What Would Carrie Bradshaw Do?

In the future, anthropologists wanting to understand our present culture will find the key in a curious cultural artifact—the greatest (and longest) misogynist masterwork ever to be captured on film: Sex and the City .

The television series—46.5 hours—and film—another 151 minutes so far—is not only a magnum opus of propaganda (Leni Riefenstahl has nothing on Darren Star ) but it captures the zeitgeist of the post-feminist era in a way that nothing else can. In a better world, Sex and the City would be viewed as a minstrel show caricaturing women; in our culture, it is nearly a cinéma vérité examination of the lives of our young women (only without the expensive shoes).

Conservatives like me (forty-something Christian men with young daughters) have been lamenting this state of affairs for decades. But now even the feminists who paved the route on which Carrie Brandshaw treads in her Manolo Blahniks are growing disturbed by the consequences of the sexual revolution. A veritable cottage industry of books and articles is now being produced by Friedanesque, first wave feminists, wringing their hands over what their movement has devolved into.

The latest example of this welcome genre is by Cassandra Jardine in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph :

Far from relations between the sexes flourishing emotionally and physically, against a backdrop of mutual respect, understanding and equality, a generation of young girls is interpreting liberation as the right to behave like top-shelf models. These women, interviewed by Walter, are also committed to no-strings sex, celebrating one-night stands as notches on their designer handbags. For them, STDs are almost a badge of honour, eating disorders commonplace and men who talk of love and commitment are sneered at for “going soppy”.

“In previous generations many women had to repress their physical needs and experiences in order to fall in with social conventions, and feminism was needed to release them from the cage of chastity,” writes Walter. “But what I heard from some women is that they feel there is now a new cage holding them back from the liberation they sought, a cage in which repression of emotions takes the place of repression of physical needs.” In short, they daren’t feel because it might limit the exercise of their freedom. “It’s my choice,” is now an argument-clincher for any kind of louche behaviour.

Ouch. Was this what their mothers fought for? Of course not. Freedom, combined with economic independence, may have proved a poisoned chalice, one that has made women more unhappy than ever before.

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