What Sex and the City taught us about female friendships
Sex and the City: During the show’s incredibly successful six-year run, it was a modern fairytale of female friendship.
Caroline O’Donoghue and Dolly Alderton’s deep dive into six seasons of Carrie Bradshaw on their podcast, Sentimental in the City, has us yearning for the TV reboot, and wondering once again if girlfriends really are our soulmates, writes Marie Kelly.
From fashion to friendship, Sex and the City sold women an alternative tale of romance. Carrie’s big love was not, in fact, Mr Big, it was Manolo Blahnik. In the first Sex and the City movie, retrieving a pair of blue bejewelled Manolo heels was Carrie’s motivation for running back to “heaven on fifth”, where the couple eventually reunited. After shoes, her affections fell firmly at the feet of her girl-squad – Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte.
This affluent, attractive, fun-loving foursome became the benchmark against which young women in the noughties measured their own friendships – superficially anyway. For many women, cosmopolitans replaced Chardonnay, brunch was the new black, and fashion became everyone’s passion. Six series, two movies and more than 20 years later, the iconic show is set to return to our screens with a brand new 10-episode series. In the meantime, we are getting our fix from Sentimental in the City, Caroline O’Donoghue and Dolly Alderton’s brilliant new podcast, celebrating the series. In their own words, the self-confessed fans may not know the most about the show - but they feel the most.
During the show’s incredibly successful six-year run, single women were no longer made to feel ashamed of being unmarried. In fact, it suddenly became cool to be the single gal in your gang. But the show did inspire a kind of inadequacy among women who didn’t have the type of 30-year-long, share-all, soulmate-style female relationships that the four protagonists portrayed. I certainly felt it. I’ve known my two oldest friends since we bonded over playdough in primary school. We each live in different counties, have very different personalities and interests, and see each other only once or twice a year, but the bond is strong because it’s based on a shared history, a treasured past that spans first periods to last chance pregnancies and so much more in between. But do we bare our souls to each other? No we don’t. Are we desperate to spend more time with each other? I don’t think so. We were never any kind of version of Carrie et al.
The notion that “Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates”, proposed by Charlotte in season 4, gained huge traction over the subsequent 20 years, with a variety of celebrities eulogising and declaring love for, not their partners or husbands, but their female friends, and making appearances alongside them on the red carpets of LA’s biggest awards shows. Former Dawson’s Creek actresses Michelle Williams and Busy Phillips are one such “couple”. In an interview with People magazine in the US, Williams said that Phillips is “proof that the love of your life does not have to be a man.” Drew Barrymore, meanwhile, described Cameron Diaz as “more than a best friend, she’s my sister.”
According to psychologist and founder of bWell Clinic in Malahide, Allison Keating, this is because, “Unlike any of our other relationships, female friendships are not based on duty. This gives them a unique freedom and joy.” With freedom comes variety, and it’s important to remember that the bonds between women are as diverse, complex and unique as those who form them. There’s no one size fits all. There’s no one way to grade the quality or meaningfulness of a friendship. Sex and the City offered a perspective on, not a prescription for, friendship. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem put it beautifully when she said, “[friendship] is not about how often, necessarily. It shouldn’t become a duty that you do whatever once a month. It’s just that the person is always there in moments of celebration or sorrow.”
Equally, in Between Women, authors Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum argue that focusing on emotional attunement as an ideal of friendship can create difficulties and disillusionment for women when feelings of anger, guilt or disappointment emerge – as they do in almost all relationships. As women we may be emotionally mature, but we’re not saints. The pressure to achieve “emotional attunement” is probably the reason why the reality of behind-the-scenes infighting and sidelining on the set of Sex and the City felt like a betrayal to fans. As it turned out, New York’s fab four weren’t BFFs in real life. Although this shouldn’t have come as any great shock – it’s not the first time a beloved on-screen relationship has been exposed as anything but cosy; Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey for one – but the furore over Kim Cattrall’s unequivocal assertion on Twitter that Sarah Jessica Parker is neither her family nor her friend and her decision not to return for the new HBO venture undermined the modern fairytale of female friendship which Sex and the City was built on and which we’d all so thoroughly bought into.
Despite this, Sex and the City did firmly dismantle what Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay described as “the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses – pretty but designed to slow women down.” Instead, the narrative implied that behind every great woman are great female friends. For centuries we’ve had so many social and cultural touch points that present women as spiteful and malicious – from the evil stepmother in Snow White to Sigourney Weaver’s manipulative lady boss in eighties’ drama Working Girl to the conniving ladies at court in The Great – that perhaps we needed, and still do, Sex and the City’s intense and aspirational depiction of what a female bond between four intelligent, working women might look like to even begin dismantling the urban myth that women can’t or won’t support each other.
It’s always suited a patriarchal society to perpetuate this fallacy because as Gloria Steinem explained, “With the women’s movement came the realisation that... support was crucial; that unless you had a group of people who share your values, and support each other, you probably can’t do it by yourself. It was a political necessity.” Historically, women’s friendships have often been undermined by their obligation to husband and family. Women fighting for equality realised that there was strength in a sisterhood.
Film historian Shelley Cobb agrees. She told The Guardian in a 2019 interview that traditionally even in Hollywood, “the [female] friendship always has to be subordinated to maturity, which is usually signalled by marriage, but also by motherhood…” The wildly successful Netflix show Grace and Frankie circumvented this cinematic convention by presenting a friendship between two mature recent divorcees, played by actress and activist Jane Fonda and her long-time collaborator and friend Lily Tomlin. Fonda once described women’s friendships as “a renewable source of power” and this sums up the dynamic between the two octogenarians in Grace and Frankie. Unlike Carrie and Samantha, these two are close both in front of and behind the camera. Over the past 40 years, Fonda and Tomlin have campaigned, protested, lobbied, worked and socialised together, and even hosted a TEDWomen talk called “A Hilarious Celebration of Lifelong Friendship”. Keating explains that one of the best things about decades- long friendships is “looking back and laughing at who and how you used to be.” What’s wonderful about these two women’s onscreen relationship is that it can be as tetchy as it is tender. In other words it’s real. It neither idealises or demonises relationships between women.
Grace and Frankie, though best friends, are complete opposites. The former is a straight-talking, cashmere-wearing, martini-drinking skincare expert, while Frankie is a creative and spiritualist, a free thinker who smokes and meditates in multicoloured kaftans. The show is a wonderful exploration of how a shared experience (being abandoned by their husbands) can cement a lasting bond between two such diverse characters.
I doubt that my two oldest girlfriends and I would seek each other out as companions now in our 40s, but that’s the wonderful thing about those very early relationships when they last; they bring a variety of perspectives and experiences into what might otherwise be a closed bubble of like-minded women. The most valued friendships I’ve formed in my 30s and 40s have all been with women who share my love of fashion. Those relationships, too, are close without being claustrophobic. Catch-ups and calls are occasional, not a defining part of every day.
However, this doesn’t make them any less valuable or meaningful than those friendships played out in each other’s pockets. It would be dangerous and absurd to neglect a terrific mate simply because of some idealised vision of a soulmate. Female friendships are about an authentic connection, shared sensibilities and pure enjoyment. As Michelle Obama said, “Friendships between women... are built of a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again.” They can be subtle and quiet and outwardly unremarkable, but just as enriching as those nurtured by any flamboyant foursome.
Originally published in the Irish Examiner Weekend magazine, May 2021