Satire in the city

Then, there are the skeptics, the people for whom Sex and the City is a glamorization of everything wrong with cosmopolitan living. These are the people who show up to almost every conversation about dysfunctional social trends involving women — decreasing marriage and fertility rates, increasing rates of depression, alcoholism, and anxiety — and say that the lifestyle promoted by the show must not be so glamorous after all.

The truth is that Sex and the City is more like American Psycho than Working Girl. It’s an incisive and punishing satire about a certain subset of wealthy, culturally influential New Yorkers. What’s curious is that so many people miss this point.

Sex and the City is obviously satirical. The show has all the hallmarks of a satire: The leading ladies and their friends and lovers are archetypal. It is obscene in the same way that Mad magazine is often obscene (few would argue the sex in Sex and the City was ever sexy). And each episode ends with a ham-fisted lesson, reiterating that Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and company do not make smart decisions.

And when Sex and the City is relatable, it is relatable in the same way a joke is relatable: It reveals a truth that everyone knows but that we’re normally too ashamed to admit.

Think of the show’s premise. Carrie, the protagonist, is a sex columnist in her mid-30s strip-mining her own romantic history for content. By the end of each misadventure, she is just barely grasping at childlike nuggets of wisdom — each episode ends with a Hallmark-style gem such as, “It’s comforting to know the ones you love are always in your heart, and if you’re very lucky, a plane ride away” — that she was only able to find by broadcasting her most intimate moments to all of Gotham City. It’s not merely that she writes a sex column. It’s that, at 35, she’s still searching for knowledge that most of us are able to discern by age 20.

From the very first episode, Carrie is portrayed as though she’s suspended in perpetual adolescence. After all, think of her neuroses around her on-again, off-again love interest, Mr. Big: stalking him at church and feeling entitled to meet his mother after only dating for a short time or showing up at his apartment drunk because she’s worried that he’s ashamed of her. When you get the sneaking suspicion that her behavior might be pathetic, it’s because it is.

She can’t cook, she can’t manage her finances, and she’s a bad friend and an inadequate girlfriend. She is constantly being humiliated by her choices. The show never shies away from reminding us that Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and certainly Samantha are adrift.

But what about all of the show’s glamour? No glamorous moment goes unpunished in Sex and the City: Carrie stays up all night partying and ends up on the cover of a magazine looking haggard and unkempt. Charlotte refuses to accept her age and play-acts as a woman in her early 20s, and while she gets short-term validation from a handsome young WASP, he gives her a sexually transmitted disease. Miranda has a high-powered career as a lawyer but is constantly cast as a sexless spinster, a pseudo-lesbian.

Consider the arcs of the four main characters. Miranda, who focuses on her career rather than her romantic life, is paired off with the financially impotent and effete Steve, who has no real career and is desperate for a mother figure. Samantha, after a life of no strings attached sex that’s portrayed as borderline sociopathic, only finds redemption through a cancer diagnosis. And Charlotte, whose life is arguably the happiest of any of them, has to go through a mortifying divorce. These are half-successes that include unique punishments for each character’s sins.

But why is Sex and the City such easy prey for misinterpretation? I have two theories.

The first has to do with the show’s popularity. When a show or series of movies becomes big or profitable, it can grow beyond the artists’ original intention, transforming into something different in the process. As Daniel D’Addario wrote of Sex and the City: “The HBO adaptation began … as a pretty biting satire, but [actress Sarah Jessica] Parker’s winsome portrayal ended up turning Bradshaw into the sort of heroine that can inhabit the center of a profitable movie franchise and become something of a Zeitgeist unto herself.” I buy this theory for the films. But in the show, each episode is a single-serving lesson about why a single, sex-obsessed life is ultimately unsatisfying, and each character only finds absolution upon settling down.

The second theory is that, as a country, we were just unfamiliar with the source material. To a New Yorker watching Sex and the City, especially a New York woman of a particular age and class, the joke is understood. It’s saying, “Yes, we are materialistic, we are shallow, we settle down too late, and it hurts us.”

What about a 15-year-old from Tampa? All she sees are Jimmy Choo heels and a woman who seemingly “has it all.” The criticism that the show directs at Carrie and friends falls by the wayside. But that criticism is a vital component of the story, not just stylized drama.

There’s also the fact that we just weren’t used to this particular flavor of satire. As Emily Nussbaum argued in the New Yorker, there has been such a dearth of female-led television that the minute we got a show that didn’t fit the Mary Tyler Moore formula, we couldn’t help but read it straight. It’s not as though satirical characters are uniformly unlikable or the stories are completely devoid of compassion. When we watch Futurama, we’ll still cry during the famous “Fry’s dog” episode, but this emotional depth makes it no less satirical.

The shock of the novelty made us too forgiving, and we ignored the red flags. Ironically, it’s just the sort of mistake that Carrie and company are constantly making.

Default Friend is a writer and involuntary digital nomad. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter @default_friend.