[PREVIEW] 'Sex And The City' Revisited: Season 1

As 2021 winds to a miserable conclusion — a couple highlights: a new Covid variant, Supreme Court hearings over a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse — we found our thoughts turning inexorably back to a simpler time (in the sense that we were, personally, ten years old). After a long day of catching up on the latest soul-crushing news and trying to find toddler-sized N95 masks, we craved the sweet escape of Cosmopolitans and Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals. And rather than wait for the upcoming, Samantha-free series “And Just Like That…”, we decided to indulge in a rewatch — and a journey back in time.The year: 1998. The show: “Sex and the City,” HBO’s hottest new sex-com. The reviews: decidedly mixed. When the escapades of Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, Samantha Jones, and Charlotte York debuted that year, it wasn’t foreordained that it would become a juggernaut that would revitalize HBO and profoundly influence the way a generation of (predominantly white, affluent) women would think about sex, shoes, being a writer, and New York City. But ohhh, it did. In this episode, we talk about how season one of the show worked — the blunt diagnoses of different types of single men, single women, married couples, and moms; the endless debates among the foursome about how single, professional women in their 30s could and should navigate a world full of toxic men; the flawed yet charming women whose misadventures we follow — and how it hits us now, over 20 years after it first aired. Hope you enjoy! xoGive a gift subscriptionAction items…For obvious reasons, we’ve been spending the last week thinking a lot about reproductive justice, and the way that this country exhibits a fundamental lack of care, even an outright hatred, towards women and other people with uteruses. We fetishize motherhood, but do not support mothers. We force birth, but do not let the people doing the birthing heal afterwards or support children once they have been born. We are so fucking tired, and we bet you are too. If you have some extra money this holiday season, consider giving to one of these amazing organizations doing the work to keep abortion care safe, accessible and legal:Indigenous Women RisingNational Network of Abortion FundsShout Your AbortionAid AccessMississippi Reproductive Freedom FundFund Texas ChoiceWe’ve been watching…Netflix’s entire holiday romcom slate, for… reasons. Thumbs up to “Single All the Way,” thumbs down to almost everything else, as of this writing. -ClaireI’ve been binging terrible made-for-TV holiday movies across Netflix, Lifetime and Hallmark for ~research~ and I think my brain has officially turned into red and green holiday cheer mush. Brb while I move to a small town named Snow Globe in order to reconnect with my elementary school boyfriend and rediscover the meaning of Christmas/ the value of a successful, small, family-owned business. -EmmaWe’ve been reading…A deeply moving piece in Airmail by Bill Adair (initially with the rather mean headline “Stephen Glass’s Biggest Lie,” now apparently changed to “Loving Lies”) about the disgraced ex-journalist Stephen Glass who lost his New Republic gig after fabricating splashy scoops. In the 20 years since then, Glass has rebuilt his life outside of media — going to law school, finding a new career, and scrupulously trying to make amends — only to find himself in the midst of a slowly unfolding tragedy that required him to deny reality again. Also, author Merritt Tierce’s searingly honest, generous essay in the New York Times Magazine about the abortion she didn’t have at 19, the son she gave birth to too young, and the tangled knot of regret and love that has lived inside her ever since. Her story celebrates the profound love she has for her son and the joy he’s brought her, but it doesn’t flinch away from exploring precisely how his unplanned birth destroyed the life she had dreamed for herself and left him with a mother who, she argues, wasn’t ready to be the parent he deserved. At a moment when the Supreme Court is weighing a woman’s right to an abortion, and looks almost certain to take it away, the conservative justices and amicus briefs seem to be presenting various formulations of “women don’t need abortions now that they can easily give up their babies for adoption, or now that there are more policies to help them continue their careers after starting a family, etc. etc. etc.” Essays like Tierce’s, and Elizabeth Spiers’s heartbreaking piece on the trauma left behind when women see no choice but to give up a child for adoption, put the lie to such facile, callous arguments. Horrifyingly, our Supreme Court, and the conservative movement, aren’t listening. But the rest of us should be. -ClaireI also read Tierce and Spiers’s essays, and I can’t say it better than Claire just did. -EmmaWe’ve been listening to…“Gone South,” a Cadence13 podcast about the 1987 murder of prosecutor Margaret Coon. It starts like a more run-of-the-mill true crime podcast, but ends up going into the history of the LGBTQ+ community in Louisiana, and the systematic failures of law enforcement. -EmmaWe’ve been buying…A washable rug to put under our kitchen/dining table! My cat used to claw up carpet in chunks, so we went pretty much rug-free for years. But I was sick of the table and chairs sliding around on our bare wood floors, and how unfinished the whole apartment looked, so we finally sprung for a Ruggable. It’s incredible how much more like a “room” our dining area now looks, and how much more homey our apartment feels. Rugs: has everyone heard about these? -ClaireI finally caved and ordered a Dyson vacuum after finding a V8 Fluffy Cordless model on major Black Friday sale. I look forward to gleefully sucking up all the dust off of my floor and other surfaces in my apartment. -Emma