The woke lot want to cancel Sex and the City – but for the wrong reason – Telegraph.co.uk

It was a grim moment last week when I realised that news of the revival of Sex and the City, my all-time favourite television programme, did not make me excited or happy. Instead, it made me anxious, detached and depressed. It was not that the brilliant character of Samantha, played by Kim Cattrall, wont be there, though that is sad. No, it was that the culture wars won by those overwhelmingly on the side of extreme, often insane commitment to political correctness have ruined everything, including what constitutes entertainment. A programme about white women and heterosexual sex? Front of the line for massacre by the PC police.

As I sought information on the reboot, which is called And Just Like That it was clear how things would be. Pundits and tweeters piled in to lecture those impure enough to still harbour fond attachment to the original. Vanity Fair explained that, while the original had offered a story about proudly imperfect women that may have seemed refreshing and even feminist at the time (it did), the show also used it as a cheap excuse to centre a very specific viewpoint: straight white affluence, as written by straight white women and gay white men.

There you have it. Sex and the City in its joyous old form is no longer on the Allowed list of things to enjoy because it is too white and too straight. Crimes include Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) expressing concern about being involved with bisexual men, or in Vanity Fairs eye-wateringly ungenerous terms, doubting such mens very validity.

An even more heinous crime is, you guessed it, transphobia. This, we learn, oozed everywhere from the failure to offer prominent and serious storylines to trans people, to the hideous impropriety of Samanthas jovial and long-running relationship with a group of local cross-dressing male prostitutes. For this she stands accused of gleefully using a a transphobic slur in a dig against sex workers. Eh? Come again? Had the community of Manhattan men on whom those characters were based been told at the time that 20 years later Samanthas term would cause grave offence, theyd have surely roared with laughter and told you to get a life.

All that said, the old Sex and the City was not perfect. Those ready with their bucket of cold, woke-flavoured water have missed the point and spirit of the programme, and have, therefore, failed to understand where its legacy actually has been problematic. This, to my mind, was in selling to a whole generation of girls and young women myself included an image of casual sex that made it seem fundamentally glamorous, frictionless and liberated. It may be the last thing: it certainly isnt the first two.

My favourite character was always Samantha. We all loved her. She was our gateway drug. She offered a vision of femininity we had never encountered. She wasnt annoying or coy or quiet. She was hilarious, forthright and dressed like a maniac: all things young women believe make them less, not more, attractive.

And yet here was this force of nature, hoovering up men by the hundreds, gobbling them up, spitting them out, and politely closing the door in their faces when they wanted more. Most of us werent into feminism yet, but we thought we knew it when we saw it. We certainly felt it. This was a woman we wanted to be and a life we wanted.

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The woke lot want to cancel Sex and the City - but for the wrong reason - Telegraph.co.uk