Sex and the City, and Wanting Like Nobody but Herself

It is Miranda’s birthday, and four women are at dinner in Manhattan. Samantha, a publicist and the oldest of the four, sets out the choices she thinks a successful woman in this city has. She can bang her head against the wall trying to find a relationship, or she can go out and have sex like a man. Charlotte is not sure what that would involve. Samantha explains: “without feeling”.

That is the first episode of Sex and the City, broadcast by HBO in June 1998, and by the end of it the four have vowed to try: to stop worrying about finding the perfect man and to have sex the way men were supposed to, for its own sake and without attachment. The vow is a joke and a manifesto at once, and the series never quite put it down.

What follows discusses all six seasons, including how each of the four stories ends, and touches on the two films and the later series. If you would rather meet the ending first, this will keep.

Six seasons later, in the final episode, a young actor flies home to New York from a film shoot to tell Samantha that he loves her. She has been through chemotherapy, and the series has shown the treatment dimming her desire. What she says back is not the line the scene seems to be waiting for. She tells him that he has meant more to her than any man she has ever known.

This essay is about the distance between those two sentences, and about the fact that both belong to the same woman. The usual account of Sex and the City is that it began with a vow about sex and ended in romance, and that the ending was a retreat: the series lost its nerve and paired everyone off. This essay argues something narrower and, it thinks, truer. What the first episode got wrong was not the wanting. It was the measure. It took a picture of how men were supposed to want and offered it to four women as the shape of their freedom. Read one way, the six seasons that follow are the story of that measure failing, and of each woman finding out what her own wanting was actually like.

Samantha, who seemed to keep the vow better than anyone, is the proof. She never wanted like a man. She wanted like Samantha: often, frankly, on terms she said out loud. When illness took the appetite away, what was left was not a lesser woman or a corrected one, but the same voice, saying something it had not said before. Carrie is the counter-case. She spends the series loving a man in whose company, by her own account, she does not sound like herself, and the series closes her story on his sentence rather than hers.

The record first. Sex and the City ran on HBO from 6 June 1998 to 22 February 2004, ninety-four half-hour episodes in six seasons. Darren Star created it from the column Candace Bushnell wrote for the New York Observer, which she collected in a book in 1996, and he adapted it with a writing staff made up mostly of women. Sarah Jessica Parker plays Carrie Bradshaw, Kim Cattrall plays Samantha Jones, Kristin Davis plays Charlotte York and Cynthia Nixon plays Miranda Hobbes. The series won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series in 2001, and seven Emmys and eight Golden Globes in all. Michael Patrick King wrote its final episode. Two films followed, in 2008 and 2010, and a sequel series, And Just Like That…, ran from 2021 to 2025. In Japan the first season began on satellite television in December 2000.

The premise is a column. Carrie writes one each week, about sex and relationships, for a New York paper, and each episode is framed by the question she is typing, the sentence that begins by admitting she couldn’t help but wonder. Her three closest friends supply much of the material. Samantha runs her own public relations firm, wants sex without romance, claims hundreds of soulmates and prefers her lovers to leave soon after. Charlotte manages a gallery and hopes, in the traditional way, to marry. Miranda is a lawyer, sceptical of both.

This essay follows Samantha first, because the argument starts with her, and then Carrie, whose story ends the series. Charlotte and Miranda come after, briefly, for the endings the series gave them. Six seasons hold a great deal more, and it can wait.

A note on method. The series was not screened for this essay. What it says about the episodes rests on their published record and on reviews and criticism of record, and a line of dialogue appears in quotation marks only where such a source prints it; otherwise it is paraphrased. No character is diagnosed. Where the series shows illness, the essay says what the series shows and goes no further.

The first episode offered something more generous than its reputation, and more confused.

The generosity was real. Liz Tuccillo, one of the show’s writers, told the Guardian in 2018 that these women were the first on television to say that they were in their thirties, that they wanted love, and that they were also going to have fun, have sex and go out. The writer Kate Bolick, in the same article, credited the series with showing single women as sexually autonomous, with thriving careers, rather than as sad and lonely spinsters. In 1998 that was not a small thing to put on a screen, and it was put at the centre, with four women doing the talking.

