Edel Coffey: Women of all ages can relate to Sex and the City

An original promo image for Sex And The City. Left to right: Charlotte (Kristan Davis), Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha (Kim Catrall), and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon).

I was slightly surprised at all the fuss around Sex And The City arriving on Netflix earlier this month. 

People were behaving as if the show had been sealed in an underground crypt for the past 20 years and was just now being released onto an unsuspecting world like radioactive waste.

How would Gen Z respond? Would they cancel Carrie? Would the dating horror stories of 90s New York seem tame compared to Tinder? Would Gen Z ever be able to understand why Carrie, Big, and Aidan didn’t just become a throuple?

As far as I can tell, re-runs of Sex And The City have been taking place on numerous channels since the show ended 20 years ago, so Gen Z probably just think of it as the show their uncool mother watches while doing the ironing.

The real question for me is why it remains so popular across generations of women.

The main reports back from Gen Z so far seem to be that Carrie is selfish and a bad friend. But Carrie was always a dislikable character, spoiled and indulged, demanding and prudish, overwrought and attention-seeking. 

She stopped being funny as early as Season Two. But that’s one of the reasons she appealed to viewers. She felt like a real woman. So if Carrie was so annoying, why were we all watching it?

The summary of the show on Netflix is as broad as can be — Sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw turns to her best friends Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha for advice as she experiences love and lust in New York City. 

But that’s not really what the show was about either and it certainly isn’t why it remains so popular.

Some say the real reason people loved the show was because it represented women in a way they hadn’t been seen on screen before — as imperfect, sexual and emotionally ambivalent beings, just like their male counterparts. 

Even in its most escapist moments, the show gave us recognisable versions of womanhood, like when your period arrived at just the wrong moment or you were ghosted by a man and had to come to terms with the rejection or you had to do the walk of shame to work. 

It was the first time women had seen themselves on screen in a way that felt realistic and smart and funny. But that’s not the secret to its enduring success either, I don’t think. 

We’ve had so many brilliant shows since that do the same thing, Girls and Insecure to name just two.

I’ve been thinking maybe the real reason it’s so enduringly popular is a reason we don’t like to admit to ourselves. 

The show’s ending was divisive and controversial. Would Carrie end up with bad boy Mr Big? Some fans thought Carrie should end up alone, independent, enjoying her single life.

Some people saw Carrie ending up in a relationship as a cop-out, a capitulation to the fairy-tale idea that a woman must have someone. 

I understand that much of that sentiment was a backlash to the old-fashioned conformist idea that women had to have a partner or be married to be considered successful in life, but that backlash also seems to have made us a little ashamed of our individual human desire to love and be loved.

I think that’s actually the real reason why Sex And The City endures from generation to generation. 

It’s not about the friendship dynamic or its honest portrayal of women’s lives but rather because it puts the search for love front and centre in its plot. It recognises it as an important thing in people’s lives.

None of the women is ever made to feel ashamed for wanting to find love and for prioritising it as a goal. That’s why you’ll likely see it in the top ten of Netflix’s most-watched programmes. 

Because it puts the marriage plot, the same story that has made Jane Austen’s novels so beloved over hundreds of years, at the centre of its story. 

It’s a story we’ve been taught from childhood, and one that’s in our bones from Cinderella to Frozen to Snow White, but at a certain point we are told that those ideas are silly and that spending time focused on finding love is a frivolous pursuit. 

Where Sex And The City was really radical was in suggesting that the pursuit of love might actually be a worthwhile endeavour.

I still watch the odd episode from time to time when I’m doing the ironing, just to get that little injection of romantic comedy. 

Sex and the City doesn’t need Netflix to convince us of its global success but it will likely find a whole new generation of fans on the streaming platform because whether you’re Gen Z or Gen X, a Carrie or a Samantha, people from all generations can relate to the basic human desire to find love, whether we want to admit it or not.