Our Carrie, ourselves

When you hate her, you hate yourself.

Two important notes, before we begin:

1. I’m very aware the world is terrifying right now. And it’s true that, at this exact moment, I’m not writing about war powers violations, or Gaza, or the fact that half the country is in the “danger zone,” heat index-wise. I’m writing instead about one of my favourite comfort shows. It is what it is.

2. When I say “one of my favourite comfort shows,” please understand that that distinction applies only to Sex and the City. I’m not talking about the movies, and I’m not talking about And Just Like That. I’m not even watching And Just Like That anymore, out of an abundance of self-preservation.

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Last spring, the weekend we went to see Every Outfit’s live show, I made a bold admission to two of my dear friends. While I still strongly identified as a Miranda—not only do I have the “we should all be Mirandas” t-shirt, but her aversion to sharing bathroom space and answering personal questions is basically my religious belief—signs were pointing me to being, perhaps, a Carrie moon. I am, after all, a woman who called her wife sobbing at 12:30am from a Miami hotel when Big (spoiler alert) died. I also have three favourite pairs of Nikes¹, get very touchy when anyone suggests that I might have too many clothes, and took explicit inspo from two separate Carrie looks for my first trip to the opera.

This photo marks the last And Just Like That acknowledgement that I’ll make! Henceforth it’s SATC only!

So why did I feel so squeamish admitting a sense of kinship with this fictional character? Well, because—and I don’t know if you know this—the girlies hate Carrie. Megan thee Stallion, the newest celeb SATC fan, broke down just how off-putting she finds Carrie² on a late-night appearance just last year.

“Like, Carrie really love drama. She literally wake up and figure out, ‘how can I mess up everybody’s day? How can I be my cutest, messing up everybody’s day? How can I make my life MORE complicated?’ Simply, she could have always made the right choice. She could have chose sanity. But she always chose insanity.”

She’s not entirely wrong, is the thing. Carrie is absolutely a lot. She is self-absorbed, impractical, and addicted to drama. She shows up to her ex-boyfriend’s office to tell him she’s broke and needs “financial advice” while wearing head-to-toe Chanel. She brings bagels to Miranda merely as a Trojan horse to vent about Aidan, and doesn’t even bring cream cheese. She puts Herculean effort into pursuing an unemotionally available man, and frequently embarrasses herself in so doing.

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But honestly, all of the SATC women are a lot. These are well-drawn, complicated characters who, despite decades of memery and misogynist mockery, can’t actually be easily slotted into two-dimensional stereotypes. Charlotte is a romantic whose rigid aesthetic expectations limit her ability for genuine connection.³ Miranda is a fiercely devoted friend who is hampered by how guarded, judgmental, and self-centered⁴ she is. Samantha projects supreme confidence, but is often insecure and avoidant of everyone else’s emotions.⁵ So, why is it Carrie who gets the bulk of our ire, here in the 2020s?

There is the fact that Carrie seems the worst at her job out of all of them—she’s a good writer, in the world of the show, but weirdly prudish considering that she’s a sex columnist. Americans are particularly disdainful of characters who are bad at their jobs, and particularly enthralled by those who are bad at everything else but great at their jobs. But I think it’s more because Carrie’s humiliations are generally the least cartoonish, and therefore the most personally recognizable. Going out on a limb here, but I suspect few of us have climbed several flights of stairs in a pearl thong on our way to catch our partners in flagrante. Fewer still have had Dr. Blair Underwood in a milk chocolate velour tracksuit mocking our dirty talk after we left him for the bartender we had already broken up with twice.

Dr. Robert at Miranda and Steve’s wedding, probably.

But many more of us have tried to get a prospective partner to match our energy and attachment. We’ve said, in one way or another, “I think about you all the time. No. Correction, correction. I think about US, all the time.” We’ve made the mistake of being too available to someone entirely unavailable. Carrie cries over men more than the rest of the quartet, in achingly vulnerable ways— “She's shiny hair, Style section, Vera Wang; and I'm the sex column they run next to ads for penile implants” is a particularly heartbreaking moment. I feel very strongly that our disgust is based in recognition, and we don’t want to recognize ourselves in someone so transparently emotional. We don’t want to acknowledge how many of our relationship anxieties, romantic and otherwise, boil down to “just tell me I’m the one.”

I texted the girls about this self-identification that I’m wrestling with, a whole year later, and realized that writing my way through it is itself unavoidably Carrie-coded. As in, I literally couldn’t help but wonder. Self-awareness game weak (which is also very Carrie-coded)!

Imagine wearing thrifted Christopher John Rogers to a live podcast show and then asking this question 🤡

Unlike Carrie, however, I’ve stayed seeing a therapist for nearly eight years. The ongoing thrust of our work together is getting me less allergic to my own vulnerability. Because of our delusional obsession with individualism, our society tends to validate people who are too closed off, rather than people who are emotionally slutty. But empathy and connection are two deeply important values to me, and I can’t really access those without letting some walls down. It’s worth the embarrassment, the risk of cringe, to let myself be a whole person who cares about and is cared about by other whole people. I won’t be stalking anyone to their church and demanding they introduce me to their mother any time soon, but I’m getting more comfortable wearing my heart on my Klarna-supported⁶ sleeve.

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1. this one, this one, and this one. Don’t make me choose.

2. But especially Miranda, to be fair.

3. She’s also probably the biggest freak out of all of them, being the only canonical bottom feeder.

4. How often did I rewatch the episode where she moves to Brooklyn while I was resisting moving out of our beautiful but only 500sq.ft. downtown apartment? All the often.

5. Samantha trying to orgasm her way out of empathizing with Miranda’s grief when Miranda’s mother dies; Samantha abandoning Carrie on the street when Aidan’s dog is shitting everywhere; Samantha leaping into a cab away from new mother Miranda…avoidant!

6. RIP Carrie Bradshaw, you would have loved fancy layaway!