In Defense of Carrie Bradshaw

Can you name a better Single Girl?

I recently found myself in an East Village bar discussing the merits of “Sex and the City” with a drunk stranger (stay with me here). In a sudden moment of lucidity, he proclaimed, “I liked Carrie. She had flaws, but she was trying her best. Ya know?” I slammed my palm down on the bar. “Yes!” I do know!

As we await the “SATC” reboot, it’s in vogue (pun intended) to hate the show’s leading anti-heroine. Her list of faults is long: bad friend, bad writer, bad girlfriend. She was irresponsible, vapid, anxious, messy. And she just kept crawling back to that goddamn toxic Mr. Big. 

Much of the condescension of the show at large is steeped in sexism, as Emily Nussbaum alludes to in her excellent 2013 New Yorker piece about the show’s “Difficult Women.” While critics (and men I’ve dated) have no problem defending the flawed “Bad Boys” of prestige television (Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Jimmy McNulty), “Sex and the City” is dismissed as a mock-worthy rom-com, a “guilty pleasure.” 

In fact, however, “....the show wrestled with the limits of that pink-tinted genre for almost its entire run,” Nussbaum writes. “In the end, it gave in. Yet until that last-minute stumble it was sharp, iconoclastic television. High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, ‘Sex and the City’ was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show.”

I started watching “SATC” in my late teens. I suppose that back then I viewed the sexy adventures of Carrie and her friends with a certain degree of wonder and aspiration. As a college student in a long-distance relationship, I could only fantasize about what it might be like to go on New York City dates with a new man each night, and then gossip about my exploits the next morning. 

Now that I’m 30, single, and swiped on enough dating apps to make my thumbs bleed, you would think that the show would have lost its luster. But as I re-watch the series (for the umpteenth time), I’m finding a whole new side of it to admire. Carrie is no longer someone I aspire to be, but she is someone I relate to...deeply. 

Today’s dating landscape is radically different from 17 years ago when the series finale aired. And yet, the trials and tribulations of Carrie feel more relevant to my life than ever before. Yes, there were men, blowjobs, fashion, and puns. But what made “SATC” special and unique — and why I find myself returning to favorite episodes again and again — was its dedication to painting a full, complex picture of what it means to be an American single woman. It’s not all glamour and one-night-stands, but it’s also not always moping on the couch waiting for the phone to ring. 

In Season 2 Episode 4 (“They Shoot Single People, Don’t They?”), Carrie is going to be photographed for New York magazine’s “Single and Fabulous!” feature on notable Manhattanites. She stays out drinking too late with the girls, oversleeps, and shows up to the photoshoot with bags under her eyes and cigarette in hand. Her hungover face is plastered on the cover, with the headline: “Single and Fabulous?”

The accompanying article warns that women in their thirties are “filling their lives with an endless parade of decoys and distractions to avoid the painful fact that they're completely alone." It scares Carrie’s single friends into faking enthusiasm for — and settling into mediocre relationships with — mediocre men: Charlotte gets involved with the struggling actor who fixes things around her house, and Miranda gives the ophthalmologist who has never made her orgasm another chance (giving way to one of the best lines in the series: “What's the big mystery? It's my clitoris, not the Sphinx!”). Even Samantha is so uncharacteristically spooked by the Perils of Singledom that she is lured into the seduction of “we” with a boring Suit, who promises her commitment and a summer share in the Hamptons. He stands her up on their next date (the fucking nerve), and Samantha is left crying alone at her favorite restaurant. 

Later in the episode, Carrie is at a Tuesday night party, on the hunt for a good time and a quick, hot lay to validate her own “Single and Fabulous!” (emphasis on the exclamation point) life. By the time she agrees to go for a ride in Bradley Cooper’s (!) Porsche, she is multiple cocktails deep and resentful of Stanford (RIP Willie Garson), who is heading home with his new boyfriend. 

The episode speaks to that universal pressure every Single Girl feels to overcompensate for our singlehood by making sure we are always having the Best Time Ever. Who among us hasn’t overstayed our welcome at a party, searching for our Bradley Cooper, all in some grand effort to ensure that the Couples will never point their fingers in mockery, or worse…pity?

In the end, Carrie decides not to sleep with Bradley, because, “It'd be the only time I'd ever had sex to validate my life. The question mark would no longer be a question, it would be a fact.”

Instead, she wakes up the next morning and bravely takes her single self to lunch: “I sat there and had a glass of wine...alone. No books, no man, no friends, no armor, no faking.”

Carrie showed me not only the whole range of who a Single Girl was — funny, cool, sexy, smart, selfish, bitter — but also the range of what her life could be: exciting, fun, childless, lonely, isolating, chaotic, terrible, and wonderful all at once. “SATC” showed me that there is more than one path to take in your thirties, and no one path is more fabulous than another. Unlike a show like “Girls,” where all of the characters seemed to be in a constant state of misery, “SATC” allowed room for sadness, slips, and sparkle. 

In a media landscape in which representation of the thirtysomething Single Girl is scarce, I will always find myself turning to Carrie — stumbling ungracefully through life in her Manolo Blahniks — as a source of comfort and validation. She was, as all of us Single Girls are, trying her best. She’s important to us, and we could use more role models like her. 

Xo,

Lauren 

Here I am trespassing at Carrie’s home. But I couldn’t help but wonder, when it comes to sex…and the city…is anything ever really private?