Why does my Gen Z daughter adore Sex and the City?

The answer says a lot about the state of young sex lives

Fond as I am of the Gen-Zers in my orbit, it has to be said: they take eye-rolling to unprecedented new heights. It’s not just my 19-year-old daughter, is it? There really is very little, if anything, about me and my fellow Gen Xers - our love of Wine O’Clocking, our Tik Tok illiteracy, our wearing trainer socks and sometimes perching our sunglasses on our head - that doesn’t mark us out as unspeakably lame and embarrassing. I once wrote a column at You magazine that was a list of things I do that mortify my daughter, which included waving hello to someone I know in the street and accessorising my outfit with a scarf. 

So why, I couldn’t help but wonder, has my daughter, Evie, recently become so obsessed with the one television show that is the ode to Generation X? Sex and the City was my show. Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda are my girls. So integral were they to our lives that I cited them, relentlessly, back when we were pitching to advertisers about our soon-to-be-launched magazine, Glamour. This was back in 2000/2001, when SATC was a couple of seasons in and the must-see TV of its day. I was 31. So were Carrie and co. Like the magazine I was launching (or so went the spiel), the SATC women cheerily pursued sex, love, joy, ambition, emotional and financial independence, whilst also unapologetically celebrating frivolities like shoes and bright blue drinks. Feminism, or so we said back then, did not have to mean eschewing make-up or feeling embarrassed to say you were looking for The One. 

It spoke to me. It spoke to millions of us. It was the first TV show that felt written about us and for us. It’s not the first and only show to ever make female friendships the centrepiece, but even now, that’s rare. It was the first time we’d seen anything like it reflecting our exact age and life stages.   

So I was really surprised at how much my jaded, woke 19-year loves it. And I mean, really, truly, obsessively loves it. She recently declared it ‘the greatest television ever made’. Really? Why would someone so young like a show so old? Especially one that’s rife with the drinking and shopping and shagging that we’re forever being told this lot are just not that into.  Evie’s left cold by Friends on account of all the dated fat and gay jokes, so I assumed some of the more ‘problematic’ SATC content - like the time the girls tell Carrie to dump a guy because he’s bi, or all the clunky weiner jokes in the one where Samantha locks horns with some transgender prostitutes - would get the same short shrift. But nope, she’s all in, right down to the cotton-tailed behind on this look from Carrie.

Have you watched any of it with your teen? Her dad has simply upped and left the room because he can’t watch his daughter watching Samantha ‘reverse cowgirl’ Smith. Even I was squirming all the way through the one where Samantha (it’s always Samantha, bless her adventurous heart), cops a face full of another woman’s ejaculating vagina.

 ‘Oh Mum, please,’ she said, and I could hear the eye-roll before I saw it. ‘Think about all the weird French films I watch.’

Well that’s true. I do sometimes forget she is now an actual adult. An adult who’s become a card-carrying cinephile. The card is for the BFI and she takes herself off most weekends, to sit in the dark on her own and watch something odd and Russian from the Cold War era. Or yes, something porny from 1960s France. The less I know, probably the better. 

But it’s Evie’s analysis of the sex in SATC that intrigued me.   

‘The sex in the show really isn’t the point,’ she says. ‘Whenever it’s in there, it’s because it’s making some other point for the plot. It’s talking about the solving of an emotional dilemma. Or it’s there to show up something funny about a relationship, like if someone does something embarrassing that everyone can relate to. Whereas, a lot of shows now… they try really hard to make the sex this really sexy, or dirty thing, when it’s just… not. Like all the sexual encounters in Sex Education for example, are awkward because it’s teenagers. Or with Euphoria, you know even before you watch it that the nudity and the sex and not much else is just the vibe. It’s not there to drive the story.’

And just like that, I understood a little bit better. Could it be that SATC, whose answering machines and low slung jeans have not aged well, is still a more human, more rounded and more comforting depiction of where sex fits in the wider scheme of our lives?  And possibly more than anything currently aimed square at this audience?

Back then, we all thought SATC was groundbreaking: a modern voice on modern relationships and as such, it definitely tested the boundaries for what was considered palatable for TV at the time. A few things spring to memory, like the live sex demo at the tantric sex class, the wanking marathons, even the guy who eats out a fig for Charlotte at a restaurant table was pretty dirty for its day. But I’m fascinated that to my teenager’s eyes, the sex is a supporting character  - way down the list behind the girls, their friendships, the fashion and New York. And to her eyes, the sex is usually either funny, or just kind of… sweet. Which is the real rarity in modern TV. 

It’s an obvious point that SATC was not competing with our phones for our attention. There was less desperation to gratuitously shock us into looking up at the TV screen for one damn second please. Whether it’s the aggressive approach of Euphoria, or the flesh mobs of Love Island, to the relentless swipe swipe swiping of Tinder et al, sometimes it feels like everything these kids are presented with is about instantly slamming everyone’s uglies together first and then maybe having a conversation later. But probably not. 

Dare I say that SATC suggests how much simpler - and nicer - relationships could be?

‘There were no dating apps!’ Evie almost shrieks. ’And it’s wild to me that Carrie will go about her business all day and only when she gets home she’ll see she’s got a message from Big. On the machine! It’s just so weird how… inaccessible people were. And it looks pretty great to be honest.’ 

Can’t argue with that. And for Gen Z, an episode of SATC is the first time they’ve ever witnessed - in fiction or real life - that quaint old event known as the ‘meet cute’. Ah, the magical time when there was always a chance you might turn a corner and bump head first into your future husband (Big), or discover that the new shop down the road is owned by a cute single guy (Aiden). According to Evie, and her friends, this is really no longer a thing.

Of course, we thought we had it tough. The whole point of the show was to bond 21st-century women in the face of the dating battlefield. And while there are indeed things that are better now - younger women will not be tolerating your victim blaming, ‘but what was she wearing?’ bullshit, thanks very much - rewatching SATC really drives home to me that today’s single young things are out there braving a dating apocalypse.

The discussions are so dominated by all the darkness: the sabotaging effect of porn on sex lives, the risk of catfishing, the cold-hearted, just keep swiping culture of all the apps, #metoo, #believeherq, and then the resultant terror in young men who feel at some stage they’ll be accused of rape.  Where, in all of this, is the room for the conversation that dating, sex and -  dare I say it - actual love can be nice and wholesome things? 

No wonder there are young women discovering SATC and finding all the sex in it - butt-licking and all - quite soothingly vanilla.

In fact, the only thing that Evie claims truly shocked her about Sex and the City? The amount of shit Carrie puts up with from Big. Which feels like something of a parenting win.