This paper examines HBO's Sex and the City as a cultural text that reflects evolving attitudes toward love, sex, and career among contemporary American women. Through close analysis of the four central characters — Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, and Miranda Hobbes — the paper identifies two key themes: the transition each character undergoes between the first and final seasons, and the way each character embodies a distinct facet of femininity that resonates with real women. The paper also engages with critical debates about the show's idealism and its postmodern framing of urban single womanhood, ultimately arguing that the series balances aspirational fantasy with recognizable human experience.
When the Home Box Office (HBO) series Sex and the City first aired in 1998, its concept was immediately embraced by its target audience of adult women. Featuring four women characters who embody specific types of sexuality and modernity — Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, and Miranda Hobbes — audiences witnessed women facing and conquering the challenges of love, sex, and career in urban New York City.
More than a study of femininity, Sex and the City is also an example of popular culture material that fuses the experiences of individuals achieving self-realization and accomplishment in life, while simultaneously presenting life as projected by the mass media through television. Because the program is representative of contemporary American society, it provides insightful information about changing concepts of love, sex, and career among women, as illustrated through the characters of Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda.
This paper discusses and analyzes two important points that emerge from an examination of the series: (1) the show demonstrates a transition among its characters, wherein the image of the modern woman is eventually reframed during the final season to illustrate women facing real challenges, and (2) each character represents a particular facet of femininity and womanhood that audiences can relate to — giving the show its human and realistic element.
Foremost among the characters is writer Carrie Bradshaw, the series' lead. She is characterized as a modern woman living an urban life as a New York City writer and fashionista, remaining single and childless in her thirties and embracing liberal views about love and sex. Carrie's character is best captured by Kamen's (2000) description of what the show is all about: "These women jabber with eyebrow-raising frankness about every subject under the Kama Sutra — oral sex, threesomes, romance-killing farts, cradle robbing, and anal sex, to name a few" (215). This description embodies Carrie's character, who tempers a free-spirited nature with a hopeless romanticism when confronting love lost and found. In effect, Carrie carries romantic notions about love while maintaining a liberal outlook in her sex life.
While Carrie is a romantic, Samantha Jones — the forty-something, feisty character — illustrates life lived to its fullest. Samantha is anything but a romantic and maintains an active sex life, at times bordering on promiscuousness in her choice of partners. She is characterized as "the show's sexual adventurer, a kind of stylized superhero of cheerful promiscuity" (Nussbaum, 2004). She enjoys success in both career and sex, and shows little concern about romantic love. Her personality is largely defined by her sexual philosophy and adventures rather than her professional life.
Charlotte York embodies conservativeness throughout the series. Her traditional views on sex, love, and career are reflected in her insistence on maintaining privacy about her sex life, her inability to separate physical intimacy from emotional attachment, and her decision to marry Harry Goldenblatt — despite her inability to conceive and their religious differences. Her character depicts the traditional image of a woman who sees love, sex, and career as inherently linked.
Lawyer Miranda Hobbes is the antithesis of Charlotte. While Charlotte is portrayed as a traditional woman, Miranda rejects those conventional beliefs. Like Samantha and Carrie, she maintains emotional distance from her sex life and does not actively pursue love. However, she is perhaps the only character whose career takes center stage in a manner comparable to Carrie's identity as a writer. Furthermore, Miranda serves as the show's feminist voice: she challenges conventional notions of marriage and emotional attachment, and actively advocates for women's equality with, if not superiority over, men.
These images of the four women persisted throughout five seasons of the series. However, the final season in 2004 showed a significant transition in each character, as they revealed their "other selves" by ultimately embracing the more conventional images of women that the media had long portrayed.
Carrie attempts to find lasting love in Aleksandr Petrovsky, only to eventually settle for Mr. Big — the one man seemingly unable to open himself up emotionally to her. She trades casual sex for a steady relationship, seeking a more meaningful life with someone she genuinely loves. Samantha's carefree spirit is redirected from sex and fashion to confronting breast cancer. Despite the health crisis, she maintains her characteristic strength and willfulness, facing illness with a positive attitude. Charlotte, meanwhile, comes to terms with her inability to conceive and adopts a Chinese baby to complete the family she and Harry had always wanted. Finally, Miranda lowers her guard, accepts that she is getting married, and assumes the roles of wife to Steve and mother to Brady.
These transitions also reshaped critical reception of the show. Praise for its frank and witty portrayal of women in New York City became interspersed with criticism of its overly idealized depictions of witty, wealthy, and beautiful career women. As Rothenberg (2004) argues, the show is "insufferably arch," containing dialogue, characterizations, and scenes far removed from the everyday realities its audiences actually inhabit. Beyond its unrealistic portrayals, the series is also said to be preoccupied with the anxiety to "snag a man" — an ideology that seemed to permeate its storylines for six years (Orenstein, 2003). Despite its modern and trendy aesthetic, critics argue that Sex and the City ultimately lacks originality in advancing new ideologies for modern women, instead showing how to fashionably pursue a man while coping with life's failures through witty dialogue and extravagant shopping (Fairley, 2002: 161).
"Critics challenge the show's unrealistic depictions"
"Relatable human moments within idealized characters"
Indeed, love, sex, and career as depicted in Sex and the City are actually embedded in the show's women characters. The close relationship of the four women with each other symbolically represents the intertwined nature of love, sex, and career, wherein each theme finds its clearest expression through a particular character. Through its ensemble, the show has cultivated and sustained an ideology of liberal thinking in matters concerning love, sex, and career — an ideology that proves essential for women seeking to strengthen their personalities and individualities without resorting to the radical expressions of femininity that critics of feminism often cite as a weakness of the movement.
You’re 69% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 2 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.