(Disclaimer: this is not an attack on anyone's fandom of SATC! It's just a goof on one of the weirder episodes)
Before we start, it’s important to remember, because it’s easy to forget, that THE CHARACTER OF CARRIE BRADSAW GETS PAID TO WRITE A SEX ADVICE COLUMN FOR A HIGH-PROFILE NEWSPAPER THAT IS SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH TO BE ADVERTIZED ON THE SIDE OF AN ALBEIT ERRATICALLY-DRIVEN MANHATTAN BUS.
Yes, it’s an obvious point, but given some of the things she does and says in this episode, it’s worth keeping in mind.
We open on our heroines at a Charlotte-curated gallery exhibition of photos of drag kings. Miranda’s mind is B-LOWN. “Seriously? THAT’S a WOMAN?!?” she says, like she’s just seen a dinosaur on a unicycle and not just, er, a woman wearing a suit with a sock down the front of the trousers. Samantha says, knowingly, that women dressing up in men’s clothing is “very popular” “these days”. She’s in fashion PR, you guys, she would know these things.
Gay sidekick Stanford (played by the late and straight actor Willie Garson I KNOW RIGHT) chirps up, taking a lighthearted liking to a Western-themed photo: “I always had a thing for cowboys.” Carrie, accessorizing tonight with a heteronormative Fendi wet blanket, immediately reminds Stanford of his immovable homosexuality. “Remember, John Wayne’s a Jane!” she gleefully announces at Stanford, stamping what low levels of fun he might be having right into the dust.
The Artist, Baird (really?), arrives and announces his vision: “Gender’s an illusion...sometimes a very beautiful illusion.” He says this last bit with a leer as he blatantly glad-eyes Charlotte, who is so virginally flummoxed by this idea that she runs away to hide behind a canape.
Carrie (age unknown?) remembers that she has a date, the group making fun of the fact that she is seeing (the horror) a 26 year old. Carrie meets this ‘youth’, Sean, at a skating rink, a late night one that’s open and busy even after an evening reception at the gallery. The camera closes in on Carrie and she is SMOKING A CIGARETTE on the ice. New York was LAWLESS back then. They skate, the lit cigarette never leaving Carrie’s hand.
As they take off their skates afterwards, Sean reasonably asks, “When was your last serious relationship?” Carrie, the unshockable, no-holds-barred professional sex columnist, balks, and ducks the question, sending the query right back.
Sean: Before you there was Caitlin, then Lesley, then Mark
CARRIE BALKS EVEN HARDER
Sean: Is that a problem?
Carrie doesn’t answer and pretends to fiddle with her skates.
Before we start, it’s important to remember, because it’s easy to forget, that THE CHARACTER OF CARRIE BRADSAW GETS PAID TO WRITE A SEX ADVICE COLUMN FOR A HIGH-PROFILE NEWSPAPER THAT IS SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH TO BE ADVERTIZED ON THE SIDE OF AN ALBEIT ERRATICALLY-DRIVEN MANHATTAN BUS.
Yes, it’s an obvious point, but given some of the things she does and says in this episode, it’s worth keeping in mind.
We open on our heroines at a Charlotte-curated gallery exhibition of photos of drag kings. Miranda’s mind is B-LOWN. “Seriously? THAT’S a WOMAN?!?” she says, like she’s just seen a dinosaur on a unicycle and not just, er, a woman wearing a suit with a sock down the front of the trousers. Samantha says, knowingly, that women dressing up in men’s clothing is “very popular” “these days”. She’s in fashion PR, you guys, she would know these things.
Gay sidekick Stanford (played by the late and straight actor Willie Garson I KNOW RIGHT) chirps up, taking a lighthearted liking to a Western-themed photo: “I always had a thing for cowboys.” Carrie, accessorizing tonight with a heteronormative Fendi wet blanket, immediately reminds Stanford of his immovable homosexuality. “Remember, John Wayne’s a Jane!” she gleefully announces at Stanford, stamping what low levels of fun he might be having right into the dust.
The Artist, Baird (really?), arrives and announces his vision: “Gender’s an illusion...sometimes a very beautiful illusion.” He says this last bit with a leer as he blatantly glad-eyes Charlotte, who is so virginally flummoxed by this idea that she runs away to hide behind a canape.
