7 Ways Sex and the City Has Lied to Women

Photo: HBO

This week, Stacey Woods drives a stake through Carrie Bradshaw's pink bedazzled heart, arguing that 'Sex and the City' is a monstrous waste of women's energies and choices. Is she right? Read her provocative essay from Esquire below, and tell us your thoughts in the comments section. Have Carrie & Co. done more harm than good?

Sex and the City has existed in some form
— in print, on TV, on film, in sequel, and in prequel — all over the world for about twenty long years now (Candace Bushnell, who spawned the franchise, started writing in 1993). There are full-fledged women who have never known a world in which it didn't exist. It's been their nucleus of dreams, the backbone of their brunches, and it's made them who they are today...

There are so many addenda I could attach to that sentence. "...a bunch of aimless, self-important drunks" is just one of them. But my purpose is not to insult, it is to instruct, and with the gentlest of hands — hands that I will now use, two decades thereon, to set a wrecking ball to the pearlescent gray apartment in which so many women have been vainly quailing all these years. That's right, while it's dazzled us with pretty clothes and dulled us with easy entertainment, Sex and the City has also worked its toxic tenets so fixedly into our minds that to admit that it might actually be the source of all of our problems can really ruin Girls' Night, but I'm afraid it must be done. Fret no more, my sisters — or rather, men reading this, tell the women in your life not to fret. I'm about to set all of you free.

Here are Sex and the City's Seven Basic Lies:

1. There are Always Four Friends

Only in bad fiction do women go through life as part of a smiling group of four (or more). Try to remember the last thing you saw or read wherein the main female character didn't go to brunch with her three long-suffering friends. You can't do it, can you? In reality, the upkeep of four lifelong pals, especially four lifelong pals who really have nothing in common, is at best a distressing duty and at worst an outright hazard. To our credit, women don't naturally take to packs. Think of the classic packs wherein girls are found: sororities, book clubs, cults... It's impossible to imagine without wincing. Two friends is really the limit; two friends and possibly a third about whom they can talk shit. This is the female friend archetype. Tamper with it at your peril.

2. You Gotta Have Your Gays

It's not to your advantage to assemble a group of people and wear them like accessories, even if the group in question might happen to love it. Straight men have neither the courage nor the inclination to scale your fortress of gays, who in turn have no interest in giving you up. And calling them your "gays" is akin to calling them your pets. Don't do it.

3. Girls' Night Is the Goal

Before Sex and the City, Girls' Night was a sort of last resort during which all were quietly understood to be thinking, "Too bad there aren't any guys here." Rarely, if ever, was a Girls' Night, nor its repugnant great aunt, the Girls' Trip, the intention of most normal women. That we're simply dying to get together to finally be as raunchy as we really are is a notion upheld by naïve ninnies who harbor some odd desire to out-gross men, which simply isn't possible.

4. Women Are Raunchier Than Men

This is something I recall hearing a lot around the time Sex and the City began: "Oh, women are so much worse than men!" No, we're not — we're not even as bad as men. Far from being a liability, this is a point in our favor. There is nothing less sexy than talking about sex. Nevertheless, I've observed my fellow women striving to up the bawdy in all of their post-Sex and the City conduct, and let me tell you, long is the night spent in the company of a thirty-year-old woman who won't stop talking about dicks.

5. We Sleep in Our Bras

This one really illustrates the repercussions that one little peculiarity can have on an entire culture. I can only assume that the producers of Sex and the City must've said, "Let's have our characters sleep in their bras and see if it catches on." And it has. It's now standard practice, even in R-rated movies. It can't be based on actresses' reluctance to appear nude — there are a million ways around that and Hollywood has been hip to them for several years. The simple fact is that no woman sleeps in her bra. Even nuns take theirs off before they go to bed. If there's anyone who can provide some explanation about this bizarre prudery, please do.

6. This Was Supposed to Be YOUR Night!

Sex and the City was the first to really drive home the women-must-support-each-other's-choices paradigm, and since then, the pressure to cheerily go to everyone's hair jewelry launch party has been on. These big nights tend to be, at their roots, nothing more than plots to get attention. The problem occurs when another woman shifts the balance of attention away from the original woman, causing her to exclaim, "This was supposed to be my night!" which tends to come off a bit childish. As a rule, grown women should refrain from saying anything that naturally lends itself to a foot-stamp. Can you stamp your foot to it? If the answer is yes, don't say it.

7. Portraying Yourself as Someone Who Can't Find Love Will Find You Love

This is really the one that started it all, and it's the one that, if women were to abandon it, would strengthen them more than all the kale in Portland. Publicly crafting yourself as a person who can't find love will not encourage anyone to love you. You should resist every urge to make your dating horrors into a cottage industry. Do not blog about them, do not indicate them in your status updates, and don't you dare read your personal essays at even one open mic night. Essentially, stop telling everyone about all the people who haven't wanted to be with you no matter how funny or charming other lonely people might find it to be. Imagine if, say, Elizabeth Taylor went on the Johnny Carson show and talked about her relationship woes. You might think you'd like that, but really, you wouldn't. Actually sexy, pre-Sex and the City women weren't used cars who pointed out all of their dings. They didn't tell everyone what a drag they were to be with; they let people find out the old-fashioned way — by marrying them.

Via Esquire