Sax & The City
My husband, a passionate punner, likes to call HBO’s groundbreaking show from the nineties “Sax & the City.” (Did he know it was also an Irish brass wedding band?)
I used to groan, but now I’ve decided that this is an appropriate choice — because in 2023, Sex & the City seems a bit squeamish about its own subject matter (um, you know … s*x…).
Once upon a time, it told stories nobody else did.
The reboot, called And Just Like That, seems to be working very hard to make up for all the stories it didn’t tell when its main characters were four straight, white, Christian gals. This has brought on several fun new characters and created appropriately challenging plot points for the legacy ladies, like when Charlotte is confronted with her child’s nonbinary gender identity.
Other times, it feels a bit like watching an after-school special, as the plot drags to a standstill to let the characters work through some expository dialogue that seems mostly meant to teach the audience something, like about respecting people’s pronouns. Don’t get me wrong — please respect people’s pronouns! — but please make the point in a more interesting way, writers. (Like they do on Survival of the Thickest on Netflix!)
I can roll with most of this. It’s a small price to pay to return to Carrie Bradshaw’s fantasyland, and to see what happens after the happily-ever-afters of the original series (and movies, I guess).
But last week, episode 10 … SET. ME. OFF.
One of the new main characters, Lisa Todd Wexley, has an unexpected pregnancy. She’s been busy creating a documentary series about important Black women in history, while her husband runs for public office and her three children attend fancy private schools. It’s a very unexpected pregnancy, given her age and the fact that she’d asked her husband to get a vasectomy after their last child was born.
When she confides in Charlotte, both women look anxious and pained. Yet neither of them seems capable of even glancing at her feelings directly. Charlotte does not ask: Is this good news? Were you expecting it? How do you feel about this pregnancy? Have you decided you do want to have another child?
Her husband’s reaction to her distress — pounding her pillow as she tosses, turns, and bemoans his un-had vasectomy — is similarly pathetic. He also celebrates her heroic strength and endurance, without questioning the need for her to live her life like some kind of ultra-marathoner. Plus, he says, “he’ll help.”
I think I was most disturbed by Charlotte and Herbert’s assumption that because a person can do something, they should and will. If life hands you lemons, you better damn well start making lemonade. Don’t even think about trying to set down that lemon! Squeeze, woman, squeeze, with all your might!
Herbert and Lisa, in the privacy of their bedroom, cannot even utter the word “abortion.” After going back and forth, he raises an eyebrow and asks if they “should be having the other conversation.” You know, the conversation that dares not speak its name. He cannot even have the conversation, he can only wiggle an eyebrow furtively in its direction.
Lisa continues to speak in euphemism. “I’m glad I have the option,” she says, but quickly dismisses “the choice.” Sounds like the state of New York is more willing to consider her options than she is. And this is not to say that Lisa should have an abortion! But she clearly Did Not Want to Be Pregnant in the first place—what message does it send that she is unwilling to even think through the option of ending her pregnancy?
In her own mind, she doesn’t really have a choice at all.
I couldn’t help but wonder: If abortion is unmentionable even for someone like Lisa, a wealthy, liberal woman in an abortion-protecting state like New York, on a show (once) as audacious as Sex & the City, how are we going to safeguard this precious human right in our country?
Well, there goes my dream of having Sarah Jessica Parker on for a future episode of the Extra+Ordinary podcast. Even without an SJP episode, sign up for our emails right now, because we are launching SOON, and CLEARLY the women of American (nay, the world) are in dire need of more uplifting and enlightened stories about abortion and reproductive justice.
P.S. I had fun making these memes. Have at ‘em, let that writers’ room hear our cry!