Middle-Aged Women Are Getting Their Due on TV
S1: This is the waves. This is the wave is the wave. This is the way. This is the way. This is the waves that stick.
S2: Welcome to the Waves Slate’s podcast about gender, feminism and this week at least women aging on television. Every episode you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can’t get off our minds. And today you’ve got me. Shannon Palus, Slate’s senior editor covering science and Health
S3: and me Asha Saluja, managing producer for Slate Podcasts. We’re here this week to talk about two TV series that are giving us juicy female protagonists then and now. Showtime’s new Yellowjackets, a thriller that timeline hops between a group of teen girls experiencing a major trauma and the fallout they face in their 40s and HBO’s Sex and the City reboot. And just like that, which is causing all kinds of conversation as it revisits the life of Carrie and her friends in their 50s. Shannon, why did you want to talk about this?
S2: I can’t stop thinking about these shows. Both of these shows have been getting me through quarantine in the winter lately. They’re both being released the old fashioned way on a weekly basis, which means that I have this like appointment viewing again in my schedule, which is really nice. And they both feature middle aged women with the shadow of their younger selves hanging over them throughout everything they do in Yellowjackets. That’s a little bit more literal as the drama goes back and forth between what’s happening to the teen girls and what’s happening to the 40-Something women and in sex and the city. It’s just impossible to escape the fact that we’re watching these women because we watch them 20 years ago and we watched, you know, their younger selves waltz around the city, I don’t think anyone would make. And just like that as a standalone TV show, Carrie Bradshaw and her crew are kind of being haunted by their younger selves in a different way, which I find really, really interesting.
S3: Yeah. Well, yeah, we’re seeing how the how the decisions these characters make play out over time. And it’s not like the span of a series, it’s like the span of several decades. So that’s really fun to watch.
S2: And also, interestingly, they both involve mental bionics and cannibalism.
S3: Just kidding. So stay tuned. We’re going to deep dive into both of these shows and we’ll talk about what they mean for women aging and Hollywood roles in the over 40 crowd.
S2: Thank you so much for listening, and happy New Year to all our listeners. If you’re loving the show and want to easily hear more, subscribe to our feed. New episodes come out every Thursday morning while you’re there. Check out our other episodes, too. For longtime fans of the show, we’ve recently released two reunion episodes bringing back original hosts like June Thomas and Nicole Perkins. You don’t want to miss them. First, we’re going to talk about Yellowjackets, a new series from Showtime, starring a brilliant ensemble cast of teenage girls and their adult counterparts, played by some favorite 90s actresses. The plot is in 1996, this championship winning high school soccer team. They get on a plane to to go to a big meet. The plane crashes deep in the Ontario wilderness. Some of them survive, and they are forced to turn to desperate measures to make it through many, many months in the mountains. The series also flashes forward to some of the surviving women in the present day and explores what’s going on in their lives now as survivors of this trauma. Asha. When you started watching this show, what did you think of it?
S3: So when I first started watching the show, I would be lying if I said I was thinking about feminism at all. It’s still much of the show just operates on a plot level, like there’s so, so much going on in terms of like mysteries to unravel. It’s not just this then and now of what happened after the crash in the wilderness. They’re also sort of like mini mysteries playing out in each of these women’s lives. What really started to get me thinking about what the creators of this show were after was when I read a New York Times interview about what the creators of this show were after. And it turns out that they were really inspired by some discourse that happened on Twitter and online surrounding a potential all girl adaptation of Lord of the Flies. So they recall in the New York Times piece one tweet saying, What are they going to do? Collaborate to death? Meaning talking about what would happen if girls were stranded on an island, ala Lord of the Flies. And basically, you know, building up this fantasy that girls would not resort to the same drastic measures and hierarchy that boys would. So basically, the creators of this show set out to demonstrate sort of the full humanity, including capacity for harm of real teenage girls and the idea that girls would be kind and collaborative and look out for each other while boys would descend into madness is turned on its head.
