What Sex and the City taught men about women

The Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That, airs on Binge from Thursday at 7pm.

In the early noughties I had one of my worst Christmases with someone who turned out to be my least favourite girlfriend. I was staying with my mum in the country and I had bought my newish girlfriend what I thought was a very nice present: a Tiffany bracelet.

And while a gentleman would never reveal the price of such things, let’s just say that for a not massively remunerated journalist it rather set me back a few quid. Though it was going to be worth it, I told myself, because of the pleasure it would bring, the reflected glory my generosity would create. How wrong I was.

“I hate it,” my girlfriend said with a laugh, asking if she could have the receipt to return it and get something of equivalent value.

Somewhat compounding this extraordinary behaviour was the fact this line did not even sound original. It felt borrowed from Sex and the City, the show she loved and which made up another present she opened far more happily (a box set from one of the blood relations). I remember the episode when Sarah Jessica Parker’s awful Carrie is proposed to and spends her time talking about how much she hates the engagement ring. And another when Carrie is given a $900 cashmere scarf from her friend and asks if she can take it back and get the cash.

But that was Sex and the City in a nutshell, the show about brunching young women in New York, voiced by Carrie the Queen Bee columnist and charting their sexual and shopping adventures.

Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth, pictured in 1999, in Sex and the City.

A lot of people I knew lapped it up. But it left me cold. And the Tiffanygate episode, as I later called it, convinced me it wasn’t doing anyone any good.

They say porn is bad for men because it presents an unreal view of women and their bodies and what they will do in bed. I rather agree with that summation and I don’t think lad culture in the 1990s or shows like Men Behaving Badly were great for women either. But I’d also say Sex and the City was guilty of having a similar corrosive effect – on women’s view of men and what they can expect from life.

Yes, on the surface it was harmless glamorous fun, these four women tottering on their Manolos from movie or theatre premieres to restaurant openings to jumping in and out of bed with various gym bunnies, wondering whether the banker lover they had was quite rich enough for their tastes, or gave sufficiently good oral sex. Carrie had a famously on-off thing with a man called Mr Big played by Chris Noth, his name seeming to refer not just to his physique but also, we assumed, the contents of his underpants. Enjoy your fun, laydeez, I thought at the time. It’s harmless and, in its way, witty.

The problem came when the Manhattan fantasy started seeping into the lives of people I knew. And Tiffanygate showed this in full glorious technicolor as far as I was concerned. “Just like that,” to quote from the show, with its gratingly chirpy tone, oozing entitlement from every pore.

The Spice Girls in 1997. Picture: AP

A lot of men I knew who were single and dating in the ‘90s encountered a zeitgeist that was informed by many things, not least the Spice Girls, whose girl power mantra was, I would say, a generally good, real and liberating thing. At least the Spices felt like real people.

Sex and the City exerted a similar pull on women but it created a strange fantasy of perfection that no one was going to reach. One friend tells me that going to bed with women during this era was a bit like sitting an exam you were never going to pass.

I remember when the drama first came out, I was single and a friend organised a speed dating evening. I wasn’t particularly successful (by which I mean I was not at all successful). But there was one woman in particular whose beautifully washed long auburn hair virtually sliced my eyeballs off, such was the speed with which she turned on her heels when I said what I did for a living: “Freelance journalist.” Was it because I did a terrible, immoral job? Possibly. I was pretty sure it was because she thought I was unlikely to earn enough money.

In many ways it was typical of the late ‘90s, a decade I otherwise remember fondly not only because I was so young but because there was so much promise and optimism. The Cold War was over, the threat of nuclear Armageddon had receded and Islamic fundamentalism had not quite got going. The most scandalous news stories featured a few MPs getting brown envelopes for asking questions in the Commons, something that happens now with much less outrage.

It also gave us Friends, that flat-packed fantasy of three men and three women, all pretty, dating, supposedly having bad days but really being extremely funny and making their own family together in apartments they couldn’t possibly afford in real life. Grey’s Anatomy picked up the cudgels, the central heroine Meredith Grey always wondering if her brain surgeon boyfriend, played by Patrick Dempsey and nicknamed Dr McDreamy, was quite good enough.

But Sex and the City seemed to present a fantasy life too far and it was a show where I struggled to wish its central protagonists well. When Carrie eventually got jilted on her wedding day and her friends rushed to her aid, my sympathies were somewhat limited. As they were for my soon-to-be ex. We didn’t last very long and I never gave her the receipt.

I would have happily exchanged it if she hadn’t been so rude, but I spent the Tiffany bracelet money on a pair of football boots, some books and a couple of solo brunches. Just like that.

The Times

The first episode of And Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot, airs on Binge on Thursday at 7pm.