1998 Sex and the City would be cancelled today

SATC of 30 years ago was right-wing compared to today. After a lifetime of liberal hegemony, woman now are just an assemblage of holes and parts for men — straight and gay — to order a la carte. WHY?

I took a truly wild trip down memory lane this week, when — to my shame — I decided to rewatch some early episodes of Sex and the City. Yes, Sex and the City, the show that ruined not just a generation of young women, but also ruined New York City. It turned my messy, down-to-earth city into a playground for shallow young strivers in clicky- clacky designer heels swilling Cosmos and throwing themselves at any man who vaguely resembled Mr. Big.

But boy oh boy, is it a terrifying example of how far we have fallen.

In episode three, Carrie is walking down the street with her sweet gay friend Sanford, when she bumps into a male acquaintance and his male “life partner.”

The man smugly shows off his wedding band and announces: “Lou and I are interested in having a child, we already have a surrogate.” He then says — “we need a top notch egg. What are your feelings about…donating one?”

Carrie is horrified. “We’ll pay!” The man says, not picking up on the aghast expression on her face because he is a Grade A narcissist. Then he hands her his business card.

“I was no longer considered even a person,” her voice over says. “I was now an egg farm.” Her friend Stanford rips up their business card.

This aired in 1998. Today, such a reaction would put Carrie Bradshaw very close to TERF territory. All progressive women are today expected bow down and praise any Twink and his sugar daddy who feel it is their right to pay a woman for her newborn baby.

In the scheme of things, this a long time ago I suppose. But how is it possible that the common, expected reaction to such requests not even three decades ago was horror and offence. A definite, hard no. Today, we are actively participating in this.

There are other examples in the first few episodes. In one, the gals are horrified when Charlotte’s date asks her to do anal. (Sorry.) Charlotte’s reaction causes her to feel, as Carrie’s voice over explains, an “abject blackness.” In another, Carrie has a one night stand with a rich man, and is very upset when he, thinking she’s a hooker, leaves cash by the bedside. Queue debates among the four friends about prostitution — or as we today must call it, sex work.

I can’t bring myself to watch the 2025 iteration of Sex and the City, in which the now 60-something main characters are still making actively terrible decisions, but those decisions are made exponentially worse by the fact that they now must also be woke. I mean, the original show was bad enough!

We all made terrible decisions pre-2012 (which is what I consider to be the first year of mainstreamed woke), but being socially expected to enthusiastically participate in our own degradation and broadcast it to all and sundry really takes the biscuit. (And if you doubt how terrible the new show is, just watch this Maureen Callahan description of what the 2025 ladies are doing. It involves both incontinence and self-pleasure. Be warned.)

It’s absolutely incredible to me that half of us (I mean Gen X) stayed who we were, more or less, while the other half went off into a world where everyone pretends not to notice the extreme debasement.

So what the hell happened?

How can our moral compass and social graces have shifted so drastically? A thirty something New Yorker in 1998 knew that being insouciantly asked for an egg, or to take it up the butt was beyond the pale. Now teenagers have been given the impression that it is utterly par for the course. And if we don’t, we are bigots. After decades of liberal hegemony, we are just an assemblage of holes and parts for men — straight and gay — to order a la carte.

To be clear, I am not blaming men for this. We women allowed ourselves to sink so low! But actually, I am not totally comfortable blaming women either — although being one myself, it’s easier for me to see our own role in this degradation. It’s as if we have all be put under a nightmarish spell.

Jennifer Bilek is one of the earliest warriors in the fight against transgender mania. She posted something interesting here on Notes the other day, about autogynophilia and the connection to the trans movement:

“Silicon Valley has hijacked this particular male fetish to substantiate the destruction of the sex binary toward transcendence from flesh. Read: cyborgs and rights for AI. It is ridiculous to think the entire world got on board for this insanity because of some woke ideology run amuck, because of a medical scandal that castrates children, or because men hate women. This is the business of eugenics promoted as progressive, and the ad campaign has been running non-stop since 2014. Understand what you’re looking at so you can stay human.”

I appreciate her pointing out that this bizarre movement is underpinned by vastly wealthy men in both Big Tech and Big Pharma. This is surely a crucial point. And the humanity-ending implications of mass sterilisation, in the name of self-fulfillment, somehow? — is obviously eugenics on a demonic scale.

But it’s not immediately obvious to me that just because some insane ideas are heavily funded, that automatically explains why people are necessarily prone to adopting them. I understand that they pay for curriculum changes and policy papers and clubs in schools. But why haven’t we — the adults — been more resistant to a cultural moment that says we should sell the fruit of our wombs to gay men, and tell our beautiful daughters that it’s wonderful to prostitute themselves online? It’s participating in a darkness that is beyond words.

I also agree with this post on X:

But again, what about all the progressive, fifty-something hipster dads who are enthusiastically trans-ing their daughters?

I’d say most — and if not most, many — of the people participating in the degradation of society are doing it because they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing.

Half of society is now colonised by this spell. There is little we can do about that, other than continue to say the words — out loud — that might break it. So I’ll keep doing that, and praying for redemption.