S2: Yeah, I hadn’t read that piece or read that tweet or no, that was the inspiration in part for the show. And that makes a lot of sense. I very much got some of those vibes when I was watching it mostly, and that it shows teenage girls and teenage friendship in some of its glory and a lot of just its roughness. There’s a little bit of backstabbing going on between the girls or actually a lot of backstabbing going on in the establishing scenes involving the soccer team before they got in. The plane crash cannot in Logan over dramatize like, Oh, these girls are just catty way. Just in a very real way of being on a high school sports team is quickie people, gossip, people, you know, make out with each other’s boyfriends. People have thoughts and feelings about who’s best and who should play and and all of that. And I really. Related to that portrayal of a high school sports team or just being in high school and I think being in the survival scenario in the wilderness gives it a really interesting backdrop to say like what if all of that was heightened to matters of life and death?
S3: This show, if if it was operating on any sort of like higher and interesting level, it was not with the teenage girls so much as with the present day women. And we can get into some of the individual characters because I think they each are really, really like, fully illustrated and fully fleshed out. We have Shana played by Melanie Lynskey, who is sort of in a rut in a marriage that does not seem to be working out. We have Tessa, who is, by all appearances, doing so well. She is happily married with a son and running for state Senate. But we quickly learn that her demons have not completely left her yet. We have Nat, who has been in and out of rehab and seems to be on the surface, sort of struggling the most to keep her life together. And we have misty, played by Christina Ricci, who is an abusive nurse to the elderly.
S2: I love watching the older versions of the characters the most, I think, because first of all, like I’m I’m kind of obsessed with people who have hair that looks real on TV. Like they don’t. They’re not overly hostile. They’re not overly Cheyna. Tieza is the most glamorous of them, and that makes sense for her character because she’s shown in these in this very glamorous house with nice wallpaper. She’s running for Senate. She she’s we see her being photographed for a magazine, so it makes sense that she’d be really pulled together, but not tear constantly looks really greasy, which you just never see your character. And she would have greasy hair. She’s her life is a wreck. She wouldn’t have time to wake up and brought her hair. That’s not something that character would be doing.
S3: Her not busting out the dry shampoo.
S2: She is not busting out the dry shampoo. She’s not making a pit stop a dry bar before she goes to try to solve a, you know, murder suicide mystery with someone from high school like she is. Other other business to attend in jail. And I find that really nice and refreshing and interesting to watch.
S3: Yeah. Melanie Lynskey, who’s a beautiful woman and, like, you know, really belongs in Hollywood in some pretty traditional ways. I just admire how unafraid she is to kind of look normal on screen, not just in the way that her appearance is styled, but in her facial expression. She just really nails this role of sort of like a listless woman who does not know how her life got away from her. I just love her performance in this and in almost everything.
S2: You feel like you could walk up to these characters walking around your neighborhood and that there’s something really nice about that.
S3: On the flip side, one bone I have to pick is the girls look way to freshen clean for the majority of their time in the wilderness, and Nat’s character has, like her roots, don’t even go away. She’s blonde, and they don’t even really deal with with that, or it’s clearly dyed hair. Yeah, some issues there.
S2: Their hair looks great in the woods and to the point where I almost think that this must have been an artistic choice on some level, just because the the greasy hair of, you know, quote unquote present day night versus the blonde like perfectly like messy. But it looks amazing here of what’s not. I. Would it be too far a leap to say that they’re trying to make a point about the way that we view adolescence and teenage hood and that kind of like natural beauty that or do you think that some person in the machine of the Asha was like, Well, look, the teenagers need to like, look good, which is like weird and like, kind of icky in its own way.
S3: Yeah, it could be either one. I do trust that the creators of the show are working in good faith to like, accurately portray women and girls, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. Let’s even though it does sound a little bit far. Let’s let’s go with the charitable read. I would sort of ask you that same question about the show as a project in general, because, you know, reading that piece about where they were coming from, I was like, Of course, teenage girls will do the same vile stuff to each other that boys would like. You know, it didn’t even really register to me is like something worth proving. But I guess, you know, it is. So do you think that the show is sort of like operating on a feminist level? Or is it just a really good show about women that isn’t afraid to show what they are?
