Sex and the City: Dilara O’Neil (Guest Post), November 8

Dilara O'Neil / 11.08.18

Bed-Stuy, New York

Dear Friends,

In Season 5, Episode 5, on the heels of her breakup with Aidan, and Big's move to Napa Valley, Carrie publishes a collection of her columns called—you guessed it—Sex and the City. The assembled columns, originally imprints of her sexual history narrated almost in real time, now make up a single, tidy document. Her story has been tied together with a bow—in fact, it is the bow that makes the story. (For viewers, the bow even doubles the story by suggesting that Carrie will have the same runaway success as her real-life inspiration Candace Bushnell, whose book of the same name gave rise to the very show we are watching.) She poses on the cover in a short black mini dress and pink stilettos.

Carrie does a reading in California. Big shows up unannounced. He has read the book "cover to cover." All of her columns in one sitting, "one right after the other. Bam bam," he tells her over dinner. If she now has a story, he does too, of which she is the teller. And then he says the words every girl dreams of hearing: "I had no idea that I hurt you so much." They go back to her hotel room and sleep together.

At the beginning of their courtship, in Sex and the City's pilot, Big asks Carrie what she does for work, and Carrie explains that she is a sort of "sexual anthropologist." "You mean," Big replies, "like a hooker?" Throughout the show, she collects data from friends, from interviews with acquaintances, and, most of all, from her own life. For Carrie, dating is fieldwork. But while Carrie the writer attempts to describe the modern landscape of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Carrie the single woman is also attempting to crack the code (a tension in the show that Ned discussed in his first post). The women tend to move through men quickly, searching—most of them, anyway—for the right one. The data they collect becomes a database that they discuss over brunch, informal waves of information shared between a group of women which Carrie records and publishes—and, Carrie's local celebrity suggests, her fans then eagerly search for themselves in her columns. An active readership suggests, also, a collective coauthorship, an active give-and-take between writer and reader.

A little over a year ago, in an early wave of what was about to be called the MeToo movement, I tweeted something about a sexual assault I had experienced two years before that, perpetrated by a male journalist. Someone—no one quite remembers who—plugged the tweet into the Shitty Media Men list, a spreadsheet that circulated briefly but widely in media circles in the fall of 2017, sparking debates and retaliations that just keep coming. For the moment that the spreadsheet was live, anyone with whom it was shared could contribute personal experiences of shittiness—sometimes assaults, sometimes more nebulous episodes of harassment or misogyny—by men in the industry. Names of men who had multiple claims against them were highlighted in red. It was a whisper network, a database, though unlike the one offered by Carrie's columns, its point was to change things. "As someone who dated someone on The List..." became our way of dipping into explicit conversations about the gender and sexual norms we had begun to reevaluate. Inevitably, though, the list also became a public document of a certain kind of dating scene in New York. Some men apparently shared it gleefully. Others who weren't on it, I hear, were disappointed.

A number of women came forward about their own experiences with the person who had assaulted me, and my tweet was endlessly posted both within leftist media circles and by the alt right. Unlike Carrie, my face was not on the cover of a book or a bus—technically, I was semi-anonymous, with only my first name used in the press coverage that followed—but descriptions of what happened to my body were making their way all over town. It is also one thing to write, as Carrie did, probing questions about the 69 position, and another to know people were reading an account of a blowjob I was forced into giving. Eventually, people moved on from the Shitty Media Men list. But the sensation of feeling marked doesn't disappear, not completely. It took a year to sort through the rubble, to record the sensation and circulation of confession; six thousand words that I finally published in an essay last month, to track everything that happened because of a single tweet. With the records assembled neatly in print, Big can read about his past in one place, reconsider his imprint on Carrie's inner life, and reappear. By contrast, most of the men who faced serious allegations on the list have slunk into anonymity. Closure feels unlikely, the thought of hearing from them, threatening.

* * *

My mom watched Sex and the City when it first aired, but I didn't watch with her; I didn't even say the word "sex" in front of my family until well into my teens. She had emigrated from Turkey in the mid-1980s and now, in the mid-2000s, was stuck in with me in suburban Massachusetts after her American husband, my dad, left her heartbroken and broke. The cheapest activity in town was going to the movies, so we went every weekend to whichever PG-13 romantic comedy was playing, sneaking in sandwiches and candy. Most of the romcoms we saw were set in a milder, trickle-down version of the SATC universe: the tone was less acid, but they reliably concerned the lives of women in New York who worked in fashion or journalism or public relations. "You should never financially rely on a man!" my mother would remark to me on the drive home. It was her main takeaway from almost every movie.