Carrie (age unknown?) remembers that she has a date, the group making fun of the fact that she is seeing (the horror) a 26 year old. Carrie meets this ‘youth’, Sean, at a skating rink, a late night one that’s open and busy even after an evening reception at the gallery. The camera closes in on Carrie and she is SMOKING A CIGARETTE on the ice. New York was LAWLESS back then. They skate, the lit cigarette never leaving Carrie’s hand.
As they take off their skates afterwards, Sean reasonably asks, “When was your last serious relationship?” Carrie, the unshockable, no-holds-barred professional sex columnist, balks, and ducks the question, sending the query right back.
Sean: Before you there was Caitlin, then Lesley, then Mark
CARRIE BALKS EVEN HARDER
Sean: Is that a problem?
Carrie doesn’t answer and pretends to fiddle with her skates.
Triple axel, with cigarette
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Really gettin' to thinkin'
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CUT TO:
Carrie in a diner with the three other friends, loudly announcing to the table with no small amount of indignation: HE’S A BISEXUAL.
Nice casual othering with “a” bisexual. He’s not bisexual, he’s “a” bisexual. One of those fabled, mysterious folk. Like a leprechaun, or a Gideon.
“The weird thing was that he was so open about it,” says Carrie, a professional sex columnist. Oh that’s the weird thing? More weird than smoking on an ice rink? Ok, Josephine Camel. She continues, aghast but with a sarcastic tone, “Like, hi, I’m a bisexual. Like, hi, I’m from Colorado.”
This is blatantly untrue. They had obviously met before, and the information came out in the context of talking about relationships. In any case, the entire situation is generally agreed to be problematic by the brunch bunch, apart from Samantha, who declares with another knowing, raised eyebrow and a smirk that “all the kids are going bi” (another PR industry insight!) as a set up for making a tri/try sexual joke that is so tired it needs a vitamin shot (yes, I know “going bi” is problematic, but we don’t have time, there’s far worse to get to).
Carrie, a professional sex columnist, then lobs this grenade of incoherence into the room, blurting it out so loud that the kitchen can hear: “WHEN DID THE SEXES GET ALL CONFUSED?” Did “The Sexes” (a total of two are implied) get “all” confused, Carrie? Maybe it’s just you who is confused? Which, again, is incredibly worrying given your profession.
The gang decide that bi men and bi women “all end up with men” eventually, before Charlotte moans that “that’s why there are no men left for us,” despite them all getting through dozens of men every single season. Four men are slept with in this episode alone.
Carrie - head in hands in the middle of the diner - is now despairing, her world in pieces, just flailing at ideas: “I’m not sure bisexuality even exists” followed immediately by the endlessly insulting theory that “It’s a layover on the way to gay town”.
This is an astonishing analysis from a professional sex columist who gives weekly advice to the diverse denizens of a major metropolis. This is the summary from someone who has had years of being paid to wrestle with people’s most intimate problems. Remind me, just where is “Gaytown” on the Kinsey scale?
Miranda, played by queer actor Cynthia Nixon, makes a cheap jibe about somewhere called Ricky Martin-ville and rebukes Samantha’s Hiltonian theory that “It’s hot” by saying, “It’s not hot, it’s greedy.” Charlotte chimes in with the terrifyingly authoritarian “I’m very into labels, pick a side and stay there!” and Miranda, played by queer actor Cynthia Nixon, delivers the death blow to Carrie with a stark: “Stop kissing him.”
Aaaaaaand scene.
In her apartment, smoking for inspiration, Carrie’s Big Question appears, just after she wonders if “sexual flipping” (a term she just made up? She IS a writer, after all) is “the way of the future”. Here comes the money shot, the central thrust of the episode typed large on her backy-stained Macbook. Buckle up, buttercup, because it’s a lot:
“If women can become men, and men can become women and we can choose to sleep with everyone, then maybe gender doesn’t exist any more. If we can take the best of the other sex and make it our own, has the opposite sex become obsolete?”
Hoooo, boy. Sexuality, gender, presentation, fluidity, sexuality being ‘a choice’ and preferences are just all one big ball of misunderstanding to professional sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw. And remember that this is all prompted by a conventionally attractive, normie-looking bi-bro who has had one boyfriend. God forbid, say, a queer woman in Charlie Chaplin garb made out with a non-binary human wearing a Britney Spears costume. I fear Carrie’s head would explode if she ever Got To Thinking about that.