S2: I think that it’s operating on a feminist level in the sense that getting a big show made that features a cast that centers women heavily is is a feminist thing to do, which is to say a little bit. But you know, how much does that help work for the equality of women really to have to have a TV show with a big cast of women? I liked it and I like it, and I continue to like it, and I would like to see more shows out there like it?
S3: Yeah, I mean, if we could get just like largely women ensemble casts going off like awesome up and comers juxtaposed with some of our favorite actors actresses from our childhood, I would not be married that that would be a win for all of us, I think.
S2: Yeah. Oh, fork over more money to streaming services if they want to keep doing that.
S3: So you can watch Yellowjackets on Showtime. Episode nine of the series comes out this Sunday, and the season finale episode 10 will be out the following week.
S2: We’re going to take a break here, but if you’re enjoying the waves and want to hear more from Asha and myself on another topic, check out our Waves Plus segment. Is this feminist word today? Asha and I are debating whether Carrie Bradshaw as an anti-hero is feminist. Sign up for Slate Plus for more bonus content and unlimited reading on Slate.com at Slate dot com slash the Web’s Plus. Next, we’re going to talk about. And just like that HBO’s reboot of the long running series Sex and the City, actually technically the second reboot or third reboot. There have been two movies, and now this, the series drops us into the lives of three of the four characters who the original show Samantha is conspicuously missing. And now they’re in their fifties. Asha What have your impressions of the show gone so far?
S3: You know, I’m just along for the ride. I’ve kind of agreed with the public sentiment that seems to be developing that the first few episodes were both, like, really hard to watch and possibly a little bit overdone. But I do think the show has taken an interesting turn in its most recent episode. I’m definitely curious to watch it play out. I should mention that I was not necessarily an original Sex and the City fan, but I actually watched the entire series right when Covid started. It was sort of like my first quarantine show. So I have the whole thing fresh in my mind in an interesting way, and I’m totally hooked. I watched the two movies after that. I would kind of watch anything that this team put out.
S2: I feel the same way. I think I spent part of the first episode texting friends and saying, that wouldn’t happen like that. That’s ridiculous. Why are they doing this about various plot points and creative choices for the season as a whole? And after that, something in my brain shut off and I was like, I’m watching three people who I am very familiar with talk and walk around and do things, and I get to see new episodes of them talking and walking around doing things every week. And that’s great. It’s great. I’m happy a topic.
S3: So let’s turn your brain back on just a little bit and get into some of the things that made you cringe and scream and text your friends before you kind of like me went went smooth brain on the project. One thing that struck me like right away is that at the very first sit down brunch in the first few scenes, they’re addressing two elephants in the room. One is the absence of Samantha, which is addressed before they’re even inside the restaurant. Her presence is sort of explained away, but the second elephant in the room is the passing of time and within like a few minutes of sitting down to brunch, we’re hearing them talk about aging and how each of their appearances have changed. Let’s hear a clip of that.
S1: I’m starting with spring semester next week. Oh, really? Next week? Are you going to, you know, go crazy? Too late already happened. No color your hair. So where is that? White person with check. We haven’t even ordered yet. Oh, I know, but I want out now. I just think the crazy ages, you know you think the great ages you. Because if we’re friends and I’m this age, you can’t be whatever age you’re pretending to be. I am not pretending to be any age. I am 55. What? You want a medal? Yes. Yes, I do. Can I get a medal? Yes, you can. And when I turn fifty five in 10 years, I would like a medal as well. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Why are you just going after me? Kerry dyes her hair to you, but hers is obvious. You’re trying to pass. Yeah, but obvious in a good way, right? Because it’s kind of obvious. Hey, don’t come cheap. You look great. Great. But I miss the red, and I just thought it might be fun, you know, for the start of school. Yeah. For all your play dates and things. Charlotte, I’m getting a masters in human rights to pair with my law degree, so hopefully I can become an advocate for women who need one. I don’t have to be a spicy redhead to do that. I mean, we can’t just stay who we were. Right? Absolutely. And there are more important issues in the world than trying to look young. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dyed her hair might drop.
