Dear editors,
I saw a tweet the other day. Over a clip of Sex and the City, the author quipped, “and people still think this show is about sex.” I couldn’t help but wonder, what is Sex and the City about, if not sex?
Cue the protests: No, Sex and the City is about female friendships! It’s about growing older! It’s about Carrie Bradshaw’s relationship with herself and New York City!
But what do Carrie and her friends spend all their time debating? Sex. What compels them to date men who disappoint them, lie to them, and discard them? Sex. What drives those men to interact with these main characters who, as many point out, are flawed? By now, you know what I’m about to say. Sex.
Refusing to call Sex and the City a “show about sex” belies an insecurity that doing so will reduce its cultural importance. Since the presence of sex in art and media is often viewed as gratuitous or trivial, fans minimize the role of sex to make the work seem less bodily and more cerebral, legitimizing it intellectually. This process romanticizes the show. A romantic differentiates love from sex and upholds love as the more important part of romance. I have always considered myself a romantic. Until recently, I believed that sex—primal, physical, thoughtless—is distinct from and secondary to love—civil, emotional, thoughtful.
Sex and the City doesn’t believe in that separation or superiority of love over sex. Carrie is repeatedly pulled back to a man out of sexual attraction, and they end up together in the last episode because of the friendship that grew alongside their trysts. Charlotte doesn’t sleep with her first husband until they’re married, only to discover that he can’t get it up. They divorce and she remarries a stereotypically unattractive man who is, as she raves, “the best sex of my life.” Miranda describes a one night stand as “great sex” but doesn’t see a future with him. By the end of the series, they’re married with a son. Even Samantha, committed to having great sex and opposed to monogamy, ends the show in a long-term relationship with a guy she seduced. True love, Sex in the City argues, comes with and even because of great sex. The best partnerships emerge from sparkling physical chemistry, and those without it cannot last.
There is nothing base about this conclusion. Ignoring the physical in favor of the mental limits the human experience. We can admit that Sex and the City is about sex without demeaning it. We can admit that relationships do not last without great sex, which brings not only physical pleasure but a higher degree of intimacy than we experience in any other relationship. There is nothing romantic about separating love and sex, as the show demonstrates—only naivety.
The question for all the romantics out there is, which road is harder: settling for relationships with bad sex and the insecurity and frustration that comes with it, or taking Sex and the City at face value, high mindedness be damned. In my experience, the first is worse.
Unromantically,
Audrey Brunner
Image: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Bolt, oil on canvas, ca. 1777 (Musée du Louvre, Paris).