#ABOUT US ICON WOMEN TV#
But really, can you name a TV show or film prior to this that centred around a woman reflecting about her life and the world? Carrie, for better or worse, was our first pop-culture philosopher. It may seem ironic that the first female thinker in pop culture (not in books – books have had them since Doris Lessing) came to us with corkscrew curls and wacky cloth flowers in her hair, teetering on Manolos worn over Japanese-schoolgirl socks. Not only can I dress up and flirt, seduce and consume, overcome challenges, yield to temptations, take risks, fail, try again – I can think about it all, and what I think will matter. Teenage girls watching each episode were taking in a clear message. After the shallow or deeper sagas of hot sex or social slights, of hungover breakfasts with the girls or Cosmopolitans and hookups at night, every episode saw the letters unscrolling – often forming quite existential questions – across Carrie's computer screen. Male writers have structured stories around exactly this character from F Scott Fitzgerald to JD Salinger to Philip Roth but Carrie showed audiences week after week that a lively female consciousness was as interesting as female sexuality or motherhood or martyrdom – the tradition role model options.Ĭarrie is a writer, and her adventures aren't just love escapades as they would be for a Fanny, or even an Elizabeth Bennet: they are material filtered though one woman's distinctive point of view and crafted into text in her unique voice. She was a writer who arrived in the big city to test her mettle and realise her voice.
Now they are the stalest of cliches, but when, in the first 1998 episode, in the midst of all that big hair and weird brown lipstick, you hear Carrie first describe the allure and disappointment of "toxic bachelors", when Samantha first says frankly that she likes to have sex without emotion, to "fuck like a man", it was bitingly fresh for women to speak these aphorisms out loud, in public, and in fabulous heels.īut there are other reasons that the characters of Sex and the City endured as icons throughout the first decade of the 21st century, and other reasons that Carrie will continue to resonate. This was so startlingly un-sayable that when women watched Sex and the City, it was like seeing a secret set of their own dramas spring into art. And we are often just that graphic and hopeful and vulnerable and slutty as those four characters. Bushnell was gutsy enough to disclose that even we serious, accomplished, feminist women spend a lot of time, when we are alone with our female friends, telling stories centred on the men with whom we are romantically entangled, exploring the quality of the love and attraction, the romance and the sex. This break from narrative norms was remarkable not just because Bushnell was insisting that four women – no longer in their first youth – were renewably compelling on their own terms it was also radical because, in a very un-PC but admirable flouting of feminist norms, Bushnell was brave enough to lay bare the secret – that for many women the search for love is the same urgent, central, archetypal quest story that for men is played out in war narratives and adventure tales. Rather, the core of the tale was always the life-sustaining friendship among four women, as the men in their lives came and went. I have written before about how radical it was that the narrative of Sex and the City centred not around a couple – let alone the traditional formula of hero-plus-beautiful-secondary-love-interest.
#ABOUT US ICON WOMEN SERIES#
So why am I so sure that Carrie Bradshaw – the charming, ever-hopeful star of the longrunning HBO series and hit film, all based on Candace Bushnell's New York Observer column – is an icon and did as much to shift the culture around certain women's issues as real-life feminist groundbreakers?
She's not a brass-knuckled political figure, a Birkenstock-wearing Amazon or a breaker of corporate glass ceilings she's just a sassy single girl in New York City.
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