Everything You Need to Know About “Sex and the City” to Watch “And Just Like That”

Feature image via Getty / 1999 Paramount Pictures

Sara Ramirez is — and always has been — a queer magnet, even before they came out as bisexual and then non-binary. They are just… electric. I can’t get enough. You can’t get enough. And that’s why we’ve gotten about ten billion tweets and comments from readers who want to know if they need to watch the original Sex and the City to understand/enjoy them in And Just Like That. Honestly? Probably not. But I am surrounded on all sides by completionists, so I understand the impulse. Riese tracks all queer TV in a comprehensive database. Drew tracks every single movie and TV show she watches in an app. One time Valerie Anne spent an entire summer binging — no joke — 171 episodes of The Vampire Diaries just so she wouldn’t miss any references when she started Legacies, which isn’t even a spin-off, but exists in the same universe! But look, Sex and the City was a product of its time and if you haven’t watched it, you don’t need to. I feel you — but I’m here to help.

What’s The Sex and What’s The City?

Photo by Getty / 1999 Paramount Pictures

In 1998, when TV still existed in a 4:3 ratio (you know, like square TVs) and the internet was still dial-up and I personally had never even heard the word “masturbation,” Sex and the City debuted on HBO. The story centered four single, straight (mostly), affluent white women living in New York City, and having a whole lot of sex, something women didn’t particularly do a lot of on TV in the 90s.

The main character, Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), was even a sex and dating columnist. In addition to dating and boning, these four women also wore some of the most loony tunes clothes you have ever seen in your entire life. Like shoes and coats that cost as much as a mortgage! They also went to brunch as much as possible, attended many fancy parties at trendy NYC hot spots (enough for the tourism industry to create an entire full weekend bus tour out of them), and made cosmopolitan cocktails very popular. It was Carrie’s signature drink. (A cosmo is a terrible beverage made of cranberry juice, lime, vodka, triple sec, and an orange peel for garnish. You’d be better off drinking a Capri Sun.)

Can you tell me more about these four women?

I can tell you an embarrassing amount about these four women. You know how, before JK Rowling revealed herself as a radicalized transphobic jackass, all queer nerds sorted everyone into Hogwarts houses? Or how most other queers sort everyone by their zodiac signs? Well in the late 90s, the women of Sex and the City were the Hogwarts houses. People even went around saying — out loud — “Oh, I’m such a Miranda” or “Oh, that was such a Samatha thing to do.”

I’ll sort ’em for you.

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker)

Photo by Paramount Pictures/Newsmakers

Like I said, Carrie is the main character on the show. She voices over every episode, most of which are themed around whatever column topic she’s covering at the time. In nearly every episode, she says, “I couldn’t help but wonder…” which is kind of her calling card in her writing. In her life, Carrie also thinks she is the main character. Of, like, the world. This would be always unbearable (instead of 67% unbearable) if SJP wasn’t actually a brilliant actress who makes you feel empathy even when her struggles are as trite as a broken shoe heel derailing her entire week. She’s the one that wears the most bonkers of all the bonkers outfits, including a very famous tiered tutu paired with a pale-pink tank top and strappy sandals, which she wore in the show’s opening credits.

Carrie’s main love interest, from the very beginning of the show, is a guy she calls “Big,” as in “big tycoon, big dreamboat, and big time out of my league.” We don’t even learn that his name is John James Preston until like maybe 100 episodes in. He’s played very charmingly by Chris Noth, but he is a prick of epic proportions who just cannot commit to Carrie. They are on again, off again, on again, off again, on, off, on, off, on, off for the whole show. And then they finally get married. Carrie dates a lot of other dillholes, especially Aidan Shaw, the ultimate Nice Guy, before Nice Guys were being called out for being Nice Guys.

Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon)

Photo by RJ Capak/WireImage

Before Cynthia Nixon ran for governor of New York, before she even realized she was queer and came out (I still don’t actually know what label she uses; she’s been very cagey about it!), she landed the role of high-powered, uptight, cynical lawyer Miranda Hobbes, who actually kind of hates men. Everyone calls her Carrie’s “voice of reason” because she is the only one who’ll tell her best friend she’s dating an endless parade of handsome horror shows. She’s also the only one on the show who really attempts to “have it all.” She has a kid named Brady, she buys her own apartment, she becomes a partner at her law firm, and — at the very end of the show — she finally commits to her longtime boyfriend, Steve, a shy little guy who owns a bar and loves to play basketball and kind of sounds like a cartoon character. In one of her most famous scenes, when she’s trying to lose her baby weight, she throws away some cake, and then eats the cake out of the trash can, and then calls Carrie and says, “I ate some cake out of the trash can.”

