I never watched an episode of Sex and the City. But it’s not difficult to get the gist of the show because of the hype surrounding how “ground breaking” it supposedly was. Naomi Wolf, good feminist in standing, sure thinks so. In a piece in the UK Guardian titled “Icons of the Decade,” the subtitle says, “Carrie Bradshaw did as much to shift the culture around certain women’s issues as real-life female groundbreakers.”

And what “certain women’s issues” would those exactly be? Reading the piece you can’t help but come to the conclusion it was really only one issue: sex. It is after all in the title of the show. My first thought upon reading it was, “And you think this is a good thing?” So what was so great about Carrie Bradshaw and Sex and the City? Let me quote the first three paragraphs and I think you’ll get the picture:

She’s not a brass-knuckled political figure, a Birkenstock-wearing Amazon or a breaker of corporate glass ceilings; she’s just a sassy single girl in New York City. So why am I so sure that Carrie Bradshaw – the charming, ever-hopeful star of the long running HBO series and hit film, all based on Candace Bushnell’s New York Observer column – is an icon and did as much to shift the culture around certain women’s issues as real-life feminist groundbreakers?

I have written before about how radical it was that the narrative of Sex and the City centred not around a couple – let alone the traditional formula of hero-plus-beautiful-secondary-love-interest. Rather, the core of the tale was always the life-sustaining friendship among four women, as the men in their lives came and went. This break from narrative norms was remarkable not just because Bushnell was insisting that four women – no longer in their first youth – were renewably compelling on their own terms; it was also radical because, in a very un-PC but admirable flouting of feminist norms, Bushnell was brave enough to lay bare the secret – that for many women the search for love is the same urgent, central, archetypal quest story that for men is played out in war narratives and adventure tales. Bushnell was gutsy enough to disclose that even we serious, accomplished, feminist women spend a lot of time, when we are alone with our female friends, telling stories centred on the men with whom we are romantically entangled, exploring the quality of the love and attraction, the romance and the sex. And we are often just that graphic and hopeful and vulnerable and slutty as those four characters.

This was so startlingly un-sayable that when women watched Sex and the City, it was like seeing a secret set of their own dramas spring into art. Now they are the stalest of cliches, but when, in the first 1998 episode, in the midst of all that big hair and weird brown lipstick, you hear Carrie first describe the allure and disappointment of “toxic bachelors”, when Samantha first says frankly that she likes to have sex without emotion, to “fuck like a man”, it was bitingly fresh for women to speak these aphorisms out loud, in public, and in fabulous heels.

So let me get this straight. Women treating sex like men is groundbreaking? This is admirable and brave? Does she really equate women’s “search for love” as if it is the same as men’s? It seems so. This of course has been the dream of feminism from time immemorial, or at least since the time some women decided they hated their nature and thought it not fair that men and women were actually different, that men could spread their seed around and not have to necessarily live with the consequences.

It is impossible to argue the point that there has ever been a double standard when it comes to male and female sexuality. As Ms. Wolfe says:

The history of English – and one might say western – culture, when it comes to female sexuality, is the history of sluts getting punished for their lust.

True enough, but just Western culture? Really? Which cultures have we seen in history that eschewed such a double standard? Arab culture? Asian? Indian? African? Maybe it’s just a human nature thing, but far be it from me to keep a privileged Western feminist intellectual from hating her own supposedly oppressive heritage.

But let’s think about this. Do women really want what men want? Do women really want meaningless sex with multiple partners just because it feels really good? As Samantha says, “sex without emotion”? The answer is so obviously of course not, that to even ask it is to reveal utter stupidity blinded by ideology masked as sophistication.

It may have taken Time Magazine until 1992 to figure out that men and women are different, but any person with even a modicum of common sense would think you are out of your mind to even suggest otherwise. But the dream for men and nightmare for women still lives on, with the porn industry as only the most egregious example. I challenge anyone to become familiar with Shelley Lubben and her ministry to mostly women, but some men, in porn and ever again view it as anything other than the horrible abuse of women.

No, I’m afraid Carrie Bradshaw is not so much an icon as a false god.