Next follows a weird scene which isn’t relevant, but Samantha is on the phone to an employment agency looking for an assistant, and “Matt” (A Dumb Hunk) walks into her office, just randomly off the street presumably? Honestly, he and his jawline are just walking into buildings looking for work. Samantha snaps him up, sight very much seen but experience not factoring in.
Brooding Baird (really?) persuades Charlotte to pose as a man, but she’s reticent as she’s not “butch”, proving this by saying “I’m really bad at math and can’t change a tire to save my life,” the writers here really nailing down the essentials of masculine presentation.
Carrie in a diner with the three other friends, loudly announcing to the table with no small amount of indignation: HE’S A BISEXUAL.
Nice casual othering with “a” bisexual. He’s not bisexual, he’s “a” bisexual. One of those fabled, mysterious folk. Like a leprechaun, or a Gideon.
“The weird thing was that he was so open about it,” says Carrie, a professional sex columnist. Oh that’s the weird thing? More weird than smoking on an ice rink? Ok, Josephine Camel. She continues, aghast but with a sarcastic tone, “Like, hi, I’m a bisexual. Like, hi, I’m from Colorado.”
This is blatantly untrue. They had obviously met before, and the information came out in the context of talking about relationships. In any case, the entire situation is generally agreed to be problematic by the brunch bunch, apart from Samantha, who declares with another knowing, raised eyebrow and a smirk that “all the kids are going bi” (another PR industry insight!) as a set up for making a tri/try sexual joke that is so tired it needs a vitamin shot (yes, I know “going bi” is problematic, but we don’t have time, there’s far worse to get to).
Carrie, a professional sex columnist, then lobs this grenade of incoherence into the room, blurting it out so loud that the kitchen can hear: “WHEN DID THE SEXES GET ALL CONFUSED?” Did “The Sexes” (a total of two are implied) get “all” confused, Carrie? Maybe it’s just you who is confused? Which, again, is incredibly worrying given your profession.
The gang decide that bi men and bi women “all end up with men” eventually, before Charlotte moans that “that’s why there are no men left for us,” despite them all getting through dozens of men every single season. Four men are slept with in this episode alone.
Carrie - head in hands in the middle of the diner - is now despairing, her world in pieces, just flailing at ideas: “I’m not sure bisexuality even exists” followed immediately by the endlessly insulting theory that “It’s a layover on the way to gay town”.
This is an astonishing analysis from a professional sex columist who gives weekly advice to the diverse denizens of a major metropolis. This is the summary from someone who has had years of being paid to wrestle with people’s most intimate problems. Remind me, just where is “Gaytown” on the Kinsey scale?
Miranda, played by queer actor Cynthia Nixon, makes a cheap jibe about somewhere called Ricky Martin-ville and rebukes Samantha’s Hiltonian theory that “It’s hot” by saying, “It’s not hot, it’s greedy.” Charlotte chimes in with the terrifyingly authoritarian “I’m very into labels, pick a side and stay there!” and Miranda, played by queer actor Cynthia Nixon, delivers the death blow to Carrie with a stark: “Stop kissing him.”
Aaaaaaand scene.
In her apartment, smoking for inspiration, Carrie’s Big Question appears, just after she wonders if “sexual flipping” (a term she just made up? She IS a writer, after all) is “the way of the future”. Here comes the money shot, the central thrust of the episode typed large on her backy-stained Macbook. Buckle up, buttercup, because it’s a lot:
“If women can become men, and men can become women and we can choose to sleep with everyone, then maybe gender doesn’t exist any more. If we can take the best of the other sex and make it our own, has the opposite sex become obsolete?”
Hoooo, boy. Sexuality, gender, presentation, fluidity, sexuality being ‘a choice’ and preferences are just all one big ball of misunderstanding to professional sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw. And remember that this is all prompted by a conventionally attractive, normie-looking bi-bro who has had one boyfriend. God forbid, say, a queer woman in Charlie Chaplin garb made out with a non-binary human wearing a Britney Spears costume. I fear Carrie’s head would explode if she ever Got To Thinking about that.