Charlotte York (Kristin Davis)

Photo by Bill Davila/FilmMagic

Charlotte’s like… what if Blair Waldorf grew up? Do you know what I mean? She’s the sort of wholesomey girl next door, if your door is next to another six million dollar apartment on Park Avenue. She’s the friend who is most often scandalized by all the sex talk, and the friend who wants to get married most of all. Her family’s from Connecticut, she attended Smith, she majored in “Art,” and dreams of one day owning her own gallery if she can’t do the stay at home mom thing.

She’s the first of the gals in the group to get married and also to get divorced. Her first husband, Trey MacDougal (played hilariously by Kyle MacLachlan), is a cardio surgeon with a super-wealthy mom named Bunny who will not stay out of Charlotte’s business. Charlotte and Trey decide to wait until they get married to have sex, which Charlotte only realizes is because Trey struggles with impotence the day before their wedding. Their marriage is unhappy and so Charlotte divorces him — and falls in love with her divorce lawyer, Harry Goldenblatt. She thinks she’s too good for him ’cause he’s not the handsomest guy on the show and he sweats a lot. But ultimately she for really real falls for him, converts to Judaism, and marries him.

They adopt one daughter, Lily, and Charlotte gives birth to a second daughter, Rose. Rose is the one who’s gonna be gay in the new series, I think.

Samatha Jones (Kim Cattrall)

Photo by James Devaney/WireImage

Samatha Jones is everyone’s favorite character on Sex and the City. She’s also the character who loves sex the most, and also getting a rise out of all her friends by talking about it in as much detail as she wants, whenever she wants. She’s got the best one-liners, the best zingers, the best clothes, and is the very best friend in a series that is, at its heart, really all about friendship. She’s a publicist, and she’s very, very good at her job. I don’t really — you know those people who just radiate charm, but also are a little bit scary because they very clearly will not put up with anyone’s bullshit? That’s Samantha. She gets weird when any guy she’s dating tries to be emotional, and that’s the main reason it doesn’t work out when she tries to date a woman. Samatha gets breast cancer in the final season, and survives. Her wigs are amazing during chemo, and they inspired a whole lot of women who were going through breast cancer in real life the early aughts. Samatha’s the only one who doesn’t end the series married.

Kim Cattrall famously fell out with SJP, and even though she returned for the movies, she opted out of the sequel. I miss her a lot. The show is just not the same without her. Carrie was the heart of the original series, but Samantha was its soul.

Who all’s gay here?

Photo by Marcel Thomas/FilmMagic

The most valid complaint about Sex and the City during its original run is that it was way too white and way too straight. Like, this is New York City. You’re telling me there’s no women of color in this friend group and no queers? EP Darren Star tried to address that criticism in his very short-lived post-SATC network dramedy, Cashmere Mafia, which starred Lucy Liu and also Bonnie Somerville as bisexual marketing exec Caitlin Dowd, but that series only lasted ten minutes and only me and Riese and Malinda Lo ever watched it.

Samantha had a relationship with an artist named Maria, but it was the Will & Grace era of TV, so instead of simply embracing her bisexuality, everyone on the show started referring to her as a lesbian and then a former lesbian. Charlotte notoriously proclaimed, “She’s not a lesbian! She probably just ran out of men!” Carrie was mostly just surprised that Samatha was in a relationship at all ’cause relationships were not her thing. Maria tried to make Samantha happy, she even bought a strap-on (my first time seeing a strap-on!), but Samantha ended things due to too much processing and feelings.

However, SATC did have gay men. In fact, Stanford Blatch (played by Willie Garson, who passed away during the filming of the sequel) was kind of the original Gay Best Friend. A zillion characters like him sprang up, even on network TV, in the wake of his friendship with Carrie. He was always up for brunch, for gossip, for drama, for Carrie’s unhinged fashion choices. He was happy to follow Carrie shopping for shoes on 5th Ave or carrots at the farmer’s market in Union Square. His main nemesis was another gay character, Anthony Maratino, and they ended up falling in love and getting married in the second movie. (Even though they seem to hate each other again in this new sequel.)

So can I watch the sequel without having watched the original?