S3: Shannon, what did you think of this?
S2: It has been really interesting watching the actresses now pretty aged from when we first saw them on our screen as these characters in the late 90s. It’s interesting and weird, and I’m having a lot of complicated feelings about watching them as women in their 50s on the screen. They look very old. That was one of my first thoughts when I was watching. The pilot is they look old. They have gray hair. They’ve had plastic surgery. They are not. The 32 year old’s. As when we first saw on screen in the 90s and we just don’t normally see that on TV, we don’t see TV shows focused on 50 something woman, we don’t see TV shows focused on 50 something year old woman that we knew when they were in their 30s as the same characters. It really made me kind of confront my own inherent ageism like right up front, as in like, oh, like, why do you think it’s jarring to see a woman with grey hair on on your TV? In so far as the conversations themselves around aging, I have just wanted them to go deeper into the appearance stuff. I think it was Willa Paskin, Slate’s TV critic, who said that on Twitter that the way that they talk about their hair in that episode is kind of a stand in for the plastic surgery stuff, which they don’t go into at all. And that’s kind of disappointing because as well pointed out these women would be talking about, you know, their Botox, etc.
S3: That is really a great point from Willa. And in that conversation, Miranda is the one who kind of cops do not have having had any work done, and the other two women are sort of ragging on her a little bit about it and becomes very personal. On that note, let’s talk about Miranda, because when you said in the first episode, you were like, you know, furiously texting. I imagine that Miranda may have been the character you were texting about. What do you make of how they are treating sort of her arc and her progression as a woman?
S2: Miranda at times feels like she’s starring in her own little afterschool special about how to not approach issues of race. She’s going back to school, and she mistakes the professor, who is a black woman for one of the students and then makes comments about her hair. And it’s all very cringy.
S1: Oh hey, hey. That’s where the professor sets a sorry. He just told me someone’s quick with the pronouns. It’s like, I am the professor. You’re the professor. Yeah, you’re Neil Wallace. Why do you seem so surprised? Well, your brain’s a law professor can’t have hair like mine. Why is that? Oh, you know, I didn’t. I didn’t mean because of the braids I was, I was. I was just thrown because the braids are so different than the hair in your photo on the Columbia website. My comment had nothing whatsoever to do with it being a black hairstyle. I knew that you were black when I signed up for this class. That was important to me. You sign up for this class because I’m black. Well, not just because you’re black. I take this class because you’re such a force in academia on top of everything you do as a community activist. God is like such a brown nose. I mean, please just forget that I ever said anything about your hair. Hair has nothing whatsoever to do with appropriateness or intelligence or gravitas, obviously. I mean, do I look like someone who attaches any significance to hair? I let mine go gray, and I don’t care if it makes me look old. Not that I just do. I sound racist? You really want to answer that question. I am so sorry for taking everyone’s time. This is not at all who I am. I will just be quiet now.
S2: This seems to me. They just feel like forced and awkward, and I’m thinking back to a Slate Plus segment. Danielle Hewitt did on this show a few weeks ago about how she’s personally kind of found that sex in the city has taken upon itself to, like, cram race into this reboot. Yeah. What do you make of it, Asha?
S3: Yeah, I mean, that scene is obviously so, so hard to watch, as is a lot of Miranda’s arc. The scene with her professor in particular, I had to like, pause and come back to after, like fully disassociating for a while. It’s that bad. But I think the fact that it made my skin crawl so much means that it was maybe an effective choice by the creators of the show. I totally see Danielle’s point. The fact that the creators of this reboot felt that it was necessary to take on race as a wholesale topic is definitely a choice that I’m not sure how I feel about. But I think that I’ve seen a lot of blowback about this choice that they made with Miranda about Miranda’s character wouldn’t be behaving this way. Like what happened to Miranda. She used to be the aspirational one. She used to be the pissy one. And I think that that isn’t true and that the creators made a really intentional choice to sort of explore that and that it’s that particular thing is actually working pretty well for me. That said, I think a lot of the show’s cringe moments are an intentional choice on the part of the creators. However, I think there is a whole other set of cringe. That this show is causing that is totally inadvertent and it’s related to sort of just like the overdone, ham fisted ness of feeling it necessary to take on this set of issues in general. I’m thinking of like the the black friend arc that Charlotte’s character has and how each character gets a person of color as a friend throughout the course of the series. A lot of those things, it’s like the trying too hard of it all is like a big, inadvertent cringe. But I think the cringe related to Miranda’s arc feels accurate to me.