The confusion is in the phrase. As Samantha defined it, “like a man” meant “without feeling”. It borrowed a stereotype, sex as an appetite spent and forgotten, and offered it to women as the form of their freedom. The stereotype says little about actual men. It says less about the four women it was offered to. And it carries a whole theory of desire inside it: that wanting is a quantity, a drive that builds and must be discharged, and that a free woman is one who can discharge it the way men are imagined to.

This Library has argued with that theory before. “Desire Is More Than Libido” pointed out that the word libido smuggles in a drive model, in which a woman who wants little is deficient and one who wants a lot is under pressure, and that a great deal of desire is better understood as responsive, produced by conditions rather than stored. The vow at Miranda’s birthday is a drive model in a cocktail dress. It asks whether women can do it like men, which is a question about quantity and form, with only two answers available: yes, and you are free; no, and you are not.

“Casual Sex, and the Question That Actually Predicts How It Goes” came at the same problem from the other side. The research it drew on suggests that what predicts how a casual encounter goes for a woman is not the format but the reason: whether she wanted it for her own reasons. The format itself, casual or committed, predicts remarkably little. “Like a man” is a format. Whether it meant to or not, the series spent six seasons finding out that the reasons were what mattered, and that the reasons of the four women at that table were not a man’s. They were theirs.

Samantha deserves to be read without a moral attached. She is not the series’ joke, though she has many of its best lines, and she is not its warning. She wants sex, often, and says so; she enjoys it and is funny about enjoying it; she likes her lovers gone soon after, and says that too. What is striking, looking back across six seasons, is how rarely the series makes her appetite the thing that goes wrong. When something goes wrong for Samantha, it is usually a script someone else has handed her.

The series hands her three. At the end of the first season she meets James and decides, for once, to wait, because he might be the marrying kind; she follows the old courtship script, holding sex back until she feels love, and the sex, when it comes, disappoints her, and it ends. In the fourth season she falls seriously for Maria, an artist, and it ends when Maria concludes that Samantha is afraid of intimacy. That is Maria’s verdict, and the series lets her deliver it; it also lets Samantha say plainly that she misses men. Then comes Richard, a hotelier as wary of commitment as she is. They agree to be monogamous, and it is he, not she, who cheats. She tries to forgive him. In the fifth season, worn down by suspicion, she ends it, and when he tells her he loves her she answers: “I love you, too, Richard. But I love me more.”

Put the three side by side and a pattern appears that the usual picture of Samantha leaves out. None is a failure of her appetite. Each is the failure of a borrowed form: a courtship that makes sex wait for love, a relationship that talks where she would rather act, a monogamy she accepted and he broke. And the sentence she finds at the end of the third is the first time she puts love and herself in the same breath. It is not a vow of chastity and not a conversion. It is a woman saying, in her own grammar, where she stands.

Smith begins as appetite and nothing else. She picks him up, a young waiter at a restaurant where she is dining with her friends, and takes him home. Then she does what she is professionally good at. A publicist, she renames him, turning Jerry Jerrod into Smith Jerrod, and makes him famous; within the season his image is on a billboard in Times Square. For a long time she refuses the words that would make it a romance. She does not want to be called his girlfriend. She will not hold his hand. After one more night with Richard she comes back to Smith, and he forgives her. He wants more from her than she is ready to name, and he is willing to wait.

It would be easy to tell this as the oldest story there is, in which the woman who wanted sex without romance is taught romance at last by the right man. The series tells it slightly otherwise, and the difference lies in who does the naming. It is Samantha who names Smith, literally. It is Samantha who decides when the word girlfriend may be used. The relationship holds, for as long as it holds, because the terms are hers to set and he can live inside them.

In the last season she is diagnosed with breast cancer, and the series tells it with her particular mix of nerve and comedy. She uses the fame she built for Smith to get an appointment with a well-known oncologist. Her hair falls out with the chemotherapy, and she tries on wigs and hats and scarves; Smith shaves his head. Speaking at a cancer benefit, she pulls off her wig on stage and talks frankly about the hot flashes, and women in the audience stand and take off theirs. It was, Newsweek reported at the time, the last scene Kim Cattrall filmed as Samantha.

