My ex-girlfriend Jayna concluded that Sex and the City had a negative, permanent affect on the women that watched it.
I miss Jayna, I truly do. Sadly, that may have been my most successful relationship ever. I say sadly because we kept it hidden the entire time and we lived across the state for 3 months of it. But I would drive down every other weekend, so it wasn’t the worst possible situation. I truly cared for the woman with all my heart.
She broke up with me because she’d gotten a job in another state and didn’t think there was any way for us to work out. I held out hope for so long, even going to visit her a few times on my ways across the country. She would always be extra distant and skeptical about whether I was amounting up to anything. I say that in a mean way, but at the time I was unemployed with no prospects and I didn’t care. I’m sure it must have seemed insane to a person who was settling down and finding it hard to make ends meet even with a steady income. She married a few months ago. I hope she’s happy. I hope that someday, I, too, will be happy.
Anyway, she claimed that all of her friends– that had begun watching Sex and the City had ended up turning into ends-driven, callous, materialistic women that cared little about the emotional damage that they inflicted on those around them. She gave constant examples of SatC-watching friends who had cheated, slept around, or led strangers on for no good reason.
I never gave it much credence that Sex and the City caused such behavior, but it definitely made me think twice whenever I ran into women that claimed to love the show. They would defend it as a form of women’s liberation and I wouldn’t doubt it, but I would still keep it in the back of my head. As a prude, I find the show repulsive and so find I end up running into problems with people I know that like it. Inevitably it spoke to their character in ways that they didn’t realize and in ways that I tried to be cautious toward.