S2: Could you defend that a little bit more? I find myself nodding along with the pieces that have said, You know, this is Miranda taking a turn that she wouldn’t have taken in in the original show. And this is unfair to her, not just the race stuff, but the general like not being up with the times, having a teenage son who’s, you know, having sex all the time and being at odds with him about that. But do you think that that reaction on my part and some of the other these other critics part is like trying to defend a beloved character whose original core traits we have sort of standard over in the years between when we originally watched the show and now?
S3: Yeah, I mean, Madison Malone Carter wrote kind of the piece that you’re talking about a little bit really well for Slate, and it’s not. I’m not unsympathetic to the case that like, this was my favorite character, and I’m really bummed to like, see her take such a wild turn. But I don’t think there is anything in the original text that pointed to Miranda being, like, genuinely strong on matters of social justice and consciousness, like she was mean to the woman who cleaned her house. She, you know, worked as a corporate lawyer. It’s not like she was out saving the world or like working for the Peace Corps or something. There’s a really cringy arc with a black neighbor of hers in the original series where, you know, I don’t think she demonstrates like any real degree of racial consciousness. I think to me, like the woman that we saw in her thirties would very realistically age into the woman that we’re seeing now in her 50s. And it’s not pretty. And you know, I did like Miranda. I think I think it’s just a realistic sort of like hardening of Miranda’s peculiarities. And I think it was a good choice where the choices they made with Miranda feel defensible. To me, the choices they made with Charlotte feel totally indefensible. It’s not that they got her character’s evolution wrong so much. It’s just that the way they handle this sort of stuff that is happening to Charlotte, that stuff being her deciding that she needs to diversify her friend group in order to impress this one particular mom at her school and her working through her daughter being trans. I just think that the way that they absolve her of having gotten to this point in her life without literally befriending a single person of color is like really gross and weird. So I’m not like, totally team. And just like that, I just think they happened to nail what Miranda might look like in her fifties.
S2: That’s so interesting. And I think in one sense, the argument you’re making is that the Miranda of the original series, the one who was like, All we do is talk about, man, maybe we should talk about other things. I always write it, Miranda, as you know, the most feminist of the bunch in a feminist and what you’re saying is kind of like, well, that feminism doesn’t like, translate at all into intersectional feminism. And that way that some of us who liked her in the original series might think without some closer examination, for sure.
S3: I think that Miranda is sort of the furthest on the left in terms of like. Girlboss feminism, it has to be said, and she was the one who was like, Hey, ladies, let’s not think too much about men. I’m not concerned about my wedding. But her alternative was like thinking about herself. And I think that really shows in the women she’s become. Yeah. This show is serving up some cringe, some realistic and some pretty ghastly in terms of its unnecessary ness. But Shannon, how do you feel like it compares to Yellowjackets?
S2: I just really been enjoying watching both at the same time because their past selves are so implicitly present on the screen in the Sex and the City reboot. I just like watching women be friends onscreen in complicated ways, and even if that’s cringy, and even if sometimes that involves parts of people’s faces being eaten by wolves as it does and Yellowjackets. And one thing I really appreciated about both of these series that was really, really small is they both feature scenes with adult women, friends sitting in bed and talking and touching and a friend platonic way. And I. Just found that so realistic and sweet and intimate in sex and the city, it happens when Miranda is hanging out at Carrie’s apartment after Big has died, and Carrie says, You know, my back hurts and they’re used to Robert and Miranda rubs her back and spoons her and Yellowjackets. It happens when Tasa and Cheyna are at some point in their mystery to figure out who’s blackmailing them, and they’re they’re sitting in bed, and Sean is talking about her affair, and Tasa is relating to that. And I just really liked watching both of those scenes. I think that one of the best parts of friendship is like sitting in bed when one of you or both of you is hurting and finding solace in that.