Care is needed here. The series shows her treatment taking her desire away, and this essay goes no further than that: it makes no claim about what treatment does to anyone else, which is a question for a woman’s own doctors, not for a television series or an essay about one.

What the series does with it is the most precise thing it ever did with Samantha. The appetite, which the first episode treated as the whole measure of her freedom, goes quiet. Smith, away on a film shoot, flies home to tell her that he loves her. And she answers that he has meant more to her than any man she has ever known.

Read that sentence slowly, because it is the series’ reply to its first episode, and it replies without repenting anything. It does not renounce the hundreds of soulmates. It uses them. They are the scale on which he is measured, and he comes out above all of them. A woman whose history had been held against her makes that history the unit of her tenderness. Nobody else in the series could have said it. It may be the least borrowed sentence in six seasons.

Notice, too, what the illness did not do. It did not correct her. This essay does not read the cancer as a verdict on how she lived; the case that it is one is taken up below. What the illness took was the appetite, the one thing the first episode had treated as the whole of her. What it left was her voice, her terms, and a man who had learned to live inside them. The vow had said “without feeling”. Her last sentence is full of feeling, and it is still entirely hers.

This Library’s “Dying for Sex, and the Rules That Gave Her a Voice” followed a woman with stage four breast cancer who found, late, a grammar in which every act is asked for and one word stops everything, and who carried it out of the bedroom into the rest of her life. Samantha is the other case. She had her grammar from the first episode. What illness tested was not whether she could find a voice, but whether hers would survive the loss of the appetite everyone had assumed it was made of. It did.

Carrie writes it all down, and the series is built on her voice. Each week she types a question and the episode goes looking for its answer. She is good at naming things, and she names the man she loves too. The name she gives him is a nickname, Mr. Big: a size and a rank rather than a person. The series keeps it as his only name for six seasons, a running joke with something serious inside it.

Emily Nussbaum, in a New Yorker essay of 2013 on how the series lost its good name, read him plainly: a man practically woven out of red flags, who slowly poisoned her. Carrie herself says something in the first season that is the most useful line for this essay. Around Big, she tells Miranda, she is not like herself. She is a version, Together Carrie, Sexy Carrie; sometimes she catches herself posing, and it is exhausting.

Hold that beside Samantha’s last sentence and the contrast is exact. With Smith, Samantha says something only she could say. With Big, by her own account, Carrie does not sound like herself. Her wanting, for most of the series, is conducted in a borrowed register too. Not a stereotype of men this time, but the romance her own column keeps circling: the great love, the man who will not quite arrive.

The series gives her the other man, and it is honest about why she cannot take him. Aidan is warm, patient and legible; he gets her to stop smoking. While she is with him she has an affair with Big, by then married to Natasha, and confesses it, and the series does not paper over the cost: Natasha finds them out in her own home and is hurt as she chases Carrie out, and Aidan, even after he takes her back, cannot fully trust her again. He proposes, and the engagement comes apart over what she still feels for Big.

This Library’s “When Safety and Attraction Point to Different People” was written for exactly this split, and it declined to call the split a defect. It offered several readings instead. The least welcome is that the attractive one may be attractive because he is unavailable, so that the pull is about reaching rather than about him. A kinder one is that a woman may never have felt safe and wanted by the same person at the same time, and has stopped expecting the two to meet. Carrie’s six seasons can be read either way.

Then Paris. In the last season, over Miranda’s doubts, Carrie follows the Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky there and finds herself alone in a beautiful city, neglected by a man whose work always comes first. When she tries to end it, she says the clearest thing she says in six seasons: “I am someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.” That sentence is hers. It borrows nothing, and it asks to be measured on no one else’s scale. In the quarrel that follows he accidentally strikes her in the face, and she leaves him.

Then Big arrives, sent by her friends, whom he had gone to for advice. On a bridge at night he says the words she has waited six years to hear: “Carrie, you’re the one.” She asks him to take her home. In the last minutes, back in New York, her voice-over closes the series on the thought that the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself, and that if you can find someone to love the you you love, that is just fabulous. Between those two thoughts her phone rings. The caller is identified as John. After six seasons, the man has a name.

