Love Bites: Carrie Bradshaw and Co

"Once upon a time an English journalist came to New York…" words that I must have heard at least one hundred times, are the first words of season one, episode one of Sex and the City (SATC). It all began at age 15 watching my friend’s mum’s DVD boxset collection. Now, watching again for the one hundred and oneth time at the thirty-something age of Carrie and her friends, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda back in 1998, I’m as in love as ever with this problematic fave.

The pilot successfully lays out the ways in which SATC and its 90s feminism has not aged well: everyone is white and middle class (apart from the faceless Al, Mr Big’s driver) and cis and heterosexual (apart from a bunch of Drag Queen waitresses and Carrie’s typically 90s gay best friend, Stanford Blatch) and there are jokes about sex workers, aging women and fat people, of course.

Carrie discusses the struggle for power in heterosexual relationships and decides that in order to win, women must have sex like men, i.e. without feelings. Carrie’s attempts at casual sex are thwarted through an embarrassing admission to Mr Big – who Samantha describes as the younger and hotter Donald Trump – that she’s never been in love. Stanford offers the most illuminating line of the pilot: "The only place one can find love in New York is the gay community, it’s the straight community that’s become closeted."

So I got to thinking, after two films (one brilliant, one racist) and a pretty boring reboot (justice for Samantha) that attempts to heavy-handedly right all its previous wrongs, what is it that makes SATC so good? Carrie and her friends lived in a period of intense economic growth, on the cusp of the internet, in a hedonistic and carefree cultural landscape. Who wouldn’t want to be partying all night without consequence, somehow living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, writing a sex column for Vogue? For anxious Millennials, SATC is a simple, nostalgic dream.