Next follows a weird scene which isn’t relevant, but Samantha is on the phone to an employment agency looking for an assistant, and “Matt” (A Dumb Hunk) walks into her office, just randomly off the street presumably? Honestly, he and his jawline are just walking into buildings looking for work. Samantha snaps him up, sight very much seen but experience not factoring in.
Brooding Baird (really?) persuades Charlotte to pose as a man, but she’s reticent as she’s not “butch”, proving this by saying “I’m really bad at math and can’t change a tire to save my life,” the writers here really nailing down the essentials of masculine presentation.
Hold my beer
|
Just floored
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Carrie and Sean, meanwhile, are now at a nightclub called HAIR. Um. OK. They make out as a vehicle for some great Rolling Rock product placement, Carrie very carefully holding the label front and center as they smooch. Promotional money earned, Sean looks into the vague middle distance. Carrie, with all the tact of a careening dodgem, notices a couple and says, “OK mister, who are you checking out, the guy or the girl?”
Sean: I was looking for the bathroom.
He may well have been lying here, but still. Carrie is unconvinced and wants to talk about it A LOT. “This whole bisexual thing is throwing me for a loop,” the professional sex columnist says, just relentlessly confused at this point. “You’ve been with men, you’ve been with women...seriously, were you just looking at that guy?” Carrie is spiraling, her paranoia increasing by the second.
Sean: I’m with you, I dig you.
Carrie is now almost breathless with suspicion and demands further clarification. “So You’re NOT GAY?”
Sean: I’ve been in three major relationships, one of them happened to be a guy. That’s just me.
Carrie gives in. Voiceover: AN HOUR LATER, SEAN WAS IN MY BED, THAT’S JUST ME. What’s “just you” Carrie? Sleeping with a man deemed just heterosexual enough?
This scene is baffling, too. Sean is technically not IN her bed. Carrie HAS a bed - it’s been established as the main spot for her many journalistic epiphanies, but for some reason they have taken the sheets and pillows off the bed and put them on the hardwood floor to make a kind of floor bed next to the actual bed, that they then had sex in. The real bed is for 100% straight guys only! Anyway, this whole situation is much more confusing than anything about Sean’s sexuality.
Carrie, her needs unfulfilled by the floor railing, leans in and whispers, with all the romance she can muster, “Do I kiss better than a guy?”
Sean is a model of diplomacy despite this asinine, playground-level question: “Better than any I’ve kissed.”
This just spurs Carrie on. She comes up with a math-problem-like hypothetical. Seconds after they’ve had sex, mind you, such is her determination to get to the bottom of this. Maybe her deadline was the next morning. SPOT QUIZ! “So,” she says perkily, “If there was a really good looking guy walking towards you and across the street was a beautiful girl, which one would you…”
You get the feeling she was about to state how fast they were walking and the length of the hypotenuse, but Sean cuts off this obvious idiocy, and again displays impressive patience: “It’s not about the sex, it’s about the person.”
Sean then starts to compliment Carrie to sate her rampant insecurity/shut her the hell up, including the admittedly weird “I love the way your upper lip tastes”. Not her bottom lip, mind you, which has a totally different taste. Carrie concedes to the flattery and lets him hump her again “for the next two hours”, if anyone was wondering about temporal specifics.
Charlotte meanwhile is Baird’s reluctant muse and despite her unfettered femininity, dresses in a suit and a stick-on moustache and she likes it, and gets riled up and wants a bigger sock SHE SAID SOCK GET YOUR MINDS OUT OF THE GUTTER. They make out, but not before Baird takes off her moustache LIKE AN ABSOLUTE COWARD. Way to undermine your own artistic statement, “Baird”.
Sean: I was looking for the bathroom.
He may well have been lying here, but still. Carrie is unconvinced and wants to talk about it A LOT. “This whole bisexual thing is throwing me for a loop,” the professional sex columnist says, just relentlessly confused at this point. “You’ve been with men, you’ve been with women...seriously, were you just looking at that guy?” Carrie is spiraling, her paranoia increasing by the second.
Sean: I’m with you, I dig you.
Carrie is now almost breathless with suspicion and demands further clarification. “So You’re NOT GAY?”
Sean: I’ve been in three major relationships, one of them happened to be a guy. That’s just me.