Yes, absolutely. You might not feel a strong connection to the main trio, or understand why people like me are constantly crying about Samatha being gone, but you’ll be able to follow the plots and characterizations easy enough. And Sara Ramirez is brand new! And so is Charlotte’s obviously queer teenage daughter, Rose! And so is Miranda’s blossoming queerness! Sex and the City isn’t Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Succession or whatever. There’s no intricate plot details you’ve gotta keep up with. It’s a rom-com that’s kind of become a grief-com, and the deep cut characters that have shown up so far have either been exposited so you know who they are, or mocked because the characters on the show don’t remember them either.

And anyway, it’s not like you need backstory to enjoy Sara Ramirez strutting around in a suit.

Anatomy of a Power Lesbian

Has there ever been a time when we didn’t know what power lesbians were?

Certainly, when my best friend at uni (circa 2001) casually referred to one of his English Lit classmates as a “medieval power dyke” I immediately conjured a picture in my head, and it wasn’t Joan of Arc. My own lesbianism pre-dates this millennium, hewn from an ancient world before The L Word existed and Ellen hadn’t even come out. So, how did it come to pass that this phrase immediately evokes such strong images of shoulder-padded suits and tough, queer women getting shit done (probably while shouting a lot)? I don’t think there was a specific cultural inception, but rather a percolation of various feminist ideals that bubbled over during the 1980s, the decade that female masculinity went mainstream.

Probably the first intentional spotlighting of the power lesbians is in the second season of Sex and the City, in an episode which has a proper title, but let’s just call it by its more relevant name: “The one with the Power Lesbians.”

As per Carrie’s trademark annoying voiceover: “Charlotte had discovered Manhattan’s latest group to flaunt their disposable income — the Power Lesbian. They seem to have everything. Great shoes. Killer eye-wear. And the secrets to invisible make-up.”

The storyline revolves around Charlotte being dazzled by the power lesbian clique, who she says are smart and funny (but let’s be real, she’s lusting after their giant mansions and art collections). Ultimately, Charlotte is rejected because you can dress yourself up in the sharpest suit, but you can’t be a powerdyke if you do not have at least some essential element of dyke within.

Thanks to the enduring appeal of a show you may have heard of called The L Word, there’s little doubt about who is everyone’s first-choice of fictional power lesbian: Bette Porter. She’s got it all: the suits, the shouting (bonus points if it’s into a flip-phone), the attitude that she can get whatever or whoever she wants. For me, that’s what distinguishes a true power lesbian; these aren’t women who’ve had a fortune dropped in their lap, they demonstrably crave control and aren’t afraid to take it, sometimes at any cost. That’s why although a bunch of The L Word cast wore suits throughout the show, it’s only the likes of Helena or Catherine Rothberg that really have the internal avarice to match the looks. I’m also going to throw Peggy Peabody into the ring because I think that all characters played by Holland Taylor automatically qualify as power lesbians.

In recent years, we’ve had a proliferation of queer representation on TV, and though I’m not sure that the number of power lesbians has increased proportionally, there have been a few of note: Jeri Hogarth on Jessica Jones, Mimi Whitman in Empire, Tegan from How to Get Away With Murder, and Annalise Keating herself (I don’t care if she’s bi, she’s blatantly a power lesbian). While it’s sketchy as fuck that these women are usually dabbling in the greyer areas of morality (if not downright evil), it’s for pretty obvious reasons: these are all women trying to succeed in a man’s world, usually playing by men’s rules. How much they’re punished for that is generally an indicator of how shitty the showrunner is.

While it’s easy to understand the trope and motivations of these fictional powerdykes inhabiting worlds of endless melodrama, I get rather more unstuck when it comes to real-life power lesbians. Dykes in suits remain exotically alluring, perhaps because a steady job that involves business attire is but a dream for so many queers. But a cursory search for lists of power lesbians or couples shows that our definition gets a lot more flexible, littered with as many casually-dressed entertainment stars as besuited figureheads from the world of business or politics. Is there a difference between a “power lesbian” and a queer woman who just happens to have power? Or fame or money? Are those qualities all interchangeable?

Take Ellen DeGeneres — by any measure a successful lesbian, with wads of cash, and enormous cultural capital thanks to her subtle infiltration of living rooms across America and beyond. But can she be a Power Lesbian if her whole persona is built on subverting the stereotype, by playing the unthreatening dyke next door? I feel like any compiler of power lesbians that puts Ellen at the top just hasn’t sufficiently overthought it, which is surely a crime against queer culture. Whenever she pairs a dykey-looking blazer with a pair of trainers (which is to say always), is she purposefully downgrading the potentially dominant masculinity of sharp brogues or boxy heels to a more acceptable tomboyishness, or is she merely beholden to every lesbian’s desire for comfortable footwear?

