(...) wonder whether she is being true to herself, if she is faking more than just her hair color and bra size: "And then I had a frightening thought. Maybe I was the one who was faking it . . . all these years faking to myself that I was happy being single."
So during half of the Sex and the City episodes, the women complain about insensitive men; for the other half, they coach themselves to imitate such men. The result is that by the time the sensitive men appear on the scene, the women have become insensitive, too, and incapable of appreciating them.
What went wrong, plainly, is that women confused sexual sameness with equality and imagined that competing with men in debauchery was part of their social emancipation.
The writers know that their four protagonists, for all their cool urbanity, experience feelings of loss and sadness and loneliness that are real and typical for women in the age of liberation.
Sure, the new way of doing things is a mess, goes this line of reasoning, but the old way didn't solve all our problems either. Well, no kidding. But that's like saying that because asprin doesn't always cure a headache, you are better off banging your head against the wall.
In the second episode of Sex and the City's second season, one woman says sweetly, "I'm a single, 38-year-old woman, still hoping to get married. I don't want to know the truth."
- you don't have to discover the love through the people, you need to discover people through the love -
Sex, Sadness, and the City
Wendy Shalit
http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_4_a4.html
