Craig Blankenhorn/HBOSarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in Times Square in the season-opening episode of "Sex and the City."The Relevance of 'Sex' in a City That's Changed
By JULIE SALAMON
ex and the City" sashayed into public consciousness in the summer of 1998, when sex had become, if not the national pastime, the reigning political story. Monica Lewinsky had just been featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, and her name was regularly mentioned on the front pages of major newspapers. The Clinton-Lewinsky affair had made lewd gossip an acceptable form of political commentary, and "Sex and the City" quickly became part of the pundit glossary.
The show, a smart and frisky comedy, became an instant hit, and not just in New York, though the city became an essential character, an otherworldly backdrop of glamorous hedonism and larger-than-life yearning. This was New York rarefied, the glittering city of after-hours parties, where models and Wall Streeters mingle with the almost-beautiful and the not-quite-rich, and a crucial component of social I.Q. is the ability to spot a Birkin bag across a crowded room.
After Sept. 11, however, Manhattan acquired a terrible new symbolism, and economic uncertainty has taken a toll on hedonism, at least of the expense-account kind. Osama bin Laden has outpaced Monica Lewinsky by 17 to 1 in the pages of The New York Times over the last year. Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays Carrie Bradshaw, the newspaper writer whose column tracks her adventures in dating, is pregnant in real life. Kim Cattrall, who plays the public relations vamp, Samantha, published a sex manual with her husband this year — in which she confessed that she didn't enjoy her 20 years of sex before meeting him. And earlier this month, Candace Bushnell, the sleek blonde writer whose libidinous columns in The New York Observer and subsequent book spawned "Sex and the City," got married, at 43 (to a man 10 years younger than she, but still, married).
Tonight "Sex and the City" begins its fifth season on HBO in a world solemnized by terrorism and, apparently, newly appreciative of the joys of marriage. What does this mean for a show that has relied on an unending sense of youth and blitheness? Has "Sex" become irrelevant?
Not at all. It's a different show than it was, not as lighthearted, but it's still involving and inventive. Chastity hasn't replaced promiscuity. There's still plenty of sex and plenty of talk about sex... more