It is a lovely ending, and this essay is not above being moved by it. But look at where the words come from. Her own sentence, the one about real love, was said in Paris to a man who was not listening. The sentence that ends her story is his, and so is the name that closes the series. Even the voice-over that calls the relationship with yourself the most important of all is cut in two by a call from him. The woman who spent six seasons naming things ends the series being named: you’re the one.

The other two endings are quieter, and they bear the argument out from different sides.

Charlotte came to the first dinner with a borrowed measure of her own, older than Samantha’s: the fairy tale, the husband who will arrive and rescue her. The series gives it to her almost to the letter. She meets Trey MacDougal, a doctor from an old family, when she falls in front of his taxi. She waits for marriage, as she believes she should, and learns on the eve of the wedding that he is impotent. Therapy, a separation and a short-lived revival follow; they try for a child, and Trey decides he does not want one, and the marriage ends. The script was kept exactly, and it did not hold.

What she finds instead is the man she least expected, her divorce lawyer, Harry Goldenblatt. He tells her he can only marry a Jew, and she converts, a serious decision and her own. She pushes him to propose and he leaves her; she apologises to him at a synagogue singles night, and he proposes. Then the rest of the plan does not arrive. After long trouble conceiving she becomes pregnant, and she miscarries, and the series lets the grief be what it is. In the final episode an adoption they had counted on falls through, and then word comes that they can adopt a baby girl from China. What Charlotte wanted, a family, she keeps. The form it was supposed to take, she lets go. That is what desire changing looks like in this series: not a woman corrected, but a want finding out what it was for.

Miranda’s measure was scepticism, and it had served her; she was the one at the table least likely to be made a fool of. Steve, a bartender, is not what her life was arranged for, and she leaves him over their different schedules and money. When he has surgery for testicular cancer and feels less of a man, she sleeps with him, and she becomes pregnant. She considers an abortion and decides to keep the pregnancy; the decision is hers, and the series treats it as hers. Their son is called Brady Hobbes, his father’s surname for a first name and his mother’s for a last. In the final season it is Miranda who proposes. The terms of that family are written into a child’s name.

Then comes a scene of a kind the series rarely made. They have moved, Miranda reluctantly, to Brooklyn, and taken in Steve’s mother, Mary, who is losing her memory. On one of Mary’s worst days, Miranda bathes her. She makes no speech. It is Magda, the housekeeper, who later says what it was: “What you did, that is love.”

Notice who speaks. Miranda’s truest moment in six seasons is not a line of hers at all; it is an act, and it is named by someone else. That is not a counter-example to this essay’s argument but its widest form. The measure the series finally trusts is not a man’s and not the romance’s. It is what a woman does, in her own way, when nobody has written the scene for her.

Some of the sharpest objections to Carrie’s ending came from the people who made the series. Darren Star, who did not write those last episodes, said in a 2016 interview for Amazon’s Kindle Singles that he thought the show ultimately betrayed what it was about, which was that women don’t ultimately find happiness from marriage. Not that they can’t, he added; but the series had begun by going off script from the romantic comedies that came before it. Candace Bushnell told the Guardian in 2017 that in real life Carrie and Big would not have ended up together, and that making a television show is show business, not show art. In her 2013 essay Nussbaum argued that in its later seasons the series gave in to the limits of romantic comedy.

The franchise then did what television rarely does to a happy ending: it kept reopening it. In the first film, in 2008, Big calls off their wedding on the day itself, and they marry later, quietly, at City Hall. In the same film Samantha, living in Los Angeles, managing Smith’s career and increasingly unhappy, stays faithful to him and then leaves him, telling him that she loves him but loves herself more, and that the relationship she needs to work on is the one with herself. The sequel series killed Big in its first episode. Samantha is barely in it. She has fallen out with Carrie and moved to London, and she appears in a few text messages and, once, in 2023, in a short phone call.

Kim Cattrall had chosen not to go on. She told the Guardian in 2019 that she had gone past the finish line playing Samantha because she loved the series, that it had been a blessing in so many ways, and that after the second film she had had enough. This essay reads nothing into her reasons beyond her words. It notes only that the story of the woman who wanted on her own terms ended with her offstage, present in a few messages from another city, which may not be the worst ending anyone could have written for Samantha Jones.

