It’s easy to get caught up in the internet’s moralistic shorthand for all kinds of entanglements, romantic and not. Behind the newfangled language lies a host of misogynistic assumptions. We don’t need to keep going in generations-long concentric circles on the same issues and reductive frameworks.
On Saturday night, I sat criss-cross applesauce on a lush white rug overlooking Delaware Street with three girlfriends, watching Carrie Bradshaw confront the elusive Mr. Big at his Presbyterian church service and crash-land an impromptu introduction to his mother. We quibbled over which of the main four “Sex and the City” girls we were, based on our behavior in past and current flings, indulging our self-narrativized romantic tendencies.
The infamous audio snippet from Season 1, episode 12 of “Sex and the City” — which became immortalized as a background for short-form content — rang in the background as we reflected.
“Suddenly, there he was, wearing Armani on Sunday. Mr. Big,” Carrie said in the episode.
“Sex and the City’s” popularity among young women today serves as a vehicle for dating-life discussions that have seemingly stagnated, or are as old as courting itself. Many interpersonal, romantic and sexual points of inquiry in the show continue to resonate.
The show — first aired in 1998 — was imperfect, but revolutionary at the time for its unique depiction of single women’s desires on the small screen. Its legacy of romantic intellectualization is being misinterpreted in our generation’s clunky online exploration of what love should look like.
Dating is complicated. It’s easy to snap up anything that approximates conventional wisdom, mistaking canned internet advice for something big-sisterly.
University of Minnesota second-year student Jenise Zean said our generation tends to overintellectualize even minuscule dating interactions.
“I even see myself doing that too, trying to decipher what a text is,” Zean said.
The appropriate age at which to settle down, the diminishing returns the dating market brings and the refusal of some people to commit seemingly at random are all plot points covered in the show. The push-and-pull between Carrie and Mr. Big could be seen as a proto-situationship in the same vein. The catch-all term, situationship, for indefinite, unlabeled romantic and sexual relationships has loomed large in our culture in the last decade.
University third-year student Sarah Bassas said these relationships aren’t new and aren’t replacing traditionally labeled partnerships by any means. The desire to categorize them is what’s new.
“I do believe that situationship culture has existed for a long time,” Bassas said. “I don’t think it ever was labeled or, I guess, scrutinized in this way.”
At any given point, it’s impossible not to drown in the cacophony of feminine voices online, masquerading as our collective big sisters, urging us to take action in the psychological war that is young relationships. This is reductive and formulaic at best, and misogynistic at worst.
These yet-to-be wives’ tales presume a collective desire among young women. That is, to get and keep a partner and, in these cases, almost always a man.
They say we need to hold off on hooking up until we get what we really want, or use sex to get that very same thing. We need to preserve our high value as women to attract men of the same caliber or cast spells using love magic via WitchTok. Love spell kits can be delivered to your doorstep by way of Etsy and Depop.
It seems many young women have internalized a worldview wherein their ambitions and desires toward men are only legible if seen through a larger love story, whether one-sided or not.
Will culture ever evolve beyond male idolatry?
In all of this contradictory and antiquated nonsense, there’s an assumption that women’s desire for sex is not autonomous, or that it doesn’t function as a desire unto itself. Worse yet, it’s a trap women fall into only to wind up catching feelings and being left at the mercy of whoever they decide to casually encounter.
There are nuances to this issue covered at length in feminist academia, and I won’t even begin to scratch the surface of. Reducing sexual desire to a tool, risk or Pandora’s box isn’t Machiavellian. It’s reductive.
Second-year student Madeline Maack said there is a subtext to the online content she’s seen regarding the nuances of intimacy.
“It’s kind of implied that women catch feelings more easily,” Maack said.
Our generation is just popularizing tired, moralistic and Victorian notions of female sexuality in a new form.
Zean said much of this discourse, wherein people argue women should abstain and men are caricatured as devoid of romantic attraction, is by no means new.
“The issues with sex, whether it’s men not actually caring for their partners during sex, or women apparently should not be having sex, like they should be waiting for their husbands, I feel like it’s just this whole thing,” Zean said. “I think people are more vocal about it because of the internet.”
For Maack, any credibility to the notion that women are more susceptible to romantic feelings most likely comes from socialization.
“I don’t think it’s an inherent thing to identifying as a man or a woman,” Maack said. “I think that there might be a socially-conditioned aspect where women are maybe more attentive to their feelings.”
Love and romance are always going to inspire commentary on their existence, or lack thereof, in culture and dating. Fledgling relationships may not be solvable or intuitive, but they’re good conversation starters at weekly roundtables to tune in to each season of our friends’ lives.
TikTok dating advice is far from insightful. I can’t help but wonder, do we all need a Mr. Big to be compelling?
