A commitment-phobe boy had just dumped me when I first started watching Sex and the City. I had only been on this planet for just over a year when the show first aired, but the 25-year-old series came to me as a Manolo Blahnik-clad rite of passage when I needed it most.
Many of my Gen Z peers are now meeting Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda for the first time, as the show was released on Netflix in the US last week. In the UK, you can watch it on Now TV, or buy it on Amazon Prime. And older women can’t help but wonder what Gen Z are making of it.
The knee-jerk reaction has been to assume our age group will have a problem with the series. Not true. On my WhatsApp group chat with my friends, there are already fans. “I LOVE the show,” a 21-year-old friend voicenotes me. “I enjoyed it more than I thought I would,” another replies.
Admittedly, we were all micro-dosing the best parts on social media way before we sat down to watch the series. Pinterest is full of Carrie-inspired looks: silk skirts, mini-dresses, vintage kitten heels. There’s a viral TikTok of her saying “And suddenly, there he was wearing Armani on Sunday. Mr Big,” set to Take My Breath Away by Berlin, which more than 15,000 users have posted with outfit videos and clips of their boyfriends. This is the first time SATC has reached Gen Z via Netflix, but we know the lore. Loathe the outdated opinions – love the friendship, the fashion and the fucking.
Still, we’ve got some qualms. Despite the tragically still-relatable dating dilemmas, there are plenty of embarrassingly outdated attitudes. Carrie Bradshaw is fundamentally far too judgmental to be a sex columnist. When a younger guy she dates in season three reveals he’s bisexual, she relentlessly roasts him (“I’m not even sure bisexuality exists, I think it’s just a layover on the way to gay town”), and eventually he’s dumped. “I was cringing,” my friend messages me. “It reeks of biphobia.”
Samantha Jones is slut-shamed for giving a UPS delivery guy a sly blow job in her office, fat-shamed when she gains 15lbs yet still wants to wear a crop top, and is dismissed for being ridiculous when she starts a relationship with a painter called Maria in season four: “She’s not a lesbian, she just ran out of men.” When Samantha dates a Black music producer called Chivon (one of the show’s only non-white characters) she fetishises him and announces: “I don’t see colour, I see conquests.”
When Miranda is apartment hunting, she tells her son they need to follow a “white guy with a baby” to find a “good home”. Donald Trump has a jumpscare cameo in season two. And all the girls casually use anti-trans slurs.
But in other ways, it’s relatively progressive. I’ve never heard a group of women talking about shagging this much in any other show. It’s not lost on me and my friends how revolutionary their chats about oral sex and masturbation would have been when first aired. We all agree: it’s still so refreshing seeing women talk freely about their sex lives.
As a protagonist, Carrie is simultaneously iconic, morally confused, and intensely insufferable. When a man she’s dating reveals he secretly films women having sex, she shrugs it off. When a different guy shares that he has ADHD, she dumps him. The verdicts among my peers vary from bad friend to self-obsessed – “but she does turn out the best looks”. Plus, we were all rooting for her and Big and their toxic fuckboy storyline the whole time. Truly, we’re just as dumb as Carrie with our opinions on that one.
“Overall, it’s a slay,” the group chat concludes. “Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda’s friendship is defo relatable because they literally just have brunch and talk about boys.” No Bechdel test passing here, but that’s not the point.
Plus, they’re certainly shagging more than us. “I think my biggest takeaway, which I wasn’t expecting, was that it inspired me to be more sexually liberated, like the girls,” one friend tells me. “Date people casually, with no judgment. I was watching it like: ‘What am I doing? I need to go get some dick and not take life so seriously.’”