Anti-Climacus

LINK: TNR on the Fabulousness that is Sex and the City. Surprisingly, rather than being simply a killjoy as far as the show goes, the author manages to insinuate... well... read it for yourself:

"Now, a part of the reason for the show's portrayal of women seeking sex for sex's sake is that the series' two creators, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, are gay. On this level, Sex and the City is part of a long imaginative streak in popular art, a trend that includes Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart and George Cukor and Rock Hudson and most of the writers of the 1970s series Bewitched and many other gay figures whose portrayals of heterosexual life brilliantly subverted heterosexual conventions even as they were providing models for (unwitting) straight boys and girls. But there is a quality to Sex and the City's subversions that is more bitter than playful, an element that is almost vindictive.

Running through Sex and the City is a subtext that amounts to a manifesto for a certain kind of raw, rough, promiscuous, anonymous gay male sex. Star and King sounded the call to arms in one of the very first episodes, when they had Stanford Blatch, Carrie's loyal gay friend, declare that "the only place where you can find love is the gay community. It's straight love that's closeted." A few seasons later, the women sit around watching gay-male porn films. "That's the way to do it," says Samantha, "no 'I love you'--just good old-fashioned fucking." Nobody contradicts her. One of the most recent of the half-hour-long episodes had the women finding happiness for a full ten minutes in a gay men's dance club. A segment this past season sent Carrie and Samantha, both blondes, on a train across the country, joking all the way about Some Like It Hot. Some of the quartet's boyfriends in the show's first two seasons actually wore their sweaters tucked into their pants; and if the actors playing these straight guys weren't gay, I'm Montgomery Clift. Sex and the City's ongoing impersonation is admirably resourceful and daring. But the show's misogyny is not admirable at all."