The first season reached Japan in December 2000, and the timing matters. In that year’s census, 26.6 percent of women in Japan aged thirty to thirty-four had never married, nearly three times the 9.1 percent of 1980; by 2020 the figure was 38.5 percent. Among women aged thirty-five to thirty-nine it rose from 13.9 percent in 2000 to 26.2 percent in 2020. These are census figures, the share of each age group that had never married among those whose status is known, and the 2020 figures include an estimate for people who did not answer. They describe a population, not anyone’s reasons. But they say that the women on the screen were becoming, in Japan too, a large and ordinary part of adult life.

In 2003 the columnist Sakai Junko published a book whose title gave that population a name. However beautiful and capable she is, its argument ran, in the publisher’s own summary, a woman in her thirties or older who is unmarried and has no children is a loser dog, a makeinu. The book won the Kodansha Essay Prize and the Fujin Koron literary prize, and in 2004 makeinu entered the top ten of the annual new-word and buzzword awards, whose own note described Sakai as taking the losing position by choice, and read it as a strategy.

Set the two columnists side by side, the fictional one in Manhattan and the real one in Tokyo, and what appears is not a contrast between two countries but two ways of holding a name. Carrie took the naming into her own hands and turned it outward, on the men, the dates, the phenomena. Sakai took the insult before anyone could throw it and wore it as a joke against herself. That is authorship too, and a risky kind, because a name worn as armour is still somebody else’s name. A later Japanese series, Tokyo Tarareba Musume, broadcast in 2017, begins with three single friends of thirty drinking together night after night until a young model tells them they are tarareba women, women who live on if-onlys. Who gets to name a woman’s wanting is not a New York question.

In 2010 the same awards put joshikai in their top ten: the women-only evening out, a table where women say to each other what they would not say elsewhere. The award went to the president of a restaurant company whose izakaya chain was selling a women-only package under that name. The table had been named, and it was already being sold. What could not be sold is the thing this essay has been following: four women at a table, saying in their own words what they wanted.

For a woman living in Japan in a second language, that table can be harder to find than the series makes it look. The frankness of the four depends on a shared first language, a shared city and years of evenings. The friends she can talk to that way may be abroad and asleep, and the Japanese words for what she wants may be among the last she learns, because nobody teaches them. None of this is a claim about how women in Japan live. It is the series’ own condition turned around: the four could want out loud, in their own words, because they had somewhere those words were understood.

Now the objections, as strongly as they can be put. There are five, and the first goes to the root.

First, the series may never have believed its own vow. Writing about the show in 2018, the critic Andrea Long Chu pointed to a line in the very first episode, in which Carrie tells two of her friends that when the right man comes along the whole thing will go straight out of the window, and argued that for all its bluster about sex without feeling, the series obeys that line in every episode. “Sex doesn’t replace love,” she wrote, “it just keeps its seat warm.” On that reading Samantha’s last sentence is not a reply to the vow but the vow failing on schedule: the libertine brought round by the right man, in the oldest shape a story about a sexually free woman can take. The Take, a site of video essays on film and television, has suggested the same of Samantha’s ending in particular: that it can be read as reinforcing the myth of the sexually adventurous woman who was only waiting for the right man to settle down with. This essay cannot dismiss that. Its narrower answer is that the sentence it has leaned on does not renounce her history but uses it, and that the franchise itself, in its first film, sent her back to herself. That is a narrowing, not a refutation. The series did end all four of its women in some kind of partnership, and a reader who sees in that a failure of imagination is seeing something real.

Second, the illness. Storytelling has an old habit of giving the most sexually free woman in a story the worst of its suffering, and a reader is entitled to notice that the series chose the woman with the most lovers for its long story about cancer. This essay has read that storyline as a test of the people around her rather than a verdict on her, and the storyline as it is recorded fits that reading: the man stays, and a hall of women take off their wigs with her. But the choice of whom to make ill was the writers’, and nothing here undoes it.

Third, the table itself. The freedom this essay has admired, to set your own terms and say them out loud, is shown only for four affluent white women in Manhattan. The fashion editor Chelsea Fairless, who loves the show and co-founded an Instagram account devoted to its outfits, told the Guardian in 2018 that it was as white as it gets, with no person of colour ever a series regular, and that she had taken issue at the time with its handling of certain queer issues; the same article noted the show’s overt materialism and its utterly fantastical picture of the life freelance journalism affords. Some of its jokes about bisexuality and about trans women have not aged well. The second film took the four to Abu Dhabi; its Middle Eastern setting was at the centre of the criticism it drew, and many found it anti-Muslim.

