It's a sex (and the city) thing

Hold on to your handbags! Carrie Bradshaw and her Manolo-shod girlfriends are back, five years after they last tottered off our TV screens. About time too, says Deborah Orr

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Often, their situational pecking order is in inverse to their intelligence, like in The Office. Sometimes, they have women around to keep them straight, like in Friends. But in Sex and the City, one of a few sit-coms that is entirely carried by four women, nobody is stupid, or even properly ditsy, like, say, Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous, in any way.

Maybe that's the joke. What I've started wondering, as Carrie Bradshaw herself might stab out on her laptop, beguilingly dressed in her typing uniform of ever-changing shorts, with a top that shows off her nice bra, and her impossible abs, is this: is there still a strain in the culture that struggles with the idea that intelligence isn't just wasted on girls? Why is it that a group of clever, ambitious and successful women, sitting around chatting about their tiny troubles, should be such a comedy goldmine?

It's because, isn't it, they're all bright enough to live life on their own independent terms, but still, despite their occasional protests, can't stop projecting their ideas about themselves and their status on to men? Yes – comedy genius – that's why Sex and the City is really about stupid men. Men who are too stupid to bag these fabulous women. Men so stupid that their heart's desire is a life partner who is not an alpha-female, but an even-more-stupid-and insecure-than-me foil. Men who are so stupid that it is contagious and dangerous, because its virulence stupefies women too, like sleeping sickness.

That's why women love Sex and the City – that and the superb production values, of course. It's about women whose crisis is that their ingredients are so exquisite that no man can ice their cake. It's a luxurious, pretty, decadent vehicle, built to patronise all those poor blokes who understand that the sweetie shop's never been so full of guilt-free, non-fattening confections, but just aren't quite sure whether they even have the currency or the qualifications to negotiate for them, even if they could work out how to go about it. If the Sex and the City women have anything to blame for their lack of eagerness to go nuclear, in the family way, it's their own sense of infinite choice and complete entitlement. And the tiresome, childish idiocy of men.

All of the women in Sex and the City have a catch of a chap in the wings, who wants them just as they are, except maybe Carrie, who really doesn't quite seem to be able to close the deal with Big (or any of the others, like Berger or Aidan) because he is, in some not-even-important-enough-to-be-defined way, more ultra-stupid than all the others. (Though if Britain's closest relative to Carrie, the journalist Liz Jones, is any yardstick, there might be grounds for suspicions that men aren't quite stupid enough to feel entirely comfortable with women who hawk their emotional lives in the media for a living. But I digress.) Anyway, Miranda has Steve, who isn't thrusting and successful enough for her, though she manages to work that awful problem through. Samantha had Richard, who just wasn't quite gay enough for her, so she hooked up with Smith instead, who seems to be gay enough for her, but might well fall at the final hurdle. (The coming film, like the final scene in any comic farce, will no doubt end with the actors all rushing towards the footlights, paired-off, hand-in-hand, to cheers.)

And Charlotte, well, she could have anyone she wanted, whenever she felt like it, as pretty, finished princesses like her invariably do. Charlotte's little perversion is that she likes to sit around pretending that she doesn't actually just prefer banging a different eligible bachelor every week. Charlotte makes Nick Clegg look like a blushing virgin. It's Charlotte, all innocence, not Samantha, all braggadocio, who is the most insatiable little minx of the lot.

That's why she tripped up the aisle with Trey. Because she's so totally macho that she thinks the bad boys are for having sex with and the good boys are for marrying. No wonder she's willing to throw her lot in with big, lumpy, sweaty, farty, baldy Harry. Those two can just hang out in the locker-room, indulging in manly non-verbal communication together, and having the occasional wet-towel fight, for the rest of their lives. Sweet. Guys together.

None of this is to say that Sex and the City is anything more than a romantic fantasy with a four-wheel drive and a modern twist. It's debatable, in fact, whether there's even very much of a modern twist in there. The storybook romantic premise is always that the lovers are initially star-crossed, and eventually in harmony. Ultimately, the moral of Sex and the City is that, when it comes right down to it, feminism has had only a superficial impact on men and women and romance. And that's where the real fantasy, and the uncomfortable reality, kicks in.

