Re-Evaluating a “Difficult Woman” : Carrie Bradshaw
When people talk about today’s golden age of television, there is a tendency to forget just how atrocious it was as recently as 1998. Men were pigeonholed into three professions: lawyers, doctors, or “comic” Dad relief like the men in “Full House”. Although television had just started to explore more nuanced material like “E.R.” or “NYPD Blue” many other programs cannot be watched today with a straight face.
For women, the situation was more dire. At best — if a woman had a career at all — it tended to be as a magazine editor (so many women’s magazine editors!) or a public relations agent. Their work tasks consisted of flirting with their male bosses or clumsily falling down in heels. In 1998, the pratfall was apparently mandatory for single, professional women in Manhattan.
When introduced, “Sex and the City” changed the landscape dramatically for women on television. This was not automatically obvious, as the four main characters fit, more or less, into categorizations that we’d seen before on “The Golden Girls”: the Slut, the Prude, the Career Woman, and the Heroine.
However, it must be noted: unapologetically feminine instead of working from a man’s concept, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of what it is like to be a woman older than 25, “Sex and the City” was a brilliant and radical show. It also originated the first female anti-hero on television: Carrie Bradshaw.
If we can laud the character arcs of Tony Soprano, Walter White, and Don Draper for shattering the boundaries of what an audience can stomach while a character commits sins, why NOT Carrie Bradshaw, too?
Look. I recognize the chorus of boos and the series of eye-rolls the previous statement elicits. As a cultural figure, Carrie — and especially her witticisms in her column writing on the show— have been pilloried and mocked for years.
Lines like “meanwhile, back at the Hotel Vasectomy, I found the man of the hour lying next to me” make viewers cringe. She was supposed to have a serious column, right? However, I stand by my statement that Carrie deserves a re-evaluation.
For starters, Carrie and her friends were older than the Ally McBeals and Mary Tyler Moores of the past. Their experiences navigating Manhattan in the ’80s and early ’90s left them with jagged edges and far more philosophical takes on the power dynamics between men and women. Sharp edges often lead to poor choices and more interesting material.
Carrie filled her life with a series of poor choices that indicated her belief in living on a separate plane from her more grounded friends (or any other New Yorker, for that matter). She spent years chasing an emotionally manipulative man who treated her like a secondary assistant in public. When the same man married a more “appropriate on-paper” twentysomething, Carrie had an affair with him and participated in ruining the marriage. She broke the heart of Aidan, an attractive, successful, and much more suitable life partner — twice.
Carrie was a woman who bought $40,000 in Manolo Blahnik shoes over the years but refused to save the same amount for a down payment on her condo when it flipped from being rent-controlled. She bullied her best friend (Charlotte) into giving her an engagement ring from a recently ended marriage to make up the difference.
She once attended a baby shower where someone stole her Manolo Blahniks, and got so mad that she “registered” at Manolo “for herself” and forced her friend to buy an extravagance she didn’t need. The episode was entitled “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” and the behavior was completely insane!
In a refreshing way not seen before, Carrie was unwilling to drop the four walls of the lifestyle she created for herself, even when it inevitably clashed with others in her life. In that way, her selfishness is a particular strain of anti-heroine behavior that’s far less escalated than, let’s say, a character on television today like Annalise Keating.
After all, aren’t difficult women the best to watch? Would we have wanted Bette Davis to tame her eccentricities in “All About Eve” and roll over into a complacent position?
None of the above is meant to imply that Carrie (or her three best friends) didn’t grow and mature as the series progressed. In the last season, there are three beautiful scenes that encapsulate would could have been for Carrie.
In one, Mr. Big (her emotionally distant north star) gets heart surgery. She takes care of him, listens to his protestations of changing his tune, and wakes up the next morning to realize he’s reverted back to an emotionally closed off figure who will never change. She sighs, knocks over the dominos they played the night before, and the voiceover is simply Carrie telling herself that she has to move on from this toxicity. When I watched it, I audibly cheered for her maturity.
The second scene comes with her new older boyfriend, Alexander Petrovsky (played by the wonderful Mikhail Baryshnikov). They stand by the pier. She asks if he could reverse his vasectomy if she chose (at age 38) to want children. Alexander and Carrie have one of the most honest conversations of the show — him standing firm on not wanting more children, but encouraging her to never give up if it’s something she truly wants. She has a choice, and as he wraps her in his coat, she wordlessly makes that choice. It’s beautiful.
The third comes when Carrie runs into an old party friend, Lexi (again, such a great choice in Kristen Johnson for the role) at a stuffy Upper East Side party. Forty year old Lexi is out of place. She toddles around on extremely high heels like an Amazonian woman, does cocaine in the bathroom and offers some to Carrie (who declines), and then, when told not to smoke inside, proceeds to give an incredible monologue about how “no one is FUN ANYMORE” and how “New York is O-V-E-R”. Her heel breaks, and she falls out of an open window to her death. Carrie sees what her past is, and what her future could be with different choices. She decides to move to Paris with Alexander.
Of course, the show wanted to please fans, so the producers mucked it up completely in the last two episodes and subsequent two movies. Petrovsky is inexplicably turned into a villain, Carrie is “saved” by a shape-shifted Mr. Big, and the series ends with her walking down Fifth Avenue in an insane Patricia Fields contraption you can see above.
However, I’ll always root for Carrie, and for difficult women everywhere. The concept that a woman is supposed to fall into one of three categories: working professional, monogamous married lady, and child-rearer — today, a woman is supposed to be all three, and now with the extra COVID complication of doing it all from one location!— doesn’t account for all women.
Carrie, for all her mistakes, was the first to show us a different kind of woman in popular culture. We should all be grateful.
