As Kristin Davis has now brought up a few times on her Sex and the City podcast, Are You A Charlotte?, people were outraged when Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) ended up with Mr. Big a.k.a. John Preston (Chris Noth) for the finale of the original series, but were later outraged when she ended up single for the finale of And Just Like That… In effect, what she’s trying to say is that people will find a way to be outraged no matter what you do or how hard you try to please them. That said, there was little to be pleased by with And Just Like That… as a whole, regardless of whatever the final episode might have offered (which was, quite literally, shit). Yet it’s obvious that the latest ending (though who’s to say if it will “stick,” since these women have a habit of “reviving” when one least expects it) is what Michael Patrick King wanted to do the first time around. Now finally able provide the “new and improved” coda for Carrie. The coda she should have had in 2004, but that audiences weren’t ready to fully “receive” yet.
Though they seem to be now. That is, after the three-season series already dared to leave Carrie’s pussy high and dry by leaving her single. With not even so much as the downstairs British neighbor, Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake), left as an open-ended “fuck buddy” option, as he firmly tells her after they have sex in the ninth episode, “Better Than Sex,” that he won’t be coming back to New York (even if that seems rather extreme since, inevitably, he’ll have to be back in NYC at some point). So it is that, by the twelfth and final episode, “Party of One,” Carrie has an epiphany—one that she had clearly, er, come to when she decided to sleep with Duncan knowing full well that “nothing” could happen afterward. That there wasn’t going to be any “relationship potential” from it. In the past, doing something like that would have been anathema to her. For even in her “early days” being single on Sex and the City, she was never the type to go for a one-night kind of affair (even if “The Power of Female Sex” in season one did find her in that…position). Her intent was always to at least go through the process of a few dates to engage in the “trial and error” of “landing a man.” In “Party of One,” however, she tells Charlotte (Davis) flat-out, “I have to quit thinking: maybe a man. And start accepting: maybe just me.”
This notion is later reemphasized with little subtlety when she tells her landscaper/Seema’s (Sarita Choudhury) boyfriend, Adam (Logan Marshall-Green), as he’s working on her garden, “I was thinking…we return to something more wild, free out here. Something more me.” Apart from this being a bit of a slap in the face after all the time and effort Adam put in to making it as it is, it’s meant to once again underscore that Carrie is no longer invested in trying to “find someone.” Ostensibly content with “just” her “wild, free” self. Or, as she phrases it for the final line in the 1800s-era manuscript she’s finishing, “The woman realized she was not alone. She was on her own.” This matter of semantics, of course, being designed to comfort rather than evoke pity.
That the final episode aired in mid-August, roughly two months before Chanté Joseph’s viral Vogue article, “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?,” would be published seems like a retroactive herald of what was to come. For, even though Carrie was always billed as the “perennially single girl,” she was never actually committed to being (nor did she ever seem to want to remain) single. And the reason the male view on Sex and the City wasn’t as hateful as it could have been is that there seemed to be an awareness that each of these women (even Samantha Jones [Kim Cattrall], when her relationships with Richard Wright [James Remar] and Smith Jerrod [Jason Lewis] arose), despite their “promiscuousness,” was still ultimately searching for a steady boyfriend. Therefore, it wasn’t shaking the status quo too egregiously—even if, at the time, the show was still deemed, in its way, a “threat” to men (see: the 2000 Time article with the SATC women as the cover stars alongside the headline, “Who Needs A Husband?”—the germinal form of, “Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”). But what was different about Joseph’s article—as well as the primary cause for such a male backlash against it—was that she wasn’t just making a blanket statement with her Bradshaw-esque query, but actually probing the confluence of events that’s led to women being much more cautious about and reluctant to post anything online about having a boyfriend.
Almost a month after the article was “unleashed,” Joseph wrote a follow-up piece that crystallized her own reactions to all the reactions, especially from men. As she puts it, “The article also sparked some hateful abuse, most of which came from men who read the headline and apparently flew into a rage. They wished abusive future relationships on me, warned me I’d die sad and single, or in some cases described how they’d murder me. At points all of this was worrying. But I quickly realized they likely saw the article as a threat to a system that has historically favored them. If having a man used to be the ultimate prize, and now some women are questioning whether it is anymore, well…that’s bound to be destabilizing.” Because, even for as “destabilizing” as Sex and the City was in its time, it still reinforced the classic trope: a woman wants to find a man, get married and “settle down” (regardless of whether children are a part of that equation). Even the “wildest” of ones (in this case, that would refer to Carrie, not Samantha). Joseph can even tongue-in-cheekly put a spotlight on how her “anthropological study” of whether or not having a boyfriend is embarrassing now branded her, to some, as “a wannabe Carrie Bradshaw,” prompting her to write soon after addressing that, “I couldn’t help but wonder: why is it that of everything I’ve ever written, this piece sparked such a visceral and widespread reaction? And what does that say about the landscape of modern dating?”
What is says, more than anything, is that the phobia among straight men—and one that led to the election of a certain Orange Creature to the office of the presidency for a second time—is a fear of total uselessness, irrelevancy. For who are they now if not “providers” and “protectors”? And even fathers? Inevitably, there were probably a slew of men who only read the headline and went into a frenzy, not bothering to read that an important nuance of the article was exploring the shift in women once so eagerly posting “boyfriend content” on their social media, but now shying away from doing so as much as possible. This, of course, leads into the larger question of whether it’s embarrassing to have a boyfriend in general, if online posting is meant to be at least a small reflection of real life. In the end, Joseph decided, “From my conversations, one thing is certain: the script is shifting. Being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore; it is no longer considered an achievement and, if anything, it’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.” As Carrie Bradshaw (de facto, Michael Patrick King) seemed to intuit for her “grand finale” on And Just Like That…
What’s more, the generally unfavorable reaction to her ending up “alone” (granted, the execution of how she ended up that way was not done effectively) also served as a harbinger of the backlash to this article, which concludes with Joseph’s assertion, “Where being single was once a cautionary tale (you’ll end up a ‘spinster’ with loads of cats), it is now becoming a desirable and coveted status, another nail in the coffin of a centuries-old heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with.” Or, in reductive Carrie Bradshaw speak, “The woman realized she was not alone. She was on her own.” Perhaps more so than ever as the reaction from hetero men to these explorations of what purpose the pursuit of a “fairy-tale romance” really serves in their lives—apart from, as Julia Fox summed up, being a poor use of valuable time—becomes increasingly volatile. Touching a nerve that isn’t inside their penis, ergo being the kind of female touch that is unwanted.
