Let's take a closer look at these end-of-the-decade claims, shall we? Long's argument is short and simple: "Stuck between the greater promise of true love and the immediate practicality of settling down, Carrie’s choices were somehow our choices," she continues, "For 10 long years, Carrie couldn’t decide, and we couldn’t decide, so we all went shopping." That's all she wrote on that front: Carrie Bradshaw inspired women to shop the pain away; dilemmas about relationships and starting a family were tossed in the trash alongside a mountain of credit card bills.

However, Wolf wrestles with actual issues -- of course. She's a feminist icon in her own right and an enigmatic writer who is sometimes brilliant and sometimes a little cuckoo. In setting up her argument, she writes in the Guardian: "So why am I so sure that Carrie Bradshaw ... is an icon and did as much to shift the culture around certain women's issues as real-life feminist groundbreakers?" It's easy enough in first reading that line to drop the word "certain" and think with a gasp, She's saying that Manolo-collecting fashionista did more for women's issues than actual feminist activists? In truth, though, she's arguing that Bradshaw, and "SATC" in general, shifted the cultural landscape in some very particular and noteworthy ways -- something that has been observed without controversy many times before -- but, sure, she got my attention.

She goes on to herald Candace Bushnell, the author of the New York Observer column that inspired the show -- which makes you wonder why she didn't declare her, the real-life Carrie, an icon of the decade:

Bushnell was brave enough to lay bare the secret -- that for many women the search for love is the same urgent, central, archetypal quest story that for men is played out in war narratives and adventure tales. Bushnell was gutsy enough to disclose that even we serious, accomplished, feminist women spend a lot of time, when we are alone with our female friends, telling stories centered on the men with whom we are romantically entangled, exploring the quality of the love and attraction, the romance and the sex.

It's true, many women are deeply dedicated to ruminating on their romances and charting the emotional vicissitudes of life with their female friends. This is supposed to be the fluff of the "chick lit" aisle, but "SATC" made it seem smart, relevant and less shameful. "She was a writer who arrived in the big city to test her mettle and realise her voice," Wolf argues. "Male writers have structured stories around exactly this character from F Scott Fitzgerald to JD Salinger to Philip Roth; but Carrie showed audiences week after week that a lively female consciousness was as interesting as female sexuality or motherhood or martyrdom -- the tradition(al) role model options." I agree on all these points when they're stated moderately. Carrie Bradshaw isn't the feminist heroine of the decade, but did her character have a tremendous cultural impact? Absolutely.

I initially came to Wolf's argument with an oversized handbag full of caution, because it was just in May that she skewered today's "lifestyle" feminism. She wrote somewhat mockingly of the revolution (of which that fashionable HBO quartet is a large part) that brought about "a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland." Wolf also observed: "That very individualism, which has been great for feminism's rebranding, is also its weakness: It can be fun and frisky, but too often, it's ahistorical and apolitical." The article ended with this kicker: "Feminists are in danger if we don't know our history, and a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make."

Odd that she would exalt the star of the "SATC" franchise as a female heroine of the decade just half a year after criticizing the very same brand of fluffy feminism for overshadowing politics, no? Wolf wants more balance for today's young feminists, but she seems to be  having a hard time personally striking that balance herself -- and aren't we all! It's tough reconciling contradictions between your political beliefs and personal life, and that's what so much of "Sex and the City" explored -- maybe not from an explicitly feminist perspective but certainly a feminist-influenced one. The show made great stilettoed strides for women, but feminism sure paved the way.

Now, I'm a fan of both Crystal Renn and baby steps in the right direction, but "any figure"? "No size limit"? Really? As Broadsheet's Mary Elizabeth Williams observed, "They're like two inches different." Her nine-year-old daughter Lucy, reading over Mom's shoulder, spoke for every average woman I know: "That makes the fashion part of my mind hurt."

But the fashion parts of our minds have little to do with what goes on in fashion professionals' minds. I got Barry -- usually a pretty darn good advocate for real body acceptance and diversity -- on the phone to ask if he seriously thinks this is all that revolutionary. Because as far as I can tell, high fashion still has a size limit -- to wit, a tall, well-proportioned U.S. 12 -- and even that's still more gimmick than game-changer. 

But then, in the same industry where the 5-foot-9 Renn was pronounced "too heavy" at 98 pounds, the 165-pound version of her really is a tremendous departure from the norm -- and indeed, that's what Barry was getting at with his post. "I do see what you see," he laughs, but he reminds me that we're talking about the "fashion funhouse" here. "When real people who aren't in the industry talk about it, they have to, like, jump into a funhouse and realize they're entering a completely distorted world.

"What's revolutionary is the fact that they would even have a stylist dress a size 12-14 model and include her in this." That Renn is not only wearing the same designers and revealing cuts but the same striking colors and bold accessories as Jablonski is what makes him cautiously optimistic. "The argument is always that certain looks appear better on certain bodies, so they can only put a size 2 in a high fashion spread, because it 'looks better.'" Plus models, on the other hand -- and in the fashion funhouse, that means anyone wearing size 6 or above -- are usually dressed in "safe" -- i.e., "boring" -- clothes. Furthermore, as he noted in the blog post, V magazine "is at the top of the high fashion pyramid"; it's one thing for Glamour to toss its average-Jane readers some slightly larger models, but quite another for an industry leader to do so. "'Real' people are years ahead of the fashion industry, so much more advanced in their thinking and what they want to see," said Barry.

