Those dirty girls

Did "Sex and the City" change the erotic landscape or turn the female libido into a marketing ploy? Sex writers discuss the iconic show's impact.

By Susannah Breslin

Read more: Sex, Feminism, Erotica, Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker, Salon Sex, Life

Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis in "Sex and the City"

May 30, 2008 | A decade ago, "Sex and the City" debuted and forever changed the sexual landscape for women -- or so it seemed. Unprecedented frank talk about vibrators, orgasms and blow jobs turned the HBO show into a high-profile symbol of the supposedly sexually emancipated 21st century woman. According to "Sex and the City" mythology, women are more sexually empowered than ever. But are we, really? I've been writing about sex for more than a decade, both in print and online, and when I hear about women flocking to Manhattan in droves to drink cosmos, take $130-a-head tours of the show's hotspots and see the film version of "Sex and the City," which opens Friday, I can't help wondering if I need a T-shirt that reads: "I Survived the 21st Century Sexual Revolution and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt That Says 'Porn Star' on It." Without a doubt, "Sex and the City" has made an impact, but what exactly is it? I asked five female sex writers -- from erotic pioneers like Susie Bright to brave new upstarts -- how they feel about the show.

These days, you can't swing a vibrator without hitting a college sex columnist -- that's one way you can see the influence of Carrie Bradshaw, "SATC's" kicky heroine (based on New York Observer writer Candace Bushnell). Perhaps the most prominent is Sex and the Ivy's Lena Chen, a 20-year-old Harvard junior and sociology major who has blogged about her sex life with an explicitness that would make prim Charlotte York projectile-vomit onto her Prada pumps. Recently, the New York Times declared Star magazine editor at large, fame-seeker and general goody-two-shoes Julia Allison the new Carrie Bradshaw. But it's women like Chen, with their hardcore approach to covering sex without self-censoring, who aren't just the New Carries -- they're going where Carrie feared to tread.

When "Sex and the City" originally aired, Chen was 10. Suffice to say, she didn't watch it. What was once revolutionary for women to witness on TV-- women speaking graphically about their sex lives in (gasp!) public -- elicits shoulder shrugs from Chen and her peers. For these young women, "Sex and the City's" take on sex is, like, so passé. The episode where Samantha takes a female lover? Yawn. "A lot of my girlfriends would have already done [that] in college," Chen says, sounding horrified at the prospect, "not in their 30s." On another blog that she created, The Ch!cktionary, Chen posted a photo of herself with an unidentified male's money shot smeared all over her face. Carrie wouldn't take that lying down -- or, for that matter, standing up.

Female sex writers in a post-"SATC" world have found their perfect mates in the Internet, which enables them to publish whatever they want, whenever they want. These women are unabashed, unashamed, unrepentant and winning over male and female readers by talking about real sex -- not the prettified fantasy of it as seen on "Sex and the City." One such writer is Tracie Egan, a 29-year-old who goes by the unsubtle moniker "Slut Machine" on Gawker Media's popular site for women, Jezebel. Egan says that, once upon a time, "Sex and the City" "seemed like the personification of the things that I was thinking about." Today, what strikes Egan about the show is that it has "some really old-fashioned views about sex." She references a recent article that compared the foursome's husband hunting with that of Jane Austen heroines and says, "Carrie's columns were about relationships and head games. It wasn't about straight-up sex." Watching a recent episode of "Oprah" with an audience of screaming "Sex and the City" fans, Egan wondered just how sexually emancipated these Middle American women were.

Egan, a self-described feminist, has a provocative blog, One D at a Time, that features personal zipless-fuck tales, including one in which she recounts in explicit detail having sex with a guy who has a crooked penis in a post titled: "Got My Swerve on With a Curved One." In "Pot Psychology," a video series that she co-hosts on Jezebel, Egan offers advice -- "How Do I Convince a Guy to Have Period Sex?" is the latest episode -- alongside blogger Rich Juzwiak; they film the videos while both are stoned. Frequently, what Egan writes "is about the grosser aspects of sex." Not just those "Sex and the City" water cooler moments, like the time Carrie farted in bed, but dirtier, more explicit things. Take, for example, the one-night stand she had at a porn convention in Vegas. ("My goal for the evening was to bang a porn star, and unfortch, that didn't happen," her story begins. Instead, she ends up having sex with a nominee for best music in a porn movie.) What women need, Egan stresses, is the truth -- not the polite version of sex we see (or mostly don't see) on TV. "Women still don't talk enough or openly enough about sex, when it comes to what they want, or their desires, and I feel like women need to discuss that more." If they don't, Egan says, women are doomed to sexual devolution: "You'll never be a sexual subject, and you'll always be a sexual object."

But in many ways, "Sex and the City" wasn't really about sex at all. It was about a lifestyle: the shoes, the clothes, the parties. It was about relationships: Will Samantha ever commit? Will Carrie marry Mr. Big? In Egan's opinion, the real message of "Sex and the City" was about money. "I feel like Carrie's spending habits are so much more dangerous than her sex habits. A bad credit history is more dangerous than herpes," she says.

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