This wasn't necessarily the conclusion you were supposed to draw from How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days or 13 Going on 30. Usually by the end, a type-A neurotic played by a hot blonde would, against all odds, fall in love with a wrung-out Matthew McConaughey type, with intimations of marriage to follow. My mom, however, focused on the middle—the scenes of women at work in designer clothing, or out in restaurants, or brunches, with high-end food that they could afford to eat and cocktails they could afford to drink. For years, every time we watched The Devil Wears Prada, she would remark on how much of a shame it was for Anne Hathaway to quit her demanding job at a fashion magazine. "I see you maybe living with a partner, but never getting married," she said on our drive home from seeing He's Just Not That Into You, a movie based on a book based on a self-explanatory line in a Sex and the City episode. In He's Just Not That Into You, Ben Affleck won't marry Jennifer Aniston, though they live in a sprawling loft. We were driving home to our cramped two bedroom apartment that we could barely afford to rent, let alone own—a huge sore spot. According to the movie, a loft is not enough, but the way my mom read it, it was better to live in the middle, better to keep the apartment (and, if necessary, the noncommittal guy).

In Sex and the City's fourth season, Aidan proposes, then buys the apartment Carrie rents so that they can live together. After she refuses his proposal and they break up, she has to buy it back from him or risk losing it. The grief of her breakup is diverted to grieving the potential loss of her apartment. Just as she admits to her loneliness in the episodes that follow, she also realizes her grim financial status. Her paychecks, as we're led to believe, go into her designer shoes, which lose value as they gain dust in her closet. By Jane Austen standards, her inability to make a suitable match combined with her lack of money would seem rather dire. My mother and I could only dream of such wealth.

* * *

In SATC's sex scenes, especially the show's scenes of casual sex, the women are mostly on top. Fuck, don't get fucked, the show told us, even though it wasn't really clear what that meant. "Can you have sex like a man?" Carrie asks in the pilot episode. A few minutes later, she sees a man she casually slept with out with another woman, and the look on her face suggests that the question has been answered before the second episode even begins. I tend to think my mom misunderstood the show, and the early-2000s chick flicks it inspired, because of cultural and language barriers. But I was born in the US and have lived in New York since I began college in 2012—and for me and friends my age, the pre-recession, post-feminist culture of Sex and the City still feels too remote to grasp. To have looked at all this data, to have assembled the database, and to have seen it only as a means to finding the perfect match rather than assuming the possibility that each encounter we have is political—well, what would the right interpretation be?Twenty years after the premier of Sex and the City, and one month after I last sat down and watched the show, I paused at a stoplight on 30th Street and Seventh Avenue and saw a bus with Sarah Jessica Parker's face on it. She was decked out in black silk pajamas, a diamond necklace and earrings, with a lace bra peeking out. It was an ad campaign for Intimissimi, a lingerie brand whose ads have now started clogging up my Facebook and Instagram feeds. It's a partial callback to the opening credits of SATC, where Carrie walks by an ad campaign for her own column, a photo of herself pasted onto a bus in a form fitting pink dress that resembles the color of her skin, meant to suggest nudity.

I am struck by the image of Carrie as a public face, a floating head that originated as a fictional advertisement for her sex column now informing our reality. In the second season, after her first breakup with Big, she shows up to a photoshoot for New York magazine hungover, bags under her eyes, no makeup, cigarette in her hand. They title it "Single and Fabulous?" It is humiliating to her. Her public persona as a sexy socialite is debased, stripped down to make her look ugly and sad. "You wanted to be a personal writer," my therapist said the day my piece about having my assault discussed on Breitbart came out, "but it turns out it's very strenuous for you." Only in the last week has it all begun to feel like part of the past.

My friend thinks she may have written my tweet into the red cell of the List, though I swore we had talked about it, wondering who wrote it. Perhaps it was the spreadsheet's creator. It could have been a stranger. Of that time, I have a mental image of hundreds of people hunched over their laptops looking at screenshots of the List on Reddit, reading about the interior lives of these women, of us.

In January I met someone very kind, who kisses my forehead when I'm sad and brings me Tylenol when my stomach aches. No one is knocking down the door of my bedroom, threatening to invade my space. Instead, our narrative progresses away from the signifiers of the city, inside these walls. I write this from their bed.

When I first came out about this assault I omitted my last name. Now, the essay is published under my full name, my face easily attachable. This no longer bothers me. As I search for a research project where I do not mine my own life for data so heavily, the personal seems to stretch outwards like an elastic band. I am both powerful and powerless within it.

Love,

Dilara

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