Did ‘Sex and the City’ Spawn A Generation Of Women Who Are DTF?

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Sex and the City

I’ve always been unapologetic about my love for Sex and the City. The show might be overflowing with the most cringe-inducing puns, but watching it always feels like hanging out with an old friend. In many ways, the show provided inspiration to an entire generation of young single women to take Manhattan by storm with or without a man.

So, when I was home sick last week, I naturally turned to Sex and the City to help get me through my boredom and my pain. But something weird happened. For the first time that I can remember, I didn’t think that Carrie and Co. were cool, sexy, or sophisticated. Ironically, now that I am a single 30-year-old writer living in New York, I couldn’t get past the fact that Carrie was sheltered, naive, and even a little prudish.

It seems clear to me now that Carrie Bradshaw is the last person who could ever be qualified to write a column about sex and relationships. She has toxic taste in men and an almost crippling sense of selfishness, but what’s really shocking is how uncomfortable she is with sex. In the first season, she’s embarrassed by the sight of condoms, she gets distraught when she catches Big with another woman (even though they aren’t officially monogamous), and there’s an entire episode where she thinks a man won’t sleep with her because she accidentally farts in front of him. In later seasons, she makes an almost embarrassingly big deal out of kissing a woman, and gets ludicrously upset when she catches Samantha giving a man a blow job. In 2015, all this is small potatoes. After all, one of the most popular films of the year, Fifty Shades of Grey, is about BDSM.

What was going on? When did everyone I knew suddenly get racier than the women on Sex and the City? Furthermore, were my peers and I more open to sex because we had seen the show at an impressionable age? When I imagined my “cool life in the big city” as a teen, it looked a lot like Carrie’s. Was my thirst for the dream one-bedroom apartment tied to my willingness to try things in that bedroom? In true Carrie-manner, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Did Sex and the City create a generation of women who are DTF?”

Everything in Sex and the City is aspirational to a woman of a certain modest, middle-class background. The idea that you can be a single woman, living alone in New York City, and living “fabulously” was kind of a new one in the late ‘90s. Yes, the characters were constantly in pursuit of companionship, but that romance was always the cherry on top of a life that most people — male or female — couldn’t help to attain. And so, all of the hook ups, break ups, and embarrassing sex the characters became part of the “glamorous single life.” To be sexually adventurous was to be “mature.” If even the demure Charlotte York was open to sexual exploration, then shouldn’t I be, too?

Or maybe I’m giving Sex and the City way too much credit. Just as I’ve never let a man pressure me into doing anything I didn’t want to do, I certainly haven’t given that power to a racy sitcom, either. At most, I’ve referred to specific episodes and story lines to help me parse my own feelings about a situation I’ve already been in. Sex and the City doesn’t just talk about sex in a frank manner, but in a fair manner. The four protagonists never agree on what was too far in the bedroom or what were deal breakers in relationships. Sex and the City merely offers a fictional panel discussion on sex and romance that doesn’t exist elsewhere for women.

Sex and the City didn’t invent sex. People have enjoyed consensual sex since the beginning of mankind. You can find women who enjoy sex in the 1960s folk scene, the novels of Ernest Hemingway, the tawdry parts of The Canterbury Tales, and even in the Bible. Have you read the Song of Solomon lately? Because the Bible has an entire book about having sex for pleasure. In fact, there are a lot of sexual women in the Bible: from Esther, who saved her people by seducing a king, to Judith, to saved her people by seducing and then beheading a king. There’s also Bathsheba, Mary Magdalen, Salome, and more.

Maybe it’s not that Sex and the City created a sexual culture, but it opened the door for sex to be depicted in a new way on television. Sex and the City was considered revolutionary because it was one of the first shows to depict women talking bluntly and excitedly about sex. It sparked national conversation, but it also paved the way for future shows to go even further. Now, it seems like every show on Netflix, Showtime, and HBO are in a smutty competition to be the dirtiest. If listening to Charlotte York complain about blow jobs now seems adorably quaint, then it’s probably because we just saw an explicit display of anilingus on Girls.

Sex and the City didn’t spark a sexual revolution among women, but it may have inspired a lot more sexually explicit content on TV.

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Photos: Everett Collection