On June 6, 1998, HBO premiered the original series ‘Sex and the City’, a romantic comedy that chronicles the lives of four friends in New York City, focusing on their relationships, heartbreaks, and, of course, sex—lots of sex.
The series lasted six seasons and aired until February 22, 2004. Then they released two movies and the spin-off ‘And Just Like That…’, which ran for three seasons, although the producers say it ended for creative reasons and not because of ratings.
However, the truth is that the audience didn’t like many of the new characters and the exclusion of Samantha, played by Anglo-Canadian actress Kim Cattrall, who rejected the offer to participate due to personal differences with actress and producer Sarah Jessica Parker.
The truth is that this series changed the perception of sex, not only for me, but for an entire generation. It was the first time I had heard four women talk so openly about the subject, in this case, Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha.
At the time, I fantasized that I was Carrie because I was a journalist and used to dream about writing, with the exception that I hadn’t even thought about #sinrecato until then, but let’s say I manifested it.
When I started watching the series, I had just gotten back home from Bogotá after doing a writing workshop at El Tiempo, but things didn’t turn out as I had planned. My plans were to stay in the capital, continue working as a journalist, and marry my Cachaco boyfriend.
In my mind, everything was perfect, but reality wasn’t as easy as I had painted it, so I went back to Barranquilla, studied law, and the guy cheated on me. I experienced my first heartbreak, which luckily didn’t last long because suddenly I started to feel like I was in an episode of ‘Sex and the City’, not in New York, but in Quilla City.
It was an important time in my life; I was single and learning how to freely explore my sexuality. However, the complicated part was understanding the guys I was dating because, until that moment, we didn’t always speak the same language (and I’m not talking about the series, but real life).
When hanging out with my friends, we talked about everything, including sex, what was happening to us, and how we felt. Our evenings together became some kind of group therapy, and although we didn’t always agree on everything, to talk and listen to each other was always freeing.
That’s how I normalized talking about sex. It wasn’t a mystery to me, and consciously or unconsciously, my girlfriends, and eventually my guy friends, would come to me to tell me about their most intimate adventures, almost like a secret confession. And let me clarify that I wasn’t a priest, I was much better than that, because I didn’t judge them, and my lips were sealed.
I recently started watching the series again in a random order. First, I started watching the episodes I liked the most, and then I watched them by seasons, remembering some that I had already forgotten, and I even watched the end of season six, which for me is one of the best. It’s like a movie, so much so that it has two parts.
As I rewatched the series, I noticed many lessons that, at the time, I didn’t appreciate as much as I do now. This is because the characters go through situations that, amid the magic of television, are real and relatable to any context, which makes the experience much more personalized.
Don’t worry, I won’t give away too many spoilers. I’ll just tell you what Carrie said to the Russian, who was her boyfriend at the time, in the middle of an argument because he had left her alone:
“I am someone who is looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love. And I don’t think that love is here, in this expensive suite and in this lovely hotel in Paris”, Carrie Bradshaw said through tears.
When I was 24 and started watching the series, I did so out of curiosity and morbid fascination with the steamy scenes. However, as time went by, I began to analyze the dialogues and situations that sometimes closely resembled what I was going through at the time.
Today, 27 years later, I still enjoy the series and highlight anecdotes that I experienced in my own life as well, and I understood that, like Carrie, at one point I also thought that sex was the most important thing in a relationship.
And of course it’s important, but in reality what we’re looking for is true love, as she said, the can’t-live-without-each-other kind of love. Or as I would say, real love, the kind that wakes you up with coffee in the morning and scratches your back, a #sinrecato love.
Traducción del español: Catalina Oviedo Brugés
