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Tuesday 7 October 2008

Very few single girls actually have that much sex

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

The press launch of the Sex and the City film in the Plaza in New York a few weeks ago took the form of a junket very like the one Hugh Grant blunders into in Notting Hill, made surreal by the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was ill and cancelled her whole first day of interviews. This meant that some 100 journalists, flown in to hear her thoughts on the movie, had in turn been cancelled. Maddened, they spent two days abusing the PR until, in a furious act of concession, she allocated some of them a far shorter slot with Ms Carrie Bradshaw the following day — seven and a half minutes, supplemented for the fortunate by a round table in which participants had 20 minutes, perched in groups of eight around a table, to ask SJP questions before she was hustled from the room.

Anyway, while all this was happening, the trailer for the Sex and the City movie was playing on a loop in the suite where the journalists were held, like passengers for a long-delayed plane, unenthusiastically eating seafood from silver tureens or squinting at laptops pushed on to gilt tables. I must have watched that trailer 60 times, which is why it was such a shock when Sarah Jessica Parker finally appeared for her interview. It was as if she had aged ten years. The golden girl of the trailer, whose skin and hair seemed radioactively to glow, had become a tired, normal-looking 43-year-old no prettier, albeit a lot thinner, than any of my girlfriends. It felt like the last in a Sex and the City hall of mirrors, each reflecting a more benign version of reality. The first was the TV show, in which singledom was airbrushed to a Wonderland where the women’s friendships were always good-natured, a supply of good-looking single men appeared in each episode like magic, the biological clock was a barely perceptible tick and the women never, ever, bought a self-help book.

Equally absent were the other accessories of the single woman: the moments of despair; the tears, the tantrums and the constant lamentation on the lack of men. Far from the SATC universe in which conversations are always about men and sex, they almost inevitably revolve around the etiquette of replying to the question, ‘How’s your love life?’, the latest self-help books and how so and so met her new boyfriend. Very few single women actually have that much sex.

More articles from: Marianne Macdonald | this section

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