It doesn’t matter whether Sex and the City needed a sequel miniseries. The logic of streaming dictates that no intellectual property should go unsqueezed, so we’re getting one: after a 17-year break (if you don’t count the two terrible films, which you shouldn’t), And Just Like That returns this week. The trailer promises almost everything that made the original so compelling. There are brunch-fuelled friendships and impractical fashion – but there isn’t much sign of the other F-word that made SaTC such a trend-straddling juggernaut.
Where has all the sex gone? It’s easy to forget now smut is so pervasive that men will watch porn on their morning commute without any apparent shame, but when SaTC arrived it was genuinely, agenda-settingly filthy. Episode one showed Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie blissfully receiving oral sex, before breezing out of her conquest’s apartment with half-hearted apologies for not being able to reciprocate because she was headed back to work.
Yes, her partner’s tolerance on this point was credulity-stretching. But this scene was a declaration of intent: SaTC had no qualms about shocking you, and would always put female pleasure first. Which is why it’s the series that, notoriously, introduced the world to the rampant rabbit vibrator: after a storyline in which Charlotte (Kristin Davis) grew so attached to the toy that Carrie and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) had to stage an intervention, sales reportedly exploded.
It was also the series that brought anal sex into the mainstream. In “Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys” from season one, Charlotte is anguished by her boyfriend’s request for backdoor action. “Men don’t marry the up-the-butt girl!” she wails at one point, memorably, while Kim Cattrall’s Samantha philosophically counsels that “a hole’s a hole”. SaTC didn’t just change that way the world talked about sex: it changed the way people had sex, turning niche into normal.
If the first series looks dated now, it’s only because SaTC is paying the price for being ahead of its time. Now sexual explicitness is routine – Girls, Fleabag, I May Destroy You and Netflix’s smash hit Sex/Life have all gone to fourth base and beyond – but so is an understanding of sexual harassment and intrusion that was apparently alien to Carrie and co in the early episodes. Revisiting them is like taking a holiday in the land cancellation forgot.