S3: And not only are the relationships portrayed well on screen, but like I think both shows really capture the magic of having someone else who’s like, witnessed you and your trauma over time. That’s like one of the most beautiful parts of friendship. Just having someone who understands your past without you having to explain it to them. And both of these shows explore that in particular in a way that’s pretty heartwarming. I ultimately think that both of these shows just really nail this sort of like tender, deeply intimate scenes that that show, you know, women showing up for their friends and like really sweet and tender ways. I think that that’s sort of like the most realistic thing, perhaps the only realistic and relatable thing about sex in the city, whose aesthetics kind of, like most people, kind of find to be taking place in another universe. And it’s the thing that makes Yellowjackets relatable, even though obviously the characters in that are going through some really insane circumstances.
S2: You didn’t get stuck in the wilderness, in high school on your way to some
S3: knock on wood, man, knock on wood. Before we head out, we want to give some recommendations. Shannon, what are you living right now?
S2: I am going to try and recommend two things this week. One is a yoga mat from Lululemon. It is $78. I bought it at the very beginning of the pandemic because they didn’t have a yoga mat, and I figured we were going to be stuck at home for a few weeks and should get one. This yoga mat is the greatest yoga mat I’ve ever owned and probably the greatest yoga mat I’ve ever used. It’s really, really thick. One side is squishy. I never use that. The other side is really, really grippy, and sliding around is a problem I often have with yoga mats. The best thing about this yoga mat, though, is that. It’s just one of those things where, like 78 dollars is a lot of money for a yoga mat, but it’s kind of satisfying that for seventy eight dollars you can get like the vest top of the line yoga mat that exists unlike other categories of things. The luxury version is a little bit in reach, more so than it would be for to use an example appropriate to this episode like high heeled shoes. And I just continue to be really happy that I spent money on it almost two years ago now. The other thing that I’m going to recommend, which might be a little bit more of a PSA, is if you’re a rapid testing yourself for coronavirus, swab the back of your throat as well as your nose. I wrote about this for Slate last week about how we’re doing throat swabs now. If you want all the caveats to that recommendation, you can check out the piece. But I have heard from multiple people since publishing the piece that they caught their Covid infections by by trying that method.
S3: Love it very well. May be swabbing my throat in the near future. My recommendation is an album of music. It’s called Urban Driftwoods by Yasmin Williams. It’s one of those albums that I did not know existed until sort of like a year end. Best of 2021 lists and roundups. And yeah, it’s just one of those ones. I was like, That seems good. Maybe I’ll catch up with it. And it turns out to be just like this beautiful lyric list, but very melodic guitar album Yasmin Williams is like a really innovative guitar player. She seems to use some styles that I cannot identify but are really cool. And yeah, it’s just a lovely, lush forty five minutes of music. It’s like no lyrics, so it’s good to throw on while you’re maybe working or, you know, doing some yoga on your new Lululemon mat. But it holds an urgency that lots of sort of like lyric lists or ambient music maybe does not. And of course, I recommend that you buy the album on Bandcamp, if you can do that.
S2: That’s our show this week. The Waves is produced by Shaner Roth
S3: Susan Matthews and Shannon Palus, our editorial directors, with Joon Thomas providing oversight and moral support.
S2: We love to hear from you. Email us at The Waves at Slate.com.
S3: The waves will be back next week. Different hosts. Different topics. Same time and place.
S2: Thank you so much for being on Slate Plus member and sense, you remember you get this weekly segment, is this feminist? Every week we debate whether something is feminist, and this week we’re talking about, is Carrie Bradshaw an anti-hero and is that feminist Asha? What do you think?
