"Forget Slumdog Millionaire. With all the thirtysomething women on the prowl - in chic sandals - Mumbai is starting to feel more like Sex and the City." So begins Keshni Kashyap's dissertation on the changing mores of her parents' homeland. Perhaps, she speculates, as a consequence of the emerging economy, there are suddenly a lot of visible single women in Mumbai, "cruising at bars, dancing at parties, flirting at barbecues and nightclubs, always with cocktail in hand, carving paths of their own, and struggling with the very American dilemma of enjoying the single life and putting marriage off just a little longer."

Sex and the City is big here and single women are leading the Cosmo life. The culture is, of course, still a conservative one, in which most marriages (like that of the author's parents) are arranged and a woman is considered past her marital prime by her 30's (given the rarity of divorce, it is hard for a woman of that demographic to find a single man in her own age group). Then too, because single women tend to live with their families, the opportunities for "dating" in the Western sense can be limited; one woman speaks of always going home even if she's slept with a man, "out of respect" for her parents.

The author, herself a single American woman, muses on the difficulties of being caught between the two cultures and the what-if of following her parents' path.

Like many Indian-American women before me, I've wondered if it might have been easier to marry the doctor from Fresno I met through the newspaper. To line up class, caste, education, and values on a grid, find out where I fall, and maybe even get engaged in four days, avoiding the potential for existential angst, bad dates and broken hearts. After all, the old Indian adage is that love comes after marriage.

But...are these the only alternatives? An arranged marriage or the shallow existence of a defunct TV show? Most of us exist somewhere between the two paradigms, surely - our lives less glamorous, or less secure, but surely more...livable? Sex and the City has always exerted a pernicious influence, dealing as it did in trite bromides, coating cliche in the mantle of a superficial "liberation" (made up largely of worrying about men and drinking cocktails) and tying problems up as neatly and traditionally as any of the fairy tales its protagonists would claim to scorn.

It's not a coincidence, surely, that it's a fairly traditional and even conservative subset of women who'd find this version of single life so alluringly glam, while the rest of us are as offended by its convenient blend of ideologies as its shallow aesthetic. It's troubling to see young women heading to the big city to quaff cocktails and buy shoes, but it's more worrisome still to see this taken up as the alternative to a traditional existence. What might be irritating escapism for those who can afford it is a nasty model for those who have less context. Carrie Bradshaw is not the ideal modern woman, not the archetypal modern woman, nothing but a poorly-drawn but winsomely acted 2-D character. Slumdog and Sex aren't the alternatives; there's a whole Netflix queue of life out there.

The Carrie Bradshaws Of Mumbai [Daily Beast]

Is the puzzle overtly sexual? No. But come the fuck on, people. Do we really need to model Strawberry Shortcake after Sex and the City? Is there no other cultural touchstone to base a product for elementary school girls on than Scary Sadshaws? Whatever happened to living in a cake made of strawberry? Yes, there are problems with the original, what with Strawberry Shortcake seeming to take much pleasure in sweeping her floors and doing her chores, but still, aren't there some things that are better left alone?

Watching TV all day — watching any TV show all day — will do that to you. But you know, there is something especially mindfucky about SATC. There's something about Carrie! (Ugh, something that encourages terrible, terrible puns! I promise to try to not to make any more of them.) And, actually, let me also dispense with a couple of other things right up front.

I am not interested in making qualitative judgments about this TV show. Maybe it's groundbreaking, and documentary-realistic about New York City, and it gave women permission to speak frankly about men and sex and dating mores in a way that they hadn't before! Or maybe it's hilariously dreadful — full of schlocky metaphors and over-the-top untruths about New York City, and stunningly, feminism-hobblingly retrogressive portrayals of womens' priorities and desires!

In this clip, Miranda sums up my feelings. Basically she's like, "Why do you only ever talk about penises? There is other stuff to talk about!" Unfortunately they don't listen to her and the show continues for another four seasons.

I don't know anymore. I change my mind every five minutes. This minute, on my TV screen, Carrie and friends are watching Big come down the stairs of Denial in slow motion and a huge grin is lighting up her face — he does care about her friends, after all! — and Miranda is running out into the street after Steve — she will give him a chance, after all! — to kiss him in the rain. And I'm thinking the answer might be that everything everyone's ever said about Sex and the City, both good and bad, is somewhat true. All that matters is that it's already been said, so I won't waste time saying it again here, and neither should you. Instead I want to talk about the kind of insight that can only be gleaned by watching many, many episodes of a TV show in a row.

Such as: there is a LOT of rollerblading going on in Seasons 1 and 2. A whole lot.

There are other stand-out un-modern touches, of course. Just to get it out of the way: oh my god their CLOTHES, their HAIR! The fact that their cellphones are the same (enormous) size as the Rabbit Pearl vibrator Charlotte gets "addicted" to in episode 9 ("It's pink! For girls!") And of course there's the unfortunate fact that, thanks to increasing budgets and the increasing social acceptability of facial muscle microparalysis via injected botulinim toxin, the gals seem to have grown younger, not older, as the series wore on.

