Oh, Sex and the City. With your shoes and your swanky bars and your cocktails and frank conversations about sex. You used to be so edgy, so out-there, so daring. But now Girls has grabbed your baton, stripped it of its sequins and used it as a dildo just for a lol because that’s what actual real girls do, there's a new wave of TV going on - and Sarah Jessica Parker isn't sure what she thinks about it.
‘It’s kind of surprising to say, but in a way it was a more innocent time,’ she told Vanity Fair.
But, hold up there, she doesn’t necessarily think the sex in Sex and the City was more innocent. (In fact with the swings and the pearl thongs and basically all the stuff Samantha Jones got up to, it really wasn't.) Her point is that women on TV were a lot kinder to each other back then.
‘I think so much reality television – and the women that dominate culture today – are pretty unfriendly towards one another. They use language that’s really objectionable and cruel and not supportive,’ she's said. ‘I like to remember that Carrie and the other women in Sex and the City were really nice to each other. That was the bigger picture.’
We totally see her point – women are far too often pitted against each other, in everything from The X Factor to *Made In Chelsea. *And TBH, in the latest episode of Girls (and yes, we will compare it to Sex and the City, because it's another fictional HBO show about four women in New York, and probably more similar to Sex and the City than, say, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo) Shoshanna - the character undeniably most influenced by Sex and the City - spews out all manner of cruel, mean things at Hannah, Jessa and Marnie. Because, sometimes, that’s what people do. But then again that time Miranda went up to a stranger and told her ‘he’s just not that into you’ was really really mean, too.
On a more personal point, SJP said that she refuses to look at anything written about her online: ‘I don’t read anything. I don’t Google myself. Good God, no! I have absolutely no constitution for that. I’m curious about everything except what people have to say about me.’
She added: ‘It’s the random cruelty I really don’t understand. It’s not good for us. I don’t know, you know, how we go back in time to a better place.’
Were things really that better back then? You can use our discussion board below to talk it out, or just call each other bitches.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.