S3: I think my answer is pretty straightforward. In the original series, she is an anti-hero, and it’s not particularly feminist. She’s an anti-hero. She does some bad stuff, and we love and empathize with her anyway. And that’s like the, you know, the central like driving force of the show. But yeah, I don’t see it as feminists. Like, I guess, in the late 90s around the turn of the 2000s. One thing that was operating within the bounds of feminism about sex in the City at the time was sort of the group’s relationship to sex. I don’t think Carrie, the character was a particular driver of like the cutting edge of that relationship to sex. She was very, you know, traditional somewhat in the way that she dated and operated in her dating and sex life. The way that I think about the feminist project now is to improve the material conditions of women who are marginalized in some way. And I think under that definition, Carrie as an anti-hero is like an actively anti-feminist text, almost.
S2: She’s kind of a feminist in the sense of like Girlboss feminism, revolutionary and progressive in some ways. Well, to extend that, like being a 30 something year old woman and living alone and having a successful career and being able to buy those shoes is maybe against the norm of settling down and having kids and spending money on like laundry detergent and Disneyland vacations. But it’s such a narrow, it’s an insanely narrow definition of what success looks like and what having it all looks like. I tend to think of her as feminist. I think I might be over indexing an early episode, or it might have even been the pilot in which she is like, I’m going to have sex like a man, and she goes out and hooks up with a guy I think who she’s hooked up with before and he goes down on her and then is like, OK, my turn. And she is just like, No, see you next time. That’s OK. And I always think of that scene as being feminist, but. But you’re right, it is like very different from what feminism looks like as a collective project.
S3: Totally. And to me, like the whole Girlboss feminism thing, and that scene in particular is so indicative of this like way that people maybe thought about feminism and in between waves, where the yeah, the the aim was to live like a man, and the aim was to have, you know, gender equality. But I think now the way I think about that is like, of course, the world that we’re working for isn’t one where women behave like men because men have treated people like shit since the beginning of time. Like, yeah, I see how in the sort of like late nineties turn of the 2000s view of feminism that was like supposed to be feminists, and to be sure, like the Girlboss feminism wave and the way that Kerry and her friends behaved in particular is like what feminists were were working for in the decades before that. Like, that’s what maybe certain feminists, especially, you know, white feminists dreamed of. But in the end, to me, it turns out to basically have nothing to do with feminism so much as being a woman who gets what you want.
S2: Refusing to make your partner come as like some kind of payback for previous experiences. Well, maybe that’s gratifying on a personal level in some scenarios, but that doesn’t seem to contribute to outing kind of broader project. I actually want to like very briefly mount a tiny bit of a defence and say that I think that Carrie Bradshaw has gotten progressively less feminist throughout the movies, especially. I think that if you go back and look at those early seasons, there are. Some things to recommend about that worldview, even if it’s just like, you know, maybe like, look out for yourself sometimes.
S3: I see what you mean. I do think the initial undertaking of sex and the City had a lot more to do with feminism. Even if it wasn’t like an explicitly political text, then it ended up having by the end, you know, it was the like the man on the street camera style. It was like sort of looking at like, here’s what women are going through right now, which has more to do with feminism than, you know, the end of the series, which is like rich women in their rich friends going on nice vacations. So, yeah, right?
S2: Do you think the initial premise of the show of like a 30 something year old single woman like living life on her terms? That’s not inherently not feminist?
S3: Yeah, honestly, the thing that drew me to the Sex and the City universe was exactly what you’re talking about. I was like, Wait there 30 to like, I got to watch this show. So, yeah.
S2: Yes. And I think like I, I have a friend who she would always be like, Well, you know, Carrie was 32 when Sex in the City started. This is when we were a little bit younger. But like, you know, in your 20s and you’re like, single on your own and you see other people, maybe in your family or your friends circle or whatever, settling down and getting married. And then it’s like, Oh, well, Kerry is 32 and she’s single and she’s doing great. So on a personal level, it’s it can act as an antidote, at least.
S3: So final verdict Carrie is an anti-hero. Carrie is being an anti-hero is not particularly feminist. There are some ways that sex in the city. The series speaks to feminism, but it’s definitely not a home run.
S2: Are you dying to know if something is feminist or not? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at The Waves at Slate.com.
