Also at Macleans.ca:

• Interview with Kim Cattrall
  'I didn't want to take the Samantha role — at 40, I didn't think I was sexy enough'
• The Macleans.ca Interview: Darren Star
  The creator of Sex and the City on objectifying men, taking network TV too far and why his hit series holds up, even without the four-letter words and naughty bits.

The year was 1998. On television, women were more assertive than they'd ever been. Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave us female superheroes; ER and NYPD Blue presented women doctors and cops who were just as grim as their male counterparts. There was a discordant note in the creation of anti-feminist icon Ally McBeal, but otherwise, it seemed like women would continue to rule in TV land. Then came Sex and the City, a funny, sharply written comedy about four improbably well-dressed women, which creator Darren Star says was "meant to look at relationships and sexuality from the point of view of urban women in their 30s." Now, as the show celebrates its 10th anniversary with a feature film, women on television are neurotic, sex-obsessed, and less powerful than they have been in years. Sex and the City got a lot of credit in its time for helping the image of women. But if that's the case, then wouldn't women on TV be a little better off than they are?

That's not to say that female TV characters were completely liberated before Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall). True, their predecessors had more interesting jobs and beat up more people, but one thing they didn't have much of was sex. When Darren Star, the creator of Beverly Hills 90210, tried to do an episode showing that Brenda (Shannen Doherty) enjoyed losing her virginity and had no regrets about it, the network forced him to walk it back: "I was told that for the next season, she had to deal with the dreadful ramifications of this act, which meant a pregnancy scare and breaking up with her boyfriend." When Star went to the freer environment of HBO and came up with Sex and the City (based on Candace Bushnell's semi-autobiographical book), he was finally able to imply that women could not only enjoy sex as much as men, but talk about it as crassly as men, with lines like "is it okay to f--k one guy when you're pregnant with another guy's baby?" Diana Cowan, a content specialist for TVGuide.ca, says that "the biggest change Sex and the City brought about in the way women were portrayed on TV was their cavalier approach to sex."

"We were very consciously turning the stereotype on its head," is how Star explains the show's mission. "Women have always been objectified by men, and in this case the women were objectifying men. The men had names like Mr. Big; they weren't even referred to by name." Before Sex and the City, the TV stereotype was that men can be sex-crazed and superficial, but women had to be above all that; the definitive scene of the pre-SATC era might have been a scene from Friends that intercut women's romantic, starry-eyed views of love with men who only care about physical pleasure ("Tongue?" "Yeah."). Star and his Sex and the City writers (including Michael Patrick King, who wrote and directed the movie) decided that women might be stronger figures if they were less sensitive and more self-absorbed. The very first episode had Carrie feeling a sense of empowerment — the feminist holy grail — not by avoiding sex but by having sex "like a man," using men for sex without getting involved. It was a show where sex with a handsome man doesn't have to be a life-changing event for women, and women viewers loved it.

Of course, to make the show more palatable to male viewers — there were some, here and there — the show always took the women down a peg or two when they were in danger of getting self-reliant. But at a time when even superheroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer would go all to pieces over men (or broody vampires), Sex and the City at least offered something new: when Carrie tells a man that she's not ready for marriage, he's the one who whines and pushes and insists that "people fall in love, they get married, that's what they do." It's a reversal of the TV stereotype where women are emotional and men are scared of commitment: in the Sex and the City world, men tend to be whiny, needy, and not too bright.

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