At the other end of the spectrum, the tough-talking aggression of Jillian Michaels and Jackie Warner fits my arbitrary definition of the power lesbian personality type, and yet sportswear is their uniform. When Jennifer Lawrence made her infamous off-hand comment about “slutty power lesbians” I thought I knew exactly what she was talking about… how did this all get so complicated?!

Let’s get back to the basics. What exactly are the components we are all looking for in a power lesbian? For me, there’s got to be a suit, or at least a blazer. And it can’t be any old blazer, it must be a Lesbian Blazer. I once got a (straight) friend of mine into trouble when I introduced her to the concept of a lesbian blazer, which she then discussed loudly in an Oxfam with her mum, which attracted the attention of a presumed lesbian who had a go at them for ascribing sexuality to clothing, which just goes to show you should really be careful when charity shopping in the Isle of Wight. But I digress! What then is a Lesbian Blazer? I think it’s best illustrated by comparing it to not-a-lesbian-blazer, as so:

If that wasn’t clear enough, then try this:

Still confused? What about:

Excellent, glad we’ve cleared that up.

While our fictional lesbians were usually in it for their personal gain, I think I’m more interested in those who use real-life power for a wider purpose. That’s not just in the political sphere, where the de facto dress code of female politicians of the Western world for the past three decades have had sapphic overtones, with all those pantsuits and short haircuts making things terribly confusing. Thank heavens for Tammy Baldwin, Ruth Davidson, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Ana Brnabić and many others who have actually put the lesbian into the power.

Yes, titans of the entertainment industry undoubtedly wield huge amounts of influence over our lives, but I’m not always convinced it’s for any purposes beyond perpetuating existing power structures. It’s mildly galling that Ilene Chaiken seems to tick all my traditional power lesbian boxes, but that’s only to be expected considering she used herself as the template for Bette Porter.

If I could pick two people to be my modern day standard of what a power lesbian should be, I’d go for Cynthia Nixon and Lena Waithe. Both are using the influence gained in one sphere to actively, positively change the world around them, from Waithe’s mentoring of hundreds of diverse screenwriters to Nixon literally sticking it to the man in the NYC gubernatorial campaign. Most importantly, they can both absolutely rock it in a power suit.⚡
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Edited by Heather
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Get Baked: Magnolia Bakery’s Famous Banana Pudding

feature image via Serious Eats NY

Magnolia Bakery is a fairly ubiquitous NYC spot. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Sex and the City or even so much as heard of Carrie Bradshaw, you may have been led to believe that you must try their cupcakes, but the truth is the cupcakes are only okay and if you’re going to eat one cupcake while you’re in New York I’d suggest Baked By Melissa instead. The thing Magnolia Bakery does really well is banana pudding. Real talk, I don’t even like bananas, and I’m not a huge pudding fan, and I’m still obsessed with their banana pudding.

I’ve been dying to make it for months and last weekend Lemon, my girlfriend and I had a joint birthday party, so it seemed like the perfect excuse to make a million desserts. I expected it to be tough to track down the recipe, seeing as Magnolia is like, A Big Deal, but it was actually ridiculously easy. Magnolia Bakery has a cookbook, and in it is the banana pudding recipe, and many people have taken it upon themselves to get that recipe up on the world wide web! So here we are. Let’s make the best banana pudding you’ve ever had in your entire life, courtesy of Magnolia Bakery and the good people of the Internet.

Ingredients

1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
1½ cups ice cold water
1 (3.4-ounce) package instant vanilla pudding mix (Jell-O brand)
3 cups heavy cream
1 (12-ounce) box Nabisco Nilla Wafers
4 cups sliced ripe bananas

$10 says you have at least 3 of these ingredients in your pantry right now

Directions

1. Combine the can of sweetened condensed milk and the water in a medium sized bowl and mix together very well. The recipe suggests an electric mixer, which I did use, but I think it could have been accomplished with a regular spoon and some muscle — with an electric mixer this took about 30 seconds. Also, try not to cut your finger on the can of sweetened condensed milk right as you embark on this adventure. Not that I did that, or anything. Ahem.

2. Add the pudding mix to the bowl and stir everything together, making sure there are no streaky yellow lines and that the whole mixture is more or less the same beige color.