Carrie gives in. Voiceover: AN HOUR LATER, SEAN WAS IN MY BED, THAT’S JUST ME. What’s “just you” Carrie? Sleeping with a man deemed just heterosexual enough?
This scene is baffling, too. Sean is technically not IN her bed. Carrie HAS a bed - it’s been established as the main spot for her many journalistic epiphanies, but for some reason they have taken the sheets and pillows off the bed and put them on the hardwood floor to make a kind of floor bed next to the actual bed, that they then had sex in. The real bed is for 100% straight guys only! Anyway, this whole situation is much more confusing than anything about Sean’s sexuality.
Carrie, her needs unfulfilled by the floor railing, leans in and whispers, with all the romance she can muster, “Do I kiss better than a guy?”
Sean is a model of diplomacy despite this asinine, playground-level question: “Better than any I’ve kissed.”
This just spurs Carrie on. She comes up with a math-problem-like hypothetical. Seconds after they’ve had sex, mind you, such is her determination to get to the bottom of this. Maybe her deadline was the next morning. SPOT QUIZ! “So,” she says perkily, “If there was a really good looking guy walking towards you and across the street was a beautiful girl, which one would you…”
You get the feeling she was about to state how fast they were walking and the length of the hypotenuse, but Sean cuts off this obvious idiocy, and again displays impressive patience: “It’s not about the sex, it’s about the person.”
Sean then starts to compliment Carrie to sate her rampant insecurity/shut her the hell up, including the admittedly weird “I love the way your upper lip tastes”. Not her bottom lip, mind you, which has a totally different taste. Carrie concedes to the flattery and lets him hump her again “for the next two hours”, if anyone was wondering about temporal specifics.
Charlotte meanwhile is Baird’s reluctant muse and despite her unfettered femininity, dresses in a suit and a stick-on moustache and she likes it, and gets riled up and wants a bigger sock SHE SAID SOCK GET YOUR MINDS OUT OF THE GUTTER. They make out, but not before Baird takes off her moustache LIKE AN ABSOLUTE COWARD. Way to undermine your own artistic statement, “Baird”.
Charles in charge
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You and me both, sister
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And so to the climax of this adventure. Carrie and Sean go to a party. Carrie struggles up five flights of stairs because she smokes while ice skating. She’s dressed like she’s attending a mob boss’s wake in a casino. As they enter, Carrie wonders out loud whose party it is, this information somehow not established at the planning stage. It’s Mark, Sean’s ex, of course. Carrie is amazed, the voiceover confirming this. “It’s sort of a first, I was attending the party of my kind-of boyfriend’s ex boyfriend. And his boyfriend.” This from someone who started this episode with a monologue about how NOTHING shocks jaded New Yorkers.
Alanis Morissette is also a party guest, with colorful braids and a wife. One of the gay guys has a newborn baby swaddled across his chest at a noisy, boozy loft party. Everyone that Carrie is introduced to has dated within the friends’ pool and they were all married to each other at some point, etc. We get it, they’re all cool and horny. Poor Carrie’s head is spinning. They introduce their “token straight friend Joel” (so obviously one of the producer’s nephews who wants to break into acting, he gets one line talking about “pleather”, it’s really random) and it’s a bizarre way to introduce someone, but anyway.
Alanis Morissette is also a party guest, with colorful braids and a wife. One of the gay guys has a newborn baby swaddled across his chest at a noisy, boozy loft party. Everyone that Carrie is introduced to has dated within the friends’ pool and they were all married to each other at some point, etc. We get it, they’re all cool and horny. Poor Carrie’s head is spinning. They introduce their “token straight friend Joel” (so obviously one of the producer’s nephews who wants to break into acting, he gets one line talking about “pleather”, it’s really random) and it’s a bizarre way to introduce someone, but anyway.
Wake casual
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One of these men is heterosexual
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Carrie becomes obsessed with making a mental flow chart of the dating network, even though she has no real connection to these people. “So let me get this straight,” she says to Sean, her obsession unabated, trying her best to rationalize the not-all-that complicated scenario. Let me get YOU straight is what she really means. Cue another judgy voiceover: “Gay, bi, staight, this party was a veritable pu pu platter of sexual orientation!” PLEASE GOD NOBODY TELL HER ABOUT PANSEXUALITY OR DEMISEXUALITY OR ANYTHING MORE, HER SEX COLUMN CAN BARELY COPE WITH THREE OPTIONS.