It is widely proselytised that women like to sit around deciding which Sex and the City girl is most like them. There are even quizzes on US women's websites that exist to ease our passage through this winsome parlour game. But really, when it comes right down to it, there isn't much in it.

Are you the Caucasian one whose ancestors tripped off the Mayflower, clearly educated enough to be so comfortably the acme of sophisticated Western ease and confidence that you can just fritter your intellect lightly and carelessly away; successful in your career; financially secure enough to merely corpse over the difficulties of weekly investments in super-expensive shoes; beautiful, healthy, glamorous and blessed with a family background so unencumbered by baggage or responsibility; any fly in the soothing ointment of hereditary security and down-the-generations personal autonomy, that you might as well have stepped off a scallop, out of the foamy waves? Or are you one of the other three who are just the very same as that, only with diverging tinting and conditioning needs at the hair salon, and varying sorts of taste in expensive, distinctive clothing? Sure, one's angrier, one's primmer, one's more sexually aggressive and one keeps her underwear on during sex scenes. But still, infinite variety of womanhood, it ain't.

This is not, by any means, some sort of politically correct criticism of the show. It isn't a laboured and obvious little moue about inclusivity and reflecting the American ethnic melting pot. It is a tribute to the show that it didn't opt for the didactic fantasy that the New York liberal elite is a perfect distillation of the multicultural, anyone-can-make-it, classless American dream. The heft of the women in New York who live lives that are an approximation of those of Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda, really are that white, and that gilded, and that ivy league. Those four, in general terms, are typically the kind of women for whom the only downside of feminism is too much fun and too many choices, with even the biological imperative of children a back-of-the-mind niggle that the present is too seductive to offer purchase to. Anyway, the world-beating gynaecologist will be soothing about the issue until the very last moment, when the classy adoption agency, and the nanny, will glide in to take over the job.

Criticism of the show, on those terms, and such criticism has been made, rather misses the point that these fantasy women are a narrow, atypical, yet genuine social reality. Anthropologically speaking, Sex and the City is clear-sighted. It is exaggerated and heightened for dramatic impact. But it is essentially honest and true. The Sex and the City women stick with their white elite tribe, making only the very occasional foray into the African-American middle-class constituency. Samantha dated a dreamy black record producer, but was cat-fought off by his sister who wouldn't let her brother mess around with white women. Miranda rebounded off Steve and on to a man who was the sort of perfect economic and professional equal she thought she craved. All that was wrong with him was that he was just too perfect. Is it just too perfect to be everything the white-New-York liberal elite desires, except with the unassailable moral superiority of getting there even though you are black? Did Miranda, after all, prefer being dominant to being irrevocably, genetically, trumped?

Who would the Sex and the City girls opt for in the Democratic nomination, Clinton or Obama, if they ever found themselves in character and in the privacy of a poll booth? It's a tricky New York-woman question, and not one our ladies ever got near to discussing over weekend brunch. They're all much too well-bred ever to admit that their lives are entirely about looking after their own, happy ever after, by their lights. And the final, delightful irony? It's a tribute to the wider complexity of New York and America that it found such a stylish, likeable and unthreatening expression of its robustly unfriable core social order.

The film's an afterthought, an add-on, a money-thing, a shelf-life-of-an-actress thing. Paradoxically, because American film is typically the apotheosis of fantasy, it's an injection of real life and real choices, driven by real women and men squeezing out their formula, their earning power and their success.

But the series, as it developed from the self-conscious sexual-social commentary that characterised the early Candace Bushnell columns on which it was based, to a glossy beast with a ball-gowns-for-cocktails-in-Paris life of its own, was Gatsby for the telly, with laughs. It was a serious, comic satire, about the unbearable good fortune of being privileged enough to believe you can be a bright young thing forever. People do really ask whether you can be a feminist and enjoy Sex and the City. I think you have to be a feminist through and through to really luxuriate in how beautifully subversive, how truly and gloriously absurd, the gig really was.