Which might explain why, when "real" people look at this ostensibly groundbreaking spread, we actually don't see two wildly different body types. As my friend Jess put it, "Renn just looks like the pre-Photoshop version of the other one" (a line that made Barry guffaw when I relayed it). Jess added that she'd recently watched a tutorial on using Photoshop's "Liquify" tool, and she was pretty sure she could slim Renn down to Jablonski's size, and vice versa, without much effort. Behold the results:

Jess wanted me to stress that she's an amateur who wasn't aiming for perfection and only spent about 10 minutes manipulating the images -- which just underscores how much could be done by a professional taking his or her time. And that, says Barry, is what's really troubling about the V spread, and high fashion images in general -- because of course both Renn and Jablonski have already been retouched in the original photos. "Even the model who's a size 2, she doesn't even look like that," he points out. "We're still terrified to show love handles, cellulite, wrinkles. It's still artifice over authenticity, all in the name of 'art' -- that's always the argument." Those of us who think making a woman's head wider than her hips is something other than an expression of artistic genius are just philistines with no visual sense, evidently.

So yes, this side-by-side spread is a big deal in the fashion world, but that only proves how utterly divorced it still is from the real world. Jezebel's Jenna, a model herself, recently wrote about the busty but otherwise "highly typical (for a straight-size model)" Lara Stone: "The fact that she is seen as a different kind of model for her size is the ultimate indictment of the fashion industry's standards." From where my size 16-18 ass is sitting, the same is true of Crystal Renn -- but then, I don't live in the funhouse. Says Jenna, "Yes, plus-size models are still models, and the fashion industry still makes its money presenting women with images to aspire to that are, for most, unattainable and unrealistic. But if we can change the parameters of the beauty standard even just enough to accommodate tall, enviably proportioned young women who don't have 23-inch waists, then I'd still call that progress of a kind."

Daily, it seems, there's a new "wardrobe malfunction" and an eager paparazzi waiting to catch it. The nip slip – like its kin, the upskirt – seems at once childishly tame and desperately vulgar, residing in the split personality sexual terrain of "Oh my God, I saw a lady part!" and "Hello, I'm a creep with a camera and zoom lens."

If you are a woman of any standing in the world and you have ever experienced the combination of a low-cut top and a gust of wind, your nips are out there for the world to wank to. Scarlet Johansson. J.K. Rowling. Lily Allen. Lady Gaga. Ashley Tisdale. Rachael Ray. Ashlee Simpson. Uma Thurman. Elizabeth Hasselbeck. You know what they all have in common? NIPPLES! Nipples which in certain circumstances have perhaps experienced FRESH AIR! And whose existence has been rigorously confirmed. When earlier this month, seventeen-year-old Miley Cyrus and her bikini top briefly parted ways, the Internet practically imploded. And nearly six years after Janet Jackson's aureola-flaunting Super Bowl performance, not only are people arguing about the trauma of it all, but the American legal system is still figuring out what it all meant. (Bonus points if you can remember which teams were even playing.)

Nobody needs to convince me that boobs are awesome. Nor would I argue that deshabille can't be more exciting than full on nudity. And yet, when there are  blown up images of the nanosecond that an extra centimeter of Beyonce's hooters escaped the constraints of her dance gear (yes, they're out there, and no, I'm not going to help you find them) out there, I have to wonder – why? When Kate Hudson's  and Natalie Portman's near nip slips actually make headlines – when the mere possibility of the exposure of that special area is breathlessly reported, photographed, and analyzed, I must ask, what could possibly be so revelatory under those designer duds? Priceless rubies? Weapons of mass destruction? The lost gold of El Dorado? Dark matter? They're lovely and sexy and all, but seriously – they're nipples. Men show them off all the time and it almost never makes the news.

So while the rumor of a sidelong glimpse of Catherine Zeta-Jones's breasts is kind of silly, and the fact that her publicity team even bothered to tamp it down is equally amusing -- enough already. Because I can guarantee without even seeing them that I know exactly what's under Ms. Zeta-Jones's kimono. They may come in different shapes and sizes and gravitational pulls than mine or yours, but they're the same things that are under everybody else's.

The reaction to her first night was likewise generally subdued. "The Baltimore Sun's" critic David Zurawik noted Sawyer's "poise" and "strong presence," while the notoriously error-prone "New York Times'" Alessandra Stanley praised Sawyer's "twinkly warmth,"  which is like praising Oprah Winfrey's for her restraint. And across the Web this morning, little has been made of the new anchor's gender – perhaps because her credentials and performance speak for themselves.

But in "The Washington Post," the stalwart Tom Shales couldn't hold back, getting right to business in the first sentence. "Ideally, the gorgeousness of Diane Sawyer should not be a factor in assessing her performance," he wrote, which is a dead giveaway to what's coming next. Shales then continued to dance around our "leading lady's looks" under the pretense of commenting on the show's numerous close-ups of her. Yet it seems a journalistic stretch to note Sawyer's lack of a brand new set by saying, "even Cleopatra needed a barge." He then went on to compare the graciousness of Ms. Sawyer to that of Grace Kelly, Meryl Streep and Cary Grant. And when he suggested that ABC 's cameras could confidently pull back from their "wonder woman," he explained Sawyer can "hold us captive without seeming to sit in our veritable laps." Still, based on his slavish, get-a-room-already appreciation, we can't help suspecting that Shales would be quite content with the former beauty queen on his lap, whispering sweet headlines.