Sex and the City

In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man.

For one episode, perhaps the pilot, I enjoyed 'Sex and the city'. But that was mostly because I was able to watch sex scenes on free-to-air television. That enjoyment quickly ran out. The internet may have had something to do with that. Since then, I've consistently despised Sex and the City. Not just because it tells women to define themselves by the man they hook up with (which in itself is sufficient reason, as a man, to despise the show). But because of the way it celebrates the most shallow and destructive tendencies of American society: measuring one's worth through material possession, the neurotic obssession with self-help industry solutions to personal dilemmas that has replaced more meaningful forms of self-awareness, and its hyper-narcissm.