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Very few single girls actually have that much sex

Marianne Macdonald

Wednesday, 21st May 2008

Marianne Macdonald says that, in an encounter in New York with Sarah Jessica Parker, she realised, finally, how much of a myth Sex and the City really was

It was the last fiction — that we were all being brainwashed to live like a celebrity, like Sarah Jessica Parker, when even she didn’t live like that. The whole thing really was madness. Her character in the show wouldn’t have behaved the way she did in real life, in real life SJP didn’t behave like her character, in real life she certainly didn’t look like her character, and she definitely didn’t live like the celebrity we assumed she was, which had us so irritably on the back foot. I know, we knew that. But it seemed to me that we kind of didn’t, at the same time. And as I was thinking this I looked up from my laptop to see Kristin Davis, who played the Pollyanna-ish Charlotte, wander into the suite. She was in high, shiny, pointed black boots that were almost hookerish, and she looked as much younger in real life as Parker looked older. She chatted idly to the PR, then glanced round and noticed the trailer looping on the TV in the corner. ‘Oh, I haven’t seen that!’ she exclaimed, and she and her friend went and plonked themselves on the sofa to watch. It was a mesmerising moment, because all the journalists looked at her, not knowing how to react.

Their uncertainty was spelled in the air like a plane trail: did they react as if she was normal, like them, which was how she was behaving and how, after all, she actually was; or did they react as if they were in the presence of celebrity, one of the women they had flown across the world to interview, read about all night in their hotel room, waited all day to meet? It teetered for a moment, and then the journalists all did a kind of collective mental shrug, and lowered their eyes to their laptops. The balance had fallen in favour of reality even as they went back to their profiles, doing the opposite.

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Danny Foo

May 23rd, 2008 12:44am

This series was based on the simple transposition of the sexual wishful thinking of gays onto slutty women. The writers were, in the beginning, all gays with lots of wishful thoughts. Any goddamn fool knows that - Michale Bywater (- why doesn't the Spectator hire him? He's real talent) wrote about this ten years ago. Wake up Marianne
(duh!).

contrarywise

May 25th, 2008 1:34am

Poor Sarah Jessica Parker. She's a successful actress with an attractive, successful husband. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? And yeah, did your writer really think there was an ounce of truth in the SexCity picture of single NY female life? And Barbie does really have a blast in her dream house.

Armando Gasc�n

May 27th, 2008 2:26am

Are you for real? Why do you think that a tv comedy tells us anything about the life of girls, and British girls in particular.
The girls in my job go at it like rabbits. They change sexual partners two, three times a day and doing it with two or three different boys in front of others in the living room, a normal thing.
Ask any European boy who they had their first sexual experience with. Two out of three will tell you: an English tourist woman.
Oh, Darylmple, where's thou gone?

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