A Look Back to Sex and The City - What Was Wrong With Carrie and the Girls Then?

Courtesy: IMDB.com

As someone who grew up watching the iconic show and later on a move sequel, I decided to take another, more mature and objective look at Sex and The City, and what the fuss was all about back then. Perhaps there was a reason to it - my new look and perspective on the show dawned upon me. I saw the mistakes, the outdated concepts, materialism, selfishness, insecure women willing to do anything to get attention and love, and shoes. There was so much wrong with Carrie Bradshaw and her friends - they were idolized not just for their close friendship, which was the strong theme of the show, but as desperate, horny, materialistic, lost and egocentric middle-aged women.  Millions of girls and women around the globe were watching them on TV, growing up with them, day after day, looking up to them, only to be fed with these broken concepts of female empowerment. I was one of them. So why was everyone looking up to them then? Did we miss the wrong picture from the start? Or was the American way of female empowerment not only portrayed but enforced as such through these women? 

I remember sitting on the couch at my university dorm with my girlfriends binge watching the Sex and the City episodes. We were excited, happy, thrilled and looking forward to the movie sequel. We sat and laughed, while eating popcorn, mesmerized by the lifestyle of these women. While we were bonding we consumed the images that went so deep in our subconscious that we wanted to be just like them. In some weird way, they became our role models. We wanted their lifestyles. Back then we didn't have the knowledge and experience to really see the flaws we were imitating and we missed the whole point of what was wrong with these women seeing only what we wanted on the surface. Instead of trying to be like them, we should have tried to be against them. But if they were so popular and so loved, we wanted to be just like them. That's where the core values of being a woman were missed. We mimicked the insecure, materialistic, egocentric, hypocritical and ignorant Carrie who was simply a lost little girl who didn't know much about life other than sex and shoes, while stuck in a middle-aged woman's body. 

For young women and girls watching this show, there is a very wrong concept embedded that may have caused more damage than good - the concept of the "free woman" or perhaps what that looks like. In Sex and the City the free woman is promiscuous, egocentric, self-centered, insecure, entitled, ignorant and quite "bitchy." Is that the image that America wants to portray now? I believe the show would have been a total failure if it had launched in this day and age, and maybe it worked for a reason back then. So we can work against stereotyping female characters as such and idolizing them as such. Now that the series is up for another season, I hope that we will see Carrie and her friends better, matured and as really confident, educated, strong and less self-centered women, who do not rely on sex, shoes, money and men to feel good about themselves. 

After I rewatched Sex and The City 1 and 2, I was also appalled by the way these women approached a different culture, their ignorance and superiority towards the foreign countries they visited, their constant complaining for small issues, unable to see the beauty outside their small minds, as well as a depiction of the "typical ignorant American." Why didn't I see that back then as an immigrant who dreamed of living the American dream? These women was what was really wrong with America and what needed to be fixed. 

It takes years of living, experiencing, awakening and educating to see all the flaws that existed with Carrie Bradshaw and the gang. As now an ex-fan of the sitcom and characters, I had to rethink the image I was admiring back then and reflect on what really matters now - the need to show better female characters on the screen in a way that is way more diverse, educated, self-aware and less materialistic. My personal view based on interviews I have read and my own professional opinion is that part of the reason why Kim Cattrall, the actress who plays Samantha, didn't want to come back on the new installment of the series is that she didn't want to be part of a show that continues to portray women in such a distorted way, because it simply doesn't work anymore. 

There is a need to reinvent Carrie in a new way - a way that works now. Enough with the princess, weak, horny and self-centered images of spoiled, rich, white women who need sex, money and men for their survival. This is not what female empowerment looks like now or ever. I am in hopes for a better and more improved season of the new chapter of Carrie and Sex and the City in 2021, a world that is more self-aware, spiritual, diverse, compassionate and less self-absorbed and materialistic. These are the women we need to see and be like on the screen!