All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

regularly paper the entire metropolis with ads featuring its quirky heroine in her tutu, getting splashed by street water. I didn’t hate the show because I thought it was bad; in fact, I had barely even seen it. And I didn’t object toits message; I understood, from afar, that it stood, imperfectly, for a new era of female possibility.
    What I didn’t appreciate was that Sex and the City fast became the measure by which every urban-dwelling unmarried woman would be sized up and written off by friends and family. I stopped being able to count the number of people who confidently informed me that my life was “just like Sex and the City .”
    Never mind that, for large portions of my twenties, I was having exactly no sex. Never mind that while the show relied on expansive closets and sky-high heels as metaphors for the more meaningful spaces and heights now occupied by contemporary women, I spent the years that it aired broke (not poor . . . but broke); in fact, the reason I rarely watched Sex and the City was that I could not afford cable.
    Even if I had been better-paid, better-shod and more frequently laid, I likely would have still resented the comparisons. In part, because I knew how limited this vision of modern femininity was—so many white women with so much money—but mostly because I suspected that when people told me that my life was like Sex and the City , it was likely that they didn’t intend it as a kindness.
    Television critic Emily Nussbaum, who was also a single woman in New York during Sex and the City ’s run, told me that she was always “very excited by people saying ‘your life is like Sex and the City. ’ ” Before that, she remembered, they’d just say, “ ‘Your life is like a ‘Cathy’ cartoon.” Cathy was a newspaper comic strip, written by Cathy Guisewhite, that ran from 1976 to 2010, and chronicled its protagonist’s diets, dull boyfriend, and unrewarding job. And, yes, it had for a long time provided one of the nation’s only popular models of what unmarried life for women might entail. As Nussbaum would write in a New Yorker piece about Sex in the City, shortly after our conversation, “better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely.” 34
    Nussbaum also reveled in the fact that people were put off by Sex and the City . “I really loved how scary it was to people,” she told me. Compared to earlier depictions of single women as determined and lovable, or sad and desperate, the sexually voracious Carrie and Samantha frightened men. Nussbaum continued, “The show knew Carrie was fucked-upand flawed, that she wasn’t some sweet plucky avatar of ‘Why can’t she find love?’ It was refreshing because it set the stage for women to be flawed, angry, strange, needy and otherwise nonadorable.”
    The complexities of the women in Sex and the City helped make them synonymous with the city, which is one of the reasons that in time, I grew to appreciate it more. Because I knew how flawed, angry, strange, and otherwise nonadorable a place New York City could be, even after its pleasures eventually began to reveal themselves to me.
    Five years after I moved to New York, I was able to leave roommates behind and rent my own alcove studio, and my relationship with New York changed almost instantly. In my own apartment, I became happier than I had ever been. My flat was small and not fancy, but I loved every inch of it. I used to have nightmares about having accidentally given up that apartment; in the dreams, I’d be looking into it through its big windows, desperate to get back in.
    Getting my own place coincided with an expansion of my social sphere, an increased ease in my professional life; I’d never felt more formed, more adult, and more at home than I did on the first morning I awoke in that apartment. If Sex and