Sex Has Evolved Beyond ‘Sex and the City’
A new season of the HBO hit would drag the conversation backward rather than push it forward
Back in the early 2000s, when I worked in a sex toy shop in Manhattan, there was a specific sort of customer they taught us to look out for. She would be in her thirties or forties, slightly more suburban-looking than the average patron, probably wealthy, usually white. She was easy to help because she would always be looking for one of two items: Either the Hitachi Magic Wand or the Rabbit. This would be her first vibrator purchase, and she would ask for these models by name because they had been on Sex and the City.
It’s now 2021 and Sex and the City has become a punchline, a hot-pink Juicy Couture relic of the gaudy consumerist ’00s, the TV equivalent of a bedazzled flip phone or sugary sorority-girl cocktail. The news of its impending revival, which will follow (most of) the original cast as they “navigate love and friendship in their fifties,” fills me with deep existential dread. Yet I can’t hate it.
In its time — let’s say 1998 through 2004, the length of its initial run — the show was a powerful and even feminist phenomenon. It’s just that its moment was 20 years ago, and since then, everything about our sexual politics has changed. I couldn’t help but wonder: In…
