How Carrie Bradshaw became the villain of SATC

Yes, Carrie Bradshaw is a menace. So what? vox.com/culture CULTURE   It’s become de rigeur on the internet to point out, a full 26 years after her debut, that Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw is actually kind of a bad person. She picks terrible men. She monopolizes conversations with her friends about how one terrible man in particular doesn’t want her. She gets a perfect boyfriend, then she cheats on him with said terrible man. It’s at the point where, whenever I find myself in conversations about which character archetype we most fall into, I have to sort of grimace and admit that ultimately, I am “a Carrie.” Now that, as of this month, Sex and the City is available to stream on Netflix, a whole new spate of people may be meeting Carrie for the first time. But it’s worth remembering in the next wave of discourse that Carrie sucking was kind of … the point? Of the show? Female TV antiheroes were pretty revolutionary at the time, and, as my colleague [Kyndall Cunningham couldn’t help but wonder](: Was she even that bad? Fellow Carries, rise up. —[Rebecca Jennings](, senior correspondent Does it matter if Carrie Bradshaw is the worst? [a picture of the cast of Sex and The City, with Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) in the center]( Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images In another major licensing grab for Netflix, HBO’s juggernaut Sex and the City officially landed on the platform this month. Older fans of the show are already anticipating the possibility of Gen Z’s horrified reaction to the raunchy and, in some ways, culturally outdated show. Can today’s youth stomach Carrie’s confusion over bisexuality or the women’s obsession with thinness? Will “puriteens” be scandalized watching Samantha Jones hook up with a random delivery guy? Lest we forget, Sex and the City has been available to stream for years. So the idea that teenagers and early 20-somethings have never engaged with the series before is a little presumptuous. (They’ve surely encountered some fashion inspo TikToks.) Rather, it seems like this move to Netflix has given everyone a chance to [reignite the now-decades-long discourse]( about the show’s storylines and characters. It’s only natural then that social media users are already firing off takes about Carrie Bradshaw. To be fair, fans are never not discussing the show’s polarizing protagonist. In the years during and after the show aired in 1998, Carrie was largely celebrated as a feminist triumph — the rare single, childless (and messy) woman in her 30s portrayed in a (somewhat) aspirational light. “We had never seen female characters date this way or talk this way before on television,” says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of Sex and the City and Us: How Four Single Women Changed the Way We Think, Live, and Love. “Carrie was at its center, which is a position often reserved for the sane, grounded, most relatable one.” However, the 2010s saw a wave of essays and criticism reevaluating her character — mostly by emphasizing her more annoying qualities — which the show occasionally downplayed. [Was Carrie ever the ideal image of female independence, or just a self-absorbed, self-destructive nightmare?]( In 2024, the latter opinion has become more of a default perspective, and the primary lens through which many fans seem to enjoy the show. How did this anti-Carrie sentiment come to consume so much of the discourse surrounding SATC — a lighthearted but textually rich show with an abundance of interesting talking points, a slew of actual villains, and three other complex main characters? [Read the full story »](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( How “industry plants” became the internet’s hottest conspiracy It seems like every musician is being labeled an “industry plant” — does it actually mean anything? [Read the full story »]( X-Men ’97 is Marvel’s best argument for an X-Men animated feature Soapy, super-powered, and silly, X-Men ’97 is a Marvel masterpiece. [Read the full story »](   Support our work We aim to explain what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters. Support our mission by making a gift today. [Give](   More good stuff to read today - [Mega drive-throughs explain everything wrong with American cities]( - [The Michigan school shooter’s parents face precedent-setting sentences]( - [Why are so many young people getting cancer?]( - [The messy legal drama impacting the Bravo universe, explained]( - [“Equivalent to having 50 Super Bowls”: The staggering — and lucrative — scale of eclipse tourism]( - [Why is there so much lead in American food?](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=culture). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.