This week, I saw a tweet from a young woman criticizing the show Sex and the City because the characters slept with too many men. As a millennial who came of age in the Sex and the City era, this is amusing—of course they slept with lots of men.
Imagine if I asked why all the characters on Seinfeld had to be so neurotic, nitpicky and Jewish-coded. Sex and the City might be considered basic bitch chum today, but it was revolutionary for its time. It might not seem shocking to me today, because I can open Twitter and, without my consent, be served a close-up photo of a clitoris.
Pussy, a character whose main trait was being good at cunnilingus. Had I watched it in my formative years, another piece of the show would have been lost on me, which is that it satirizes an extremely small, outlier group of women. But because that show was so popular, it seems that this group and the behaviors of this group have been misconstrued as a societal norm. But Sex and the City has taken a new form.
No, not the form of all the spinoffs and movies, but in the form of TikTok, where the top tier of attractive urban women—especially those who talk about their very active dating lives—are disproportionately boosted. Some of the women sharing lurid dating stories are influencers, others are just over-sharers, and many others are actual sex workers, especially the ones who are suspiciously always being flown to different cities by rich men. But because these videos are so popular, and because attractive people in general are boosted on TikTok, many young people believe exactly what my mom was trying to prevent me from believing by watching Sex and the City —that everyone but you is having loads of glamorous, casual, cosmopolitan, sex.
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