Sex and the City - a Sexual Reality Dsyfunction

I wonder why I have become so codependent on "Sex and the City," a 3-year-old network series nominated for many Emmy Awards about the sexual lives of four professional women. I sit in front of the TV religiously on Sunday nights, next to my husband of almost 15 years, to watch these four women have breakfast, lunch and sex. What is it that I like about these selfish, overindulgent, slim, well-dressed city dwellers in their mid-30s to early 40s, who sleep with a different man almost every episode?

Nara Schoenberg, writer for the Chicago Tribune, states that the series "helped popularize and glamorize the problems of single women in their 30s." I disagree that these are the general problems of single women in their 30s, unless we continue to think of sex and profession entirely deciding a woman's mental state. There is, of course, no room for spirituality in any of the four protagonists' lives. I'm not talking about Sunday attendance and regular churchgoing or even crystal healing, but of any type of spiritual seeking aside from getting a regular orgasm.

Samantha, Miranda, Charlotte and Carrie the main protagonists, astound us with their open talks about experimental sexuality. Charlotte, the show's stereotypical "romantic" after almost two seasons, is now-a married woman, giving up her profession as a museum curator. She married a millionaire.

Miranda is a cynical lawyer who cannot commit to the only guy who has treated her well, but continues to have sex with him. Samantha is the ideal businesswoman in her early 40s who fights for the rights to her sexuality, including, but not limited to, bisexuality, and parades a different lover or two in every show. And Carrie Bradshaw is the protagonist writer who pens a piece in the New York Observer titled "Sex and the City," thus the title of the series. Carrie has gone through being in love with "Big," a rich New York businessman who then marries and commits adultery on his wife with Carrie, whom he is unable to marry or even live with. Carrie runs through a series of "bad" boyfriends: alcoholics, womanizers, asexuals, and finally meets Aidan, the perfect boyfriend, on whom she cheats with Big while Big is still married.

In the last couple of years, anal sex, masturbation, vibrators, adultery and so on have made an original and visual imprint on the viewers. These women have committed every possible sin a woman could commit, except for murder, and yet they act entitled, empowered and superior.

What is incredibly interesting is that even the feminist actresses who portray the protagonists believe that the show is empowering to women. The real purpose of the show is to hook viewers by tantalizing them with sexual themes masked by the "friendship" theme of these four women in the Big Apple. But, any woman with real humane and interesting professional women as friends would not want anything to do with any of these four dysfunctional, self-loathing women. Unfortunately, many young women adore the show because of the "friendship" theme.