Girls Gone Mild

The most enduring legacy of "Sex and the City" may be, as its title suggests, the sex. The show was the first to daringly and shamelessly discuss anal intercourse, vibrators, the taste of sperm (or, as the show put it, spunk). Today, as older women exchange grim words about settling, thousands of young women in their teens and 20s take quizzes to determine which "SATC" characters they are and join Facebook groups called "Everything I Know About Life I Learned From 'Sex and the City'." The median age of the audience has dropped by five years, to 33, from when it debuted. Even 15-year-old singer Miley Cyrus says it's her favorite show. Bennett sees it as "its own little liberation movement. It revolutionized the way we conceptualized and visualized sex, the way we discussed it with our friends and set our expectations in the dating world. Sex suddenly became an acceptable brunch-time conversation, and it brought our discussions of it out in the open. It made it OK to play the field, and to talk and laugh about doing so. And witnessing one orgasm after another went a long way toward making us believe we were entitled to good sex—and that we could demand it."

The loosening of sexual mores is undeniable. But perhaps younger generations give the show too much credit. For those who were already in their 20s when it aired, "SATC" did not tell them what to do, it revealed what they were already doing—and emboldened them to do more. The "SATC" women were not the first to loudly proclaim their sexual desires. "A hard man," purred Mae West many decades ago, "is good to find." Madonna did more than any other female icon of the late 20th century to promote women's independent, complex sexual desires. (Her 1992 book "Sex" makes the "SATC" girls look like prudish pussycats.) Helen Gurley Brown, who wrote "Sex and the Single Girl" in 1962, declared: "Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere." In fact, you could argue that "Sex and the City" did not start a movement—it asked what a movement meant for our relationships. Carrie Bradshaw did not answer questions about finding love and meaning outside marriage—she just asked them. She simply allowed us into her confusion, and reflected our own. And for this, women will travel thousands of miles to the house of a fictional character and cry when they see it. Perhaps the key to the show's longevity is that, in grappling with the fact that it is impossible to predict, control or tame our hearts, it's good to know we have company. Just don't expect a satire of the search for Prince Charming in the film. You're more likely to find a portrait of an eager Cinderella trying to slip her feet into Manolo Blahniks, their labels angled firmly toward the camera.

With Jessica Bennett and Karen Springen

© 2008