From what I saw of Sex & City, I was horrified at the portrayal of women there. Dumb and insecure. How could these top notch actresses project such a horrible role model for girls glued to this show?! G-d forbid I had a daughter resembling any one of them and especially Carrie. Where is the pride and dignity in being yourself and not groveling to the first swinging dick?
38
I had my REAL experience with Mr. Big, Chris Noth. I met him out with friends on a Monday night on the Upper East Side in 2001, just before 9/11. He invited me to go visit his friend's restaurant in Times Square. I had to decline (I was actually on a date that night) but I decided later (2 am) to head over. I won't elaborate on this venue, his PR might get in touch with me and put a quash on it, but let's just say I got a full private tour of the kitchen. And restaurant office. SIGH.. There's my BIG story... Boy have I loved telling my friends since then... Yes, I really did meet Mr. Big
35
I began watching “Sex and the City” in 2006, thanks to an NYU MPH colleague I met in a fall semester course.
However, Madonna’s “Confessions on a Dance Floor” was the soundtrack to my time in the city and metro area (2005-2007 in Manhattan and 2007-2009 in Montclair and Chatham, NJ).
5
This article confirms what I always thought about "Sex and City": it was not the NYC I knew and loved. I moved out in 1990. I had started to notice this change from an idealistic bohemian lifestyle to a superficial life style only concerned about expensive shoes and brands and fame. I started noticing this superficial empty life in my art friends only concerned about what they wore, who they knew, and what VIP places they could get in to validate their existence. I moved out of NYC and I still grieve the creative scene that no longer exists. The city is now mostly populated with the untalented and the superficial gentrifiers. I hope something happens to make NYC great again.
29
Parker herself parked herself in the heart of the west village and an army of baby strollers followed. Drove out the last vestiges of the rich history of a couple generations of gay men. I worked at a gay-owned restaurant on Bleecker, around the corner from her now abandoned townhouse (post massive profiteering worthy of any modern-era pirate), that is of course now one of the few boutiques for wealthy white women left on the decimated block, because the money couldn't keep up with the reality. I still am down there occasionally, sadly, because my dermatologist is there, across the street from where - to this very day - straggler fans creep up the block to "Carrie's building" in some desperate dance of inanity. It's truly disgusting what that series did to NYC. They should be all deeply, deeply ashamed.
17
I couldn't have a love affair with new York because I loved the city and then I visited in the winter and the love was gone. I'm so happy about it because now new York is a great place to visit and fantasize about a glamorous life, but then realize I love the sun the beach and the perfect weather too much to live up there.
5
I grew up in northern Manhattan - at the end of the A train - and spent time after college back in my old neighborhood from 80-84. Maybe it was too early in the city's recovery from the doldrums: all of these neighborhoods downtown were pretty sketchy. But to me it had all the grimness and too little of the adventure. Subsequent visits over the last few years have impressed me only in the snapshots of advancing gentrification: it's Disneyland for the global rich, and everyone else is hanging on.
I never saw Sex and the City. Maybe I should try an episode.
The reactions some in the article and as well in the comments made me think of another show - Seinfeld - that always rubbed me the wrong way. People asked me why I didn't watch it or like it. I could only reply that it just reminded me of smug, entitled folks that I really didn't miss one bit.
22
What was cheeky ironic fun and “guilty pleasure” up to September 10, 2001 became utterly unwatchable self-indulgence, forever, just one day later.
30
As a person who more or less grew up in Manhattan and moved away twice in my youth and then again permanently, I used to watch the show whenever I was homesick for the great visuals of New York City. The interactions of the main characters were ridiculous and funny, but left a kind of bad aftertaste too. I remember that some of the musical accompaniments were sad and poignant--much more so than the main characters who were self involved to the extreme.
14
This article does not have the POV of one Black American. Just like SATC.
65
I moved to NYC in 2003, for reasons having nothing to do with SATC (though like most other 30ish urban gay men at the time, I watched the show religiously). Through the type of fluke one normally only sees on TV, I ended up living in a huge E. Village loft for $1,500/month. It wasn't formally rent-controlled, but since the building had been owned by a group of feuding family members for 25 years, the rent was far below market-rate.
As it so happened, it featured a 20-foot-long ceiling-bolted clothes rack. I'd always had a knack for finding designer threads on the cheap, so the rack was essentially full. I also worked as a travel guide editor at the time, and dated a lengthy string of men who were mostly terrible for an endless litany of reasons. Still, it took nearly a year for a friend to make the observation that I was effectively a "gay male Carrie Bradshaw" -- NOT by design.
I moved away from the city four years later, after my too-good-to-be-true loft deal ended (the feuding family members sold it after receiving a too-good-to-pass-up offer at the market's peak). By then I'd concluded, like most of the critics quoted at the end of the article, that an era had ended, in significant part due to the show. CBGB closed. The Bowery, a quarter-block from my loft, was rapidly gentrifying. (Its Whole Foods opened!) West Chelsea became a "thing." And Carrie Bradshaw wannabes invaded via B&T like clockwork every weekend night.
My time there was great, but I'm glad I left.
26
Carrie's character always felt whiny, entitled and out of control. When it first came out, it was exciting but as I have watched re-runs, and grown older, I have come to see the character as self-destructive and entitled.
43
Exactly, but it was like a 4-car pile-up on the interstate: you didn't want to look but you couldn't help yourself. The horror of the way it cannibalized anything good about NYC. You could feel the army of SATC wannabes marching towards us to infest the city and drive out all that was interesting about it. And they did. Now they sit amongst their own kind in glass condo building living as vapidly as they ever did.
28
Carrie's apartment was a rent controlled, one bedroom walk up . Could have been 300 a month or less. She spent the alot of her money on shoes but was shown. shopping at vintage/thrift shops got invited to lots of free stuff because of her celebrity and her friends occupations and she went on dates with guys who paid.
The pre 21st century NYC world was about where you lived, Manhattan and what you and your friends did for a living.
Music, fashion, art, actors, PR people made a new place hot .A good combo, of locals and the former made long running bars and restaurants continously cool .
Being discovered and overrun by car salesmen and secretaries from Brooklyn, made it Bridge & Tunnel and over as a desirable hangout.
Queens,was practically another state, the Bronx too scary, SI another country.
Brooklyn was where you grew up and moved out of.
Now its apparently the place to go with no dress code.
Anyone who comes to NYC in this,decade needs one thing. Money. You can go anywhere and pretend you're special as long as you can pay for it.
Or you have a desperate desire to get away from home and spend a fortune every month to live with 2 -3 strangers .
So glad to have had the pre 21st century Manhattan experience, in my own UWS hovel, with 40 pairs of 4.00 shoes and lots of invites.
32
"Queens,was practically another state, the Bronx too scary, SI another country."
I'm sure this will sound terrible, but during my four years living in NYC (between 2003-2007), I visited these three boroughs exactly zero times, not counting departures out of JFK and LGA. I know, I know...
19
"Carrie's apartment was a rent controlled, one bedroom walk up ."
Um, well, please try to remember this was fiction. There was no Carrie, there was no apartment, and, even so, it was not rent-controlled.
11