Also, remember the HBO Real Sex-style Man on the Street interviews and Carrie's turn-to-the-camera confessionals? Those were weird.

But yes, seriously, really I wanted to mention something about the early seasons of SATC that — I think, at least! I haven't read everyone's grad school theses — hasn't already been discussed to death. It has to do with Carrie's job.

As the first episode opens, we hear Carrie narrating, in voiceover, the story of another woman's love and loss. We don't even see Carrie onscreen for a few minutes — instead, we learn about Elizabeth, a young British woman who came to New York and met a charmer who talked marriage and babies, then completely disappeared. Remember? It's the monologue that ends, "Welcome to the age of un-Innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany's and no one has affairs to remember." We're then given to understand that this voiceover, like alllllll the voiceovers that will follow it, is an excerpt from one of Carrie's columns. She is a sex columnist for a New York newspaper. "This is my work," she later tells a man she's just met when he asks what she does besides going out every night. "I'm sort of a sexual anthropologist." "You mean like a hooker?" he (it's Big!) asks—his joke-or-is-it? quasimysogny, established here, continues throughout the series and is meant to be, I guess, realistic and endearing.

"No. I write a column called 'Sex and the City.' Right now I'm researching an article about women who have sex like men. You know, they have sex and then afterwards they feel nothing," Carrie says. So this is the premise for the show: her life is research for her column. All the things that happen on the show — everything that makes Carrie have "to wonder," to announce that she "had a thought," to conclude that "the truth was," to sum things up with "and just like that," — these are all things that Carrie is sharing with a public. She's a little bit famous. "I'm a huge fan of your column," random characters say throughout the series. "I'm sort of somebody and she's definitely sort of somebody," Samantha tells an indifferent gatekeeper at a fancy restaurant.

So as Carrie and her friends navigate the many pitfalls that can imperil romance in New York — modelizers, married people, lesbians, twentysomethings, butt sex, vibrator addiction, pregnancy, flatulence and Catholicism in the first season alone — they're doing so in front of an audience. Not just the people who are unfortunate enough to be seated around them at brunch or at so-hot-right-now restaurants — no, Carrie and co. are figuring out whether nice girls do anal in front of all the people who read Carrie's column. You have to wonder whether this scrutiny is affecting their relationships — well, you have to wonder, but Carrie never does. It's the one thing she never wonders about.

Carrie's column is the elephant in the room for a reason — what if Big and Carrie had ever argued over how he was portrayed in her column? It's like wondering what Friends would have been like if Rachel had married that dentist — which is to say, probably nonexistent. And of all the credulity-straining things about SATC — you know, the 'how can she afford those shoes/that apartment?' factors — this is, to me, the most egregious. As I watched my 17th episode of the day, I HAD TO WONDER: How does Carrie constantly, publicly pontificate about her personal life and still manage to, you know, have one?

Also, why does Miranda always talk with her mouth full?

More things to WONDER about in this season one highlight reel: are women "things?" Is Big calling Carrie ugly? Is Carrie good at dumping people? And is Charlotte, in fact, a hole?

Earlier: 36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City)

Editor's note: Remember how I said I was going to watch every episode of 'Sex and the City' between April 1 and the May 23 premiere of the film? Well, for reasons of time, energy, and impending marriage, I didn't do it. What I did do, however, is pawn the task off on someone else: Emily Gould, Jezebel contributor and coiner of my favorite 'SATC'-related phrase, "Scary Sadshaws". Between today and Thursday, Emily will be watching all 94 episodes of the HBO series — that's 36 hours' worth! — and report back with her findings. A stunt? Yes. Insane? Probably. Wish her luck.

Last night, Anna and I were sitting in a chic little winebar in Queens sipping adorably-pink glasses of rosé when she announced that she had a present for me. The present was pink, too! And it came in a case made of sensuous faux-suede!

We marveled over its size and heft and giggled before I discreetly slipped it into my purse. On my way home, I had to wonder. Would I be able to handle it — all of it? I only had a few days, and it was so, so... BIG.

As you can tell, my brain has already been warped by this project. But over the next few days, I'll be soaking up all the pontification, all the scary reverse-aging, all the 90s eye makeup mysteries, all the saxophone solos ... God, the saxophone solos alone are going to drive me insane and I'm only on episode 2 ("Models and Mortals")!! What will happen to my brain? Well, I'll be keeping you updated. As a certain cigar-smoking, receding-hairlined lothario says in episode one, "What are you waiting for? Get in!"

Earlier: Maybe It's Time To Stop Hating On America's Scary Sadshaws

Earlier: Toby Young: Sex And The City Depicts An Essentially Pre-Feminist Society

Young, the author of the memoir How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, continues:

[In New York] Women are