Let’s Talk About ‘Sex’--They Sure Do

Anyone looking for a sexist conspiracy might question why “The Sopranos,” the HBO series about a Prozac-popping Mafioso, garnered so much media attention when “Sex and the City,” another original HBO show that preceded it by several months, broke TV ground in its own very significant way. Mobsters have mistresses and fear their mothers. Now, that’s a big revelation? Girls have bedmates they would never be seen with in public. Now, that is a revelation. What’s so new about the secret lives of the Mafia compared with witty, relevant dish on sexual politics in the post-feminist era?

Carrie Bradshaw--for anyone who still thinks Sunday evening is a time to discover whether the truth is really out there--writes a column for a New York newspaper on the mating rituals of Manhattan singles called Sex and the City. A non-degreed urban anthropologist winningly played by Sarah Jessica Parker, she has to look no further than the mirror for material.

To put it mildly, Carrie knows the territory--it’s a jungle out there, populated by predatory second-tier models and the men who buy them salad. What chance does a smart, funny, complex and vulnerable woman have? When her own experiences--with younger men, gay men, desperate to be married men, commitment-phobic men or venal married men--don’t provide sufficient fodder, she can always consult her three best friends, who are somewhat successful, semi-beautiful working women whose hyperactive social lives are an ongoing quest to reconcile girlhood dreams with present reality.

Beginning Sunday night, Carrie and her gal pals will be back for an 18-episode second season on HBO. With the cable channel’s reputation for producing original series that do more than flash full-frontal views, a new audience may discover what the “Sex and the City” cult found when the first episode, “Toxic Bachelors,” appeared last summer: There’s nothing on television quite like it.

It is arguably the first show to feature characters who talk the way real women do. About sex. They discuss, usually hilariously, sexual peccadilloes and bodily orifices even the Starr report neglected. Yet if “Sex and the City” were only a keyhole glimpse into the girls’ locker room, it might be simply smarmy, and not nearly as popular. Its strength is the heart that beats beneath its sometimes foul mouth--the ability to balance the raunchy and the poignant. And since there’s no laugh track, the viewer can find a crude moment comic, or sad. While one girl is realizing she must dump Mr. Highly Eligible because he insists she perform a sexual act Smith alumnae just don’t do, Carrie tries to decide whether she can rationalize dating a dangerously irresistible man who has made it clear he never wants to get married. One scenario is low sexual farce. In the other, a woman confronts her deepest feelings about love and connection, and the emotional heft of the situation threatens to crush her.

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In each half hour, Carrie investigates a dating-world enigma: Is it better to fake it than be alone? What constitutes cheating? How far can a remodeling project go when the fixer-upper is a man, not a brownstone? Can the gulf between married and single people ever be bridged? Can women have sex like men, devoid of involvement and intimacy? That girl will do the darndest things in the name of research. In fact, like a foot fetishist who gets a job selling women’s shoes, she seems to have found a socially acceptable, even profitable way of pursuing her passion.

The truths revealed are less about sex than the minefield relationships have become in an era of too many choices. “Sex and the City” might be the first post-feminist love story. A decade ago, both genders were still a bit too politically sensitive to explore how the romantic landscape had been irrevocably altered by women’s economic independence. Or, as Carrie might put it, in a world in which men are no longer necessary as providers, why does a woman need one?

Carrie and her gang, who’d rather be called girls than women and frequently address each other with the endearment “Sweetie,” are so liberated they’re comfortable with a little retro-femininity. Self-sufficient and self-supporting, they’d have no interest in defending themselves against anyone suggesting that a weakness for expensive shoes or the sort of pink-tinted cocktails favored by high school girls makes them ditsy.

A principled feminist would never confess to resorting to a little artifice in her dealings with men. The girls help each other plan strategy and parse every statement a man has made with the obsessiveness unique to a woman in the delusional throes of infatuation.

“Sex and the City” effectively uses voice-over and characters talking directly to the camera to give the audience bulletins on its subtext. After Carrie has bumped into her boyfriend, the infuriatingly smooth and unattainable Mr. Big (Chris Noth), on a date with another woman, she responds to his phone call confirming their next rendezvous by saying, “Are we still on for tomorrow night? Yeah. Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?” She then covers the phone and tells us: “I was striving for noncommittal, but I was worried I had just bordered on shrill.”

The first season’s episodes specialized in dramatizing a number of dating’s confusing but universally recognized rules--like the only way to have a relationship is to make believe you don’t care about having one. Or the nerdy, loving and sexually gifted guy never gets the girl. And, of course, the truism that if the scent of unavailability could be bottled, it would make a best-selling cologne.

“There’s always something I can identify with, being a single woman in New York who’s dating,” said Maggie Rogers, a 28-year-old junior executive in advertising. “It’s not like Sarah Jessica Parker is me, but they bring up all these thoughts that have run through most girls’ heads at one time or another. In New York, you could be single forever, because no matter how happy people are in a relationship, everyone’s looking around the corner for a bigger, better deal. ‘Sex and the City’ shows that kind of thing perfectly.”

For creator Darren Star, the premise of an attractive, sexually active woman in New York writing a column about her friends and herself was an interesting way of doing a show about relationships. Sex and the City was actually a column in the New York Observer by writer and sometime television commentator Candace Bushnell, who published a collection of her work in book form.

Star said: “For me, the title and the notion of someone writing about her life was a great jumping-off point for us. Most of the characters aren’t from the column, except for Carrie and Mr. Big. The book is a wonderful bit of social satire about Manhattan society. I wanted the show to have a much broader appeal.”

Star, whose resume includes creating “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “Melrose Place,” and co-executive producer Michael Patrick King, a former “Murphy Brown” writer, author most of the episodes. Their ability to nail women’s feelings and experiences is generally extraordinary, but their gender might explain one of the show’s few false notes--a persistent emphasis on the importance of penis size. It smacks of an unshakable man’s view of what they think matters to women.

“The more time I spend with Darren and Michael, the more I understand that their ability to write the show is completely unrelated to their sex,” Parker says. “In our show, the men’s roles are the women’s roles in traditional TV. They’re objectified. Half of them don’t even get names. They tend to be just eye candy for us, and we do with them what we want, and then we send them on their way. . . . Darren and Michael’s way of casting men like that is more surprising to me than how consistently well they write women.”

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Yet male-bashing isn’t the show’s specialty. It’s women who can be as shallow and thoughtless as the guys. The central quartet drink too much, smoke like addicts, sleep with the wrong men, of whom they’ve long ago lost count, cheat, lie and stumble on their journeys. Which is to say they’re as flawed as real folks. One male viewer interviewed found their bed-hopping repetitive after a few episodes. It would be, if they didn’t deconstruct each adventure. They learn, they weep, laugh and bleed. Above all, they fight hardening of the heart muscles as if it were a life-threatening condition.

“The wonderful thing about doing the show on HBO is we don’t have to be a moral watchdog,” Star said. “I’m the last one to try to be dictating anyone’s morality. It’s patronizing. I feel that adults don’t want to be patronized. They can make their own decisions about what behavior they find acceptable and unacceptable.”

One of the sweetest elements of the show is the paean it offers to female friendship. In a sometimes cold and lonely place, the girls of “Sex and the City” are each other’s ideal family. Supportive, nonjudgmental--OK, occasionally competitive--their love for one another is, if not unconditional, then infused with tolerance and generosity. Despite their obvious differences, they have much in common. They understand that men aren’t the enemy. The death of hope is.

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* “Sex in the City” airs at 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).