Then a very cringey game of spin the bottle happens, set up like it’s the raciest thing you can imagine. Is it something that extremely fashionable New York twentysomethings would do unironically? Hmmmm. NOT ON ALANIS MORISSETTE’S WATCH, SHE WILL DECIDE THE IRONY LEVELS!
Two women kiss, and one of the non-Alanis lesbians shouts GET A DENTAL DAM which seems a bit excessive in terms of commentary but still, we’ve all had a few drinks. Alanis then makes out with a guy. After that, she spins and gets Carrie, who is busy lighting a cigarette, even though there is a baby whose presence has been established at the party. “Ooops, it’s a girl, try again!” Carrie says with a look that if it was any more coy it’d be a carp.
Alanis assures her, “It’s OK” and moves in for the smooch. Carrie’s voiceover: “Of course it was OK, I was in Confused-Sexual-Orientation-Land!” Yes, that famous land. The writers have tangibly given up at this point. Also, she’s the only one that’s confused. Carrie is kissed by Alanis as she wonders if she’s going to “fall down the rabbit hole” (of chastely kissing a woman?). A royalty-free version of A Whiter Shade of Pale plays. Carrie does not move her lips, not even her great-tasting top lip. She looks terrified. She may be waiting to exhale a lungful of smoke?
Here’s her summary of the experience, delivered once again in voiceover: “It wasn’t bad. Kind of like chicken.”
Does she mean the game of nerves or the meat? DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THAT’S A WRAP ON UNPACKING BISEXUALITY, FOLKS!
Then a very cringey game of spin the bottle happens, set up like it’s the raciest thing you can imagine. Is it something that extremely fashionable New York twentysomethings would do unironically? Hmmmm. NOT ON ALANIS MORISSETTE’S WATCH, SHE WILL DECIDE THE IRONY LEVELS!
Two women kiss, and one of the non-Alanis lesbians shouts GET A DENTAL DAM which seems a bit excessive in terms of commentary but still, we’ve all had a few drinks. Alanis then makes out with a guy. After that, she spins and gets Carrie, who is busy lighting a cigarette, even though there is a baby whose presence has been established at the party. “Ooops, it’s a girl, try again!” Carrie says with a look that if it was any more coy it’d be a carp.
Alanis assures her, “It’s OK” and moves in for the smooch. Carrie’s voiceover: “Of course it was OK, I was in Confused-Sexual-Orientation-Land!” Yes, that famous land. The writers have tangibly given up at this point. Also, she’s the only one that’s confused. Carrie is kissed by Alanis as she wonders if she’s going to “fall down the rabbit hole” (of chastely kissing a woman?). A royalty-free version of A Whiter Shade of Pale plays. Carrie does not move her lips, not even her great-tasting top lip. She looks terrified. She may be waiting to exhale a lungful of smoke?
Here’s her summary of the experience, delivered once again in voiceover: “It wasn’t bad. Kind of like chicken.”
Does she mean the game of nerves or the meat? DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THAT’S A WRAP ON UNPACKING BISEXUALITY, FOLKS!
Isn't it ironic?
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Don't you think?
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There’s still time for more appalling behaviour. Carrie, a professional sex columnist who gives relationship advice for money in a prominent newspaper, lies about having to leave for cigarettes and just DOES NOT COME BACK. She leaves the party and simply never talks to Sean again, even though he really did nothing wrong. She says she was “too old to play this game” which is fine if she means Spin The Bottle, but it’s implied that she means ‘kissing angsty Canadian pop stars’ or ‘tolerating bisexual men’.
“That’s just me!” she says as the credits roll. That’s just her, folks. That’s just her, a professional sex columnist, terminally befuddled by bisexuality, ghosting people without a second thought. Lovely stuff. Let’s forget him, girl, and buy us some real straight shoes.
“That’s just me!” she says as the credits roll. That’s just her, folks. That’s just her, a professional sex columnist, terminally befuddled by bisexuality, ghosting people without a second thought. Lovely stuff. Let’s forget him, girl, and buy us some real straight shoes.