3. Pop this bad boy in the refrigerator and leave it alone for 3-4 hours to set. Alternatively, you can put in the refrigerator for 10-15 minutes and then put it in the freezer for 10-15 minutes. It’s very important for the pudding to be completely set before you go on to the next steps, but both methods do the trick. An optional step here is to ask your girlfriend and your roommates over and over if they really think the pudding is set or if you should put it in the freezer for five more minutes. They’ll get annoyed with you but it’s fine. Just, whatever you do, don’t let the pudding become frozen. That’s not fine.

i think i actually overbeat the heavy cream a bit — it had gorgeous stiff peaks and then i kept beating and then it looked like this which is not beautiful — but the pudding turned out fine anyway so i’ve decided it’s forgiving, and i like that quality in a dessert

4. Once the pudding is set and good to go, grab a new bowl and put all 3 cups of heavy cream inside it. Use an electric mixer to beat the heavy cream until it forms stiff peaks. For this step I actually do 100% recommend an electric mixer. Ali has supposedly beaten eggs and things with nothing but her own two arms, but she does circus and as such is crazy strong in the upper body area, and I just don’t think my little biceps could’ve handled all the exertion. You don’t want to be sweating into your dessert. Just use an electric mixer.

5. Once the heavy cream is all nice and stiff-peak-y, take your bowl of completely-set-but-not-frozen pudding and slowly add it to the heavy cream situation. Then mix everything together very well. Avoid the temptation to eat the entire mixture out of the bowl immediately because we’re not done yet and it’s not banana pudding yet, just amazing light fluffy Jell-O instant pudding in formal attire.

you want the mixture to eventually be white or beige, not yellow

6. Chop up the bananas into thin slices.

7. Get a nice large bowl and get ready to assemble everything. The original recipe suggests a glass bowl if possible, presumably because the sides of the dish can look very elegant when prepared properly, but I used an opaque ceramic bowl and honestly it was totally fine. You’re going to assemble this like a layered Napoleon. I’ve actually never made a Napoleon but I’ve watched enough episodes of Chopped to know it’s all about the layers. Put down a layer of Nilla wafers at the bottom of the bowl, then add a layer of banana slices, then top this off with a very generous layer of pudding mixture. Repeat this 3 times, or as many as possible. Some people mentioned that they needed more wafers than were provided in a single box, but I did not have any problems.

layers

8. Garnish the fully-assembled pudding however you like. I crushed up Nilla wafers and sprinkled it over the top but I bet banana slices or whole Nilla wafers would also be delicious.

9. Cover the pudding tightly and leave it in the fridge for 4+ hours. This step is very very important as it gives the bananas time to seep flavor throughout the pudding and gives the wafers time to get mushy and cake-like which is the absolute best. I left my pudding overnight and the consistency and taste in the morning were perfect.

Not only is this pudding crazy easy to make, but it honest to god tastes exactly like the one you can buy at Magnolia Bakery. A few of our party guests didn’t even believe me it was homemade! But it was, and once I convinced them of that fact I became a baking goddess in their eyes. So go forth, hungry Straddlers, and impress your friends and loved ones. Or don’t tell anyone else about your pudding and eat the entire thing by yourself. Both are acceptable options.

baking goddess status: achieved. effort: totally minimal.

Julie & Brandy in Your Box Office #6: Sex and The City 2

It will come as no surprise to you that Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard did not enjoy Sex and the City 2. It will also come as no surprise to you that their re-enactment is ten bajillion times better than the actual film.

Sex and the City 2, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon the lesbian, Kristin Davis, Kim Catrall and a bunch of dudes, has been critically panned by everyone except Alexi Melvin, most notably in this review from The Stranger: “SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it’s my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.”

And here we have two grown women playing with themselves, and the results are glorious!

Yes, Autostraddle.com had a serious hosting situation this weekend which we have since remedied for a price equivalent to a trip to Abu Dabi (help!), but who cares really WE HAVE JULIE GOLDMAN LORDESS OF COMEDY AND BRANDY FUCKING HOWARD, QUEEN OF BEER COMMERCIALS here to finger Michael Patrick King’s asshole for you!

Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard are the Matt and Ben of Lesbian Movies. They are a sensational acting/writing duo that are trying to cause a sensation with their sensational, lesbian romantic-comedy, Nicest Thing.

Since no one wants to make their movie or cast them in anything, they feel it is their duty to harshly judge everyone else’s work, based on a sliding scale of rage, bitterness, lesbianism, and lack of any real significant training.