Sex in the City Nice Girl vs Promiscuous Girl
I somehow missed a day and today is Thursday and not Wednesday. This week has been just getting some dental work done and working on my Etsy shops. If your looking for a gift or something retro please visit my shops as that is how I make money. When I work, I have something playing in the background just to have a bit of noise. This week it has been a few different shows but Sex in the City was the one that really gets me. Spoiler Alert for anyone that has not seen the show and you should see it.
But the main thing I was thinking about is how judgmental the main female characters were to each other, how self sabotaging they are to themselves, and how most of the female characters that come on as side characters were mostly attacking them. I started to wonder, how did females ever get the right to vote when we are so mean to each other. Men may be part of the issue not allowing women get better political and/or financial power but it is women that are the ones that keep each other down.
Sex in the City Background
For those that have not watched it, Sex in the City was originally a newspaper column and later a book by Candace Bushnell. HBO bought the rights and in 1998, the first episode was aired. It had 6 seasons and 94 episodes. Plus 2 movies, a prequel, and a new series called And Just Like That which covers the lady’s life’s about 20 years later. The show is set in New York City and follows the lives of four women who are friends in their 30’s with Samantha being in her 40’s. Carrie is the main character with Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda being side stories but all the characters are fully developed.
Carrie is a newspaper columnist with a studio apartment with a fashion sense. Charlotte is a conventional privileged Episcopalian who works at an art gallery who was the homecoming and prom queen, cheerleader, and teen model. Miranda is the career minded Harvard Law lawyer with cynical views of life. Samantha is an independent public relation business women plus she is extremely confident, strong willed, and outspoken. But the thing that sets her apart from the other females is her sexual confident and doing what she wants with who she wants and not apologizing for it.
To sum up the characters in high school terms, Carrie is the “Girl Next Door”, Charlotte is the “Cheerleader Prom Queen”, Miranda is the “Nerd”, and Samantha is “Promiscuous” Girl. Because everyone needs a box. But the truth is most women are a combination of all these characters at some point in their life.
Sex in the City is basically about how these four women sex and love lives. But as much as I love to watch the romance of the show, the thing that gets me in how the women support each other but at the same time tear each other apart. So, if this is what women do to each other, how did we ever come together to get the right to vote? I find myself questioning this more and more as I watch this show and other shows and movies plus read female writers like Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. Or even male writers.
Relationships between the Women
The relationships between stars of the shows became an issue for the show as Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall had off camera issues which created problems and contract issues for upcoming projects. In addition, it was said that Ms. Cattrall was also not sitting with her other costars at lunch and was a bit isolated on set. Part of the issue was money, i.e. Sarah Jessica Parker made more and Ms. Cattrall tried to get the other 2 stars to side with her to get a better contracts. But if you look at some of the story lines that were given to Samantha and some that Ms. Cattrall refused to do. It goes deeper and into the heart of her character and women inter need to attack the “Promiscuous” girl, i.e. the 3 other actresses were the “mean girls” and Ms. Cattrall was their target.
It seemed to be that Samantha was attacked by Charlotte more and more as the seasons went by and the only thing that was keeping them together was Carrie. The two characters being the opposite sides of the female spectrum, i.e. the nice girl vs the promiscuous girls. But how did we get here! And more importantly, how do we stop this behavior.
The conflict is not over how women live but over power, money, and lifestyle which this gives them. Nice girls don’t have much power as they are always staying within the lines and having to go against their primitive instincts and says “No” to get a man. But the are rewarded with a good marriage with the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence in the end. Only to find out several years down the line, the promiscuous girl takes their man, their home, and their lifestyles, if they or their man leaves them. Or like a Nice Girl, they ignore the affair but it generally leaves factures in the relationship. Therefore, the promiscuous girl wins in the end because she breaks up the relationship.
But the truth is that men bend to society and the promiscuous girl is generally left and he ends up, as a rule, with another younger nice girl. King Charles and Camilla love life shows this to be untrue but I find that this is the exception not the rule. As Charles married Princess Diana, the “Nice Girl”, but she refused to look the other way as so many Princesses and Queens have in the past. Not that it was really a choose in the past but required by the times.
The promiscuous girl has always been the villain being called tramp, floozie, hussy, tart, slut, whore, temptress, prostitute, parasite, and so many more. They paid the price with a snob from society or even casted out of society and into the streets in the old days. The man is the victim of a seductress and in most cases, forgiven for his bad behavior because he can’t help himself. The only reason that men are forgiven is because they hold the money, land, and power.
As the promiscuous girl in Sex and the City, Samantha finds that she is allowed to do and say what she wants to without holding back most of the time. But one of the episodes shows that when she is sick with the flu, none of those men come back to help her. She is alone because of her behavior which is an underlined warning to other females. She is being punished because she does not have a sable relationship so that a man is required to help her, i.e. a husband or boyfriend. Carrie comes over to help Samantha but the underlining of this episode is that Samantha should have a man and has an under tone that women like her don’t have anyone to lean on. Plus they should start looking for a man as only a man can make her whole.
In a different episode, Samantha sleeps with Charlotte’s brother and Charlotte takes it upon herself to yell at Samantha for being promiscuous with her brother. After her brother talks to Charlotte, Charlotte takes Samantha a gift basket to apologize but the issue is that Charlotte is Slut Shaming Samantha first.
The episode that really has the women after Samantha is the one that she tells them about her new girlfriend. They are unsupportive and walk home with out Samantha just putting her down.
But can Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda really call themselves Samantha friend when they talk negatively about her both in front of her face and behind her back through out the show, judge her for her chooses, mock her, body shame her, and other not so friendly behaviors so many times that it is hard to list them. But this seems to be OK behavior between the other girls at she is the promiscuous girl.
If anything, Samantha is the real friend to all of them. She supports her friends without thought in public including Charlotte, gives up her hair appointment to Maranda, and even takes out Carrie’s stuck IUD in one episode. She gets in Big’s face about his treatment of Carrie, helps Aidan by a nice ring for Carrie, even goes to the country and on a train ride to support Carrie, and other little things for the others. She is Carrie’s friend more then the others but I am guessing that her connections are the reason that all the girls were friends with her.
Towards the end of the show, Charlotte becomes more and more aggressive about how and what Samantha can and can not said at the table and passes judgement on her behavior more and more openly. The other two trying and stay out of it but if anything, they say nothing about the behavior, i.e. they don’t stand up for the promiscuous girl by telling the nice girl that she is wrong.
Frenemies is the only thing that I can call Samantha’s relationship with the other women. But the question, comes if this is how we treat the Samantha’s of this world, how can we come together in a common cause to change as our world is making more and more demands on us as women to be the bring home the bacon, cook the bacon, clean up after the bacon is eaten, and take the trash that was made from the bacon.
Sex in the City was ground breaking in it’s time. It was teaching women so much about other women around them but as the same time, it helped keep stereotypes going. In stead of Samantha being praised for being the one that was the least judgement (everyone has a bit of judgement about others) and overall very supportive of her friends even when she did not agree with their chooses, she is the one that is judged the most. She is the one that is attacked the most and this behavior needs to stop between women. It makes women weaker in the politically, financially, and over all in life.