A woman working two jobs in Saitama may reasonably watch Samantha’s terms as a luxury she has never been offered. That is true of the series. It is less true of the principle, because a woman’s own reasons cost nothing; but the series never showed what saying them costs a woman with no money and no firm of her own, and in its final episode the woman who names love is the one who works in someone else’s home.

Fourth, this essay may be too hard on Carrie. Her friends, who had doubted Big for six seasons, were the ones who sent him to Paris. And the Washington Post’s reviewer at the time, Jennifer Frey, saw the ending as Carrie getting herself back, back in her city, her apartment and her writing, with Big as a bonus. A woman who knows what she is choosing and chooses the man she has always wanted is not borrowing anything. On that reading the sentence about real love is the ending, and Big is its answer rather than its replacement. This essay thinks the words matter more than that, but it cannot prove it, and a reader who was glad for her is not wrong.

Last, the objection aimed at this Library. This house sells private companionship, and an essay that ends by saying a woman’s wanting is measured in her own words reaches a conclusion convenient for such a house. A reader is entitled to discount it for that. It is fair to add that the series does not help the house. The moments this essay has leaned on hardest, a young man shaving his head, a woman bathing her mother-in-law, a hall of women taking off their wigs, were not bought by anybody.

Sex and the City is remembered for its frankness, and the frankness was real. But the frankest thing in it is not a conversation about sex. It is a discovery, made slowly and not always on purpose, that no borrowed measure fits a woman’s wanting. Not the stereotype of men that the first episode offered as freedom. Not the fairy tale Charlotte arrived with, or the scepticism Miranda wore, or the great romance Carrie kept writing towards. The measure is a woman’s own reasons, said in her own words, and it can change, with illness, with loss, with a man she did not expect, without being taken from her.

That is why the old argument about Samantha, whether she was a role model or a cautionary tale, asks the wrong question, the same one the first episode asked. Asking whether a woman can have sex like a man and asking when she will finally settle down are one move made twice: measuring her wanting against someone else’s shape. Samantha’s six seasons refuse both. She had sex on her own terms and loved on her own terms, and when her body took the appetite away, she kept the terms.

So, if this finds you late, at the end of a long day: if you were ever told, or told yourself, that the way you wanted was like a man’s, or not womanly, or too much, or too little, that comparison was never yours to answer. If something, illness or exhaustion or grief, has made the wanting go quiet for a while, the quiet is not a verdict on the woman you were. What you want can change and still be yours. You are allowed to say it in words that sound like nobody but you.

The series did not end where this essay would have ended it. It gave its heroine the man with the nickname, and then his name. But it gave its truest sentence, the one nobody else could have said, to the woman who had proposed sex without feeling, and its last word on love to a housekeeper, speaking of what Miranda had done for her mother-in-law on one of Mary’s worst days. Between those two, the series knew more than its ending admitted.

This essay is cultural analysis, not clinical or therapeutic advice, and it diagnoses no one, character or real person. Cancer, trouble conceiving, a miscarriage, impotence and a failing memory appear here only as the series shows them, and nothing is claimed about their causes, treatment or course in anyone’s life.

The series was not screened for this essay. What it says about the episodes rests on their published record and on reviews and criticism of record. A line of dialogue is quoted only where such a source prints it, and otherwise paraphrased; critics and makers are quoted only in words their published texts contain.

The census figures describe populations, not the reasons of any woman. The comparison between New York and Tokyo is between two columnists and two series, not between two countries or the women who live in them.

Nothing here is a statement about any performer beyond their published words, and nothing implies that anyone who made or appears in the series, or any critic named, knows of or endorses this Library.

Whose measure did you first learn for your own wanting, and do you still use it?

Is there a sentence about what you want that only you could say? Have you said it to anyone?

When the wanting went quiet, for a season or for years, who stayed, and what did they say?

If your friends wrote the last scene of your story, would it be the one you would write?