Sex and the City and the Brown Ladies
On why you too should bed-rot and binge-watch
I know. I know.
A 20-something straight woman writing feverishly on Substack about a show that ended when they were babies is almost a clique at this point. There are Substack essays written critiquing the essays critiquing the show. The internet is littered with thousands of thought pieces written by pretend-cultural commentators like yours truly, filled with what they think are crafty puns related to the show. The authors often “couldn’t help but wonder” whether the show was even relevant in our post-Covid worlds, or if “just like that” it had become more relevant than ever. It is a meme that writes itself.
But what may be odd, is probably a brown woman gushing about it. For the uninitiated, SATC ran from 1998 to 2004 and followed four women navigating their 30s (and their 40s, and 50s in the movies and reboot) in New York. Wikipedia describes these women as:
“the streetwise newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), the sexually liberated public relations professional Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrall), the more conservative art dealer Charlotte York (played by Kristin Davis) and the cynical lawyer Miranda Hobbes (played by Cynthia Nixon).”
We are not supposed to like it. Notwithstanding the corrective path supposedly taken in the reboot, the original SATC is too white, too New York, too millennial. So much of the show’s preoccupations are alien to us. Carrie’s obsession with $400 Manolo Blahniks? What the hell, woman? Charlotte’s unending quest for a handsome white man, conveniently from the upper crust of New York or British society can so easily be dismissed by us as a WASP princess doing WASP stuff. Some of Samantha’s antics are downright cancellable today. And as good feminists from the Global South, we must dutifully turn our noses up against the early 2000s boss-girl feminism that Miranda seemed to represent. Why should we watch this show when we have any number of shows with more diverse casts to choose from?
Perhaps I decided to watch it because of how ubiquitous the show has been in cultural memory that we, the anglicized brown bastard children of Americana now come to share. To be a Carrie or a Samantha means something. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I am intensely fascinated by the zeitgeist the show represents — pre-recession, and partly, pre-9/11 America where people smoked everywhere and real Y2K fashion thrived. We watch what we can’t have, right? But perhaps, for a couple of weeks, I devoured six seasons of the show because there was a tinge of familiarity, some qualities displayed by the characters and the circumstances they found themselves in that were recognizable.
This is a controversial claim. Like I said, I’m not even supposed to like it, let alone deem it relatable. I belong to the school of thought that regards cinema-viewing as an exercise in anthropology, a way of making the unfamiliar familiar. I would be the first to nope out of a show or movie whose primary premise was wannabe writer sleepwalks her way through law school. Yet, this essay tries to redeem the show and its protagonists from the general creed today that increasingly finds it easier to dismiss any art for being too [insert any dominant social identity] than engage with it for what it is.
It is my case that for a particular kind of Indian woman, working in the glass towers of Mumbai or Bengaluru or Delhi, SATC is as exotic as it is biographical. These are women — and I count myself as one of them — who are living in their own personal New Yorks. Untethered from family (the show tells us very little about their parents and siblings) but rooted through chosen families (if they are lucky), they click-clack at their desk jobs while quietly embracing a very urban Women’s Lib. These are the women who have seemingly figured out the important things of life, education, career, and housing and they are supposed to be well on their path to figure out the marriage part of it too. But scratch a little, and you’ll see that so much like the women of SATC, beneath all that fabulousness, there is something pathetic in them, an underlying vulnerability that is concealed.
Consider the frustrations of Charlotte at dating a steady stream of men since she was 15 and still being unable, twenty years later, to find someone who wants to be family with her. At one end, this is a story of a woman trying desperately to put up those heterosexual picket fences. But this is also a woman who has stretched herself thin trying to show love to men who wouldn’t accept it. This is not some white woman problem — you only need to have held a friend’s head (or have your head held) when they ask you rhetorically, why nobody cares for them, when they care so much.
At the same time, I see myself and my friends turning cynical too, á la Miranda Hobbes. We avoid credit card debt, invest in stocks, save for a nice real estate opportunity or at least aspire to do all of these things. We are terribly good at being the ideal eldest single daughters for our Indian parents who can show off the sensible, independent women that they have raised. But we are also really terribly good at being cautious and over-protective for our own good. We paralyse and postpone our lives because every incident of hurt (especially inflicted by a man, ew) is a betrayal of the high standards of perfection that we have kept for ourselves. As Indian women, the very concept of being open to the immense rewards of loving another, at the risk of heartbreak is deeply alien to us. I remember a friend telling me this of a nice boyfriend of many months we all approved, bro I’m not going to get emotionally attached. But in what is my favourite character arc, Miranda accommodates the other into her life. I know a woman or two who can do with a similar character arc. And I also know some of my friends who should be spouting Samantha’s mantra of I love you, but I love me more on an everyday basis.
A ready response to this could be: love and all are frivolous things for us to care about or something that only privileged women in India can afford to care about. We have violence, authoritarianism, and climate change to worry about. True, true. But I also wonder about the radical potentialities of an Indian woman to think about these frivolous things. In one of my favourite essays of all time, Sumana Roy talks of a “guilt tax” which we pay as a kind of personal reparation for all sorts of injustices by moralising our reading choices. Read books (or watch a TV show) on marginalised communities because that makes you a morally better person. I venture to suggest that we need not always be concerned about whether our reading and watching habits correspond to some larger structural societal issue.
But SATC is also so much more than just boyfriends. The montage of Carrie halfway around the world from her beloved Manhattan, walking alone around the streets of beautiful Paris is unexpectedly moving for a show that thrives on the frivolous escapades of people living on the Upper East Side and Park Avenue. The idea of living a perfect life, while loneliness stalks us is a common but unspoken motif, even as we move cities for an education, career and marriage. The number of Indian women who suffer from loneliness is almost thrice the number of men. This statistic is not surprising. We are not permitted to loiter around the streets endlessly outside sutta shops. We cannot simply abandon our responsibilities to have a boys’ night watching cricket. Married women are still asked why they need to meet their female friends when you know, their in-laws exist. Weekend brunches with our girl best friends do not exist. I wouldn’t be able to name a single mainstream piece of Indian art that celebrates female friendship the way SATC does. If a show featuring white women drives home the point that at the foundation of feminism is friendship, then so be it.
If much of what I said seems abstract, absent of the many particularities that constitute an individual, it is intentionally so. Modern film is probably the closest we will ever get to time-machine, but I also believe in its ability to break through space to make us realise that “the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive,” to steal from the great James Baldwin. The fact that this belief is not commonly shared in our media-illiterate times, that somehow we believe that if some social markers of a movie or a show or a book do not match our own, it is not worthy of our attention is painful, and deeply ignorant. Of course, we contain multitudes that complicate our lives, but we must strive to derive pleasure from the things that do distinguish us. A binge of SATC and writing this essay was a practice in coming to love a cultural artefact and making it my own. This practice in its generative capacity, is a much better alternative than avoidance and ignorance.
Or really, just watch the show for the clothes.
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