‘That show was as white as it gets!’ Sex and the City’s problematic legacy

The Halloween before last, Dan Clay went out in an outfit that changed his life. He paired a baby-pink tank top with a white tutu and accessorised with heels, a tumble of blond curls and a splash of NYC puddle water: Carrie Dragshaw was born. “It started as a really innocent Halloween costume with no aspirations of internet celebrity,” says the Manhattan-based strategy consultant, whose 108,000 Instagram followers now include one Sarah Jessica Parker.

Clay’s earliest memories of Sex and the City involve publicly scorning the show as a still-closeted frat boy, but those days are long gone. “The first time I got into it, it was like a complete Carrie love-fest,” he says. “I was like ‘She is me! I am her! I’ve never seen myself so mirrored!’” Many of his social circle feel the same way: “It’s like our Seinfeld, the way that people say for every moment you experience in life, there is a Seinfeld reference? I feel like Sex and the City is that for people who are going on a lot of dates and going to lots of magazine launches.”

The magazine launch-attending demographic may be larger than previously imagined. Clay’s Carrie Dragshaw is just one of many manifestations of SATC’s passionate, diverse and seemingly ever-strengthening fanbase. In the 14 years since the finale aired, Instagram fan accounts such as Every Outfit on Sex and the City and Sex and the City Quotes have accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers, and even after the nixing of a mooted third feature film, they remain committed. This summer, that fandom faces its most serious test yet, as Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda on the show, runs in the Democratic primary for New York governor. Meanwhile, the show’s sex-positive, female-fronted TV successors (Girls, Girlfriends, The Mindy Project) have spawned successors of their own (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Insecure, Divorce). Yet, somehow, SATC’s critical appreciation and cultural standing have never equalled its enduring popular appeal.

It seems the Sex and the City legacy is determined by two, often conflated questions: was it any good? And were Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha good feminist role models? We should be able to answer the first without too much trouble — if you like it, you like it; yet ongoing disputes around the second tend to colour all judgments. And there’s no getting around the fact that much of SATC looks extremely un-woke by 2017 standards.

“That show was as white as it gets,” says Chelsea Fairless, fashion editor, designer and co-founder of Every Outfit on Sex and the City and the #WokeCharlotte meme. “They didn’t ever have a person of colour as a series regular.” Fairless also admits that many of the show’s overt racial insensitivities (Samantha in a post-chemo afro wig, Carrie’s “ghetto gold”) went over her head on first viewing. “I’m white and I wasn’t educated or a particularly good ally at that point in my life. I did take issue with their handling of certain queer issues back in the 90s, because that is my community … But I’m not about to protest the show on those grounds; I’ll just make fun of it on Instagram instead.”

Other SATC issues, such as the show’s overt materialism and utterly fantastical depiction of the lifestyle afforded by freelance journalism, were controversial almost from the get-go. By the sixth and final season the writers seemed to be deliberately courting feminist disapproval, with episode titles such as A Woman’s Right To Shoes. Yet the enjoyment fans took in the show’s many pleasures seemed to make them impervious to its flaws.

As has only become more obvious in the intervening years, frivolity on SATC was never just frivolity; it was an all-encompassing creative aesthetic – one so fertile that neither Carrie Dragshaw nor Every Outfit on Sex and the City seem likely to run out of inspiration any time soon. “I would venture to say that the mix of high fashion and fast fashion that [costume designer] Patricia Field brought to the show influenced most people who work in fashion in one way or another,” says Fairless, whose own recently launched design line, Female Trouble, includes Carrie-inspired nameplate necklaces. So perhaps the “Yeah, I know … but it’s fun!” defence isn’t as weak as it might initially seem?

The very fact that we’re able to so overlook SATC’s impact is proof of how truly transformative it was, says Liz Tuccillo, a writer on the show whose subsequent books He’s Just Not That Into You (with Greg Behrendt, 2004) and How to Be Single (2008) both spawned hit screen adaptations of their own. “These women were the first on television to say, ‘We are in our 30s, we want love, but we’re also going to have fun, have sex, go out.’ They allowed this time of singleness to not just be a frightening time of not knowing when or if he would show up, but also of glamour and joy and friendship.”

By inviting the single life into the shimmery spotlight, SATC also created space for some consideration more serious than Carrie’s “I couldn’t help but wonder … ” musings. Books on the single woman, her history and her habits became a mini-publishing phenomenon, epitomised by Kate Bolick’s 2015 memoir-cum-biography Spinster (of which SJP is also, reportedly, a fan). “In 2000, when I moved from Boston to New York to study cultural criticism, more than a few people said, ‘Ah, you want to be Carrie Bradshaw!’” recalls Bolick. “I found [it] insulting … Carrie Bradshaw is fun and likable – I’d love to get a drink with her – but she’s not a serious thinker or writer.” Yet Bolick agrees with Tuccillo’s assessment of the show’s wider importance: “I definitely appreciate that the show portrayed single women as autonomous sexual creatures with thriving careers, rather than sad, lonely spinsters. And, truly, the show was a genius way to capture what, at the time, was a totally not-understood demographic shift, in which women were pushing off the age of first marriage and making more money than ever before.”

So perhaps SATC’s most serious shortcoming was its final one. After 94 episodes of extolling a woman’s friends as her true soulmates, the finale gave into romcom’s most tedious convention: it coupled up Carrie with Big in the ultimate marriage of narrative convenience. Candace Bushnell, author of the original New York Observer columns, admitted as much in a Guardian interview last year: “Well, I think, in real life, Carrie and Big wouldn’t have ended up together,” she said. “But at that point the TV show had become so big … it’s show business, not show art, so at that point it was for the audience and we weren’t thinking about what the impact would be 10 years later.”

At least the disappointment of this unhappily happy ending is easy enough to resolve: simply never acknowledge that Sex and the City has, in fact, ended. That’s what Dan Clay is doing: “I tried to, like, rewrite history and imbue Carrie Dragshaw with all of the traits that I loved about Carrie [Bradshaw] and none of the ones I didn’t,” he says. “The internet is a pretty intense place at times – like, a lot of tough news – and Carrie’s not political at all, she exists outside of all that.” The escapist joy of harking back to this pre-Trump, even pre-9/11 innocence, is payment enough for Clay; he donates any money made from Carrie Dragshaw to charitable causes, which “help spread the message of love that she was born for”.

Never-ending Sex and the City also means enough time for everyone to gradually learn to own the fact that they loved it all along – and that’s OK. As the noted academic and novelist Roxane Gay wrote in her 2014 essay collection Bad Feminist (essential reading for any conflicted SATC fan), “I have certain … interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.”

For Clay, whose embracing of Sex and the City went hand-in-hand with coming out as gay, this experience has been nothing less than transformative: “If you’re trying to hide yourself, there are certain things that you don’t even entertain the possibility of, y’know? Don’t say you like Britney Spears too loudly, don’t wear too-tight pants, don’t watch Sex and the City. So then, just allowing myself to like what I like and not question it, became this very minor act of self-expression and self-love.”

That’s what the Sex and the City fandom is about in the end: a little bit of self-love in a harsh world. Whether you’re a feminist concerned about letting the side down, a Sopranos-worshipping straight dude who’s unwittingly bought into the myth that high feminine cannot equal high culture, or a gay man desperately trying to stay closeted, making peace with your inner girlie-girl Carrie can do you good. “Of course the perfect feminist wouldn’t watch Sex and the City!” says Fairless. “It’s too white, it’s too materialistic, it’s not serious enough, but I’m exhausted just thinking about the amount of willpower that it would require for me to boycott it. And I’d rather use that energy to dismantle the patriarchy, obvs.”