was Dan's idea. Sallie's comments are in Italics.

I remember when I was younger and first had HBO thinking that this Sex and the City show seemed like something I shouldn’t watch, but yet wanted to so bad. I remember watching one episode of it then and being extremely disappointed. Not only wasn’t there much of the brief nudity HBO was famous for at the time, but these ladies weren’t the normal, “I need a man, I’m kind of ditzy” lady stars I was used to.

This is all mostly true, though some of the characters develop a bit of that desperation as the show progresses and they get older. This ‘independent woman’ aspect of the show didn’t really draw me into the series. I just liked it because it was something different from what I’d seen in the past (I didn’t start watching it until after the series had ended), and I was old enough, etc., to get what they were talking about and appreciate the new perspective.

I’ve recently been re-watching it a bit with Sallie and I think I’m starting to see why woman pay $8.50 to see the very mediocre reviewed movie, and why feminists mostly agree that it is, in fact, a good show. These women, for the most part, are intelligent and have complete control over their lives. It’s not something you often see outside of the horribly written Julia Roberts movie.

We haven’t seen the movie, so we can’t speak for that. I’m taking my time, I guess.

The first few episodes have all the classic characteristics of a Film Noir. Carrie is an inquisitive main character who smokes cigarettes in low light with the ceiling fan shadow spinning across the room.

Then you have the slut character, Samantha. For the most part, she more or less just seems to be a slut, but at the same time you get something else from her. It’s almost like someone took the ditzy cheerleader that slept with the football team and gave her about 100 IQ points so she could validate how she acts. She almost makes being the slut look reasonable.

Charlotte is the character I think that gets shoved into the background the most, but is also the character I would most likely date. She’s intelligent, down to earth and by far the most attractive of the Sex and the City girls. I wish she was more of the focal point, but I guess interesting television doesn’t focus on the most sane person.

She’s also the most conservative, both in sex scenes and as her character’s values are concerned, which would do little to sell the HBO show that’s supposed to be all about sex. However, she does go topless in later episodes.

Sex and the City would never work as the male version because it would become a soft-core porn Kevin Smith film. Women talking about sex toys is empowering, but men talking about them is perverse. If a show featuring males focused on fashion… well we already have that, it’s called “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” And if a male narrated show focused on New York, you would get at best a Woody Allen film and at worst Seinfeld. Both are great in their own right, but neither quite create the frenzy that the four women on HBO created. In a way, I’m jealous. In another, I don’t think I’d want to watch a show that talked about vaginas all the time.

We like this show because we can see ourselves or somebody we know in the characters, even if it’s not a direct reflection. We have some of Carrie’s introspective insecurity; Miranda’s pessimistic realism; Charlotte’s wide-eyed propriety and Samantha’s unapologetic slutdom. The show is undoubtedly girly and can seem superficial, but it also provides commentary on the society that women and the men who come in and out of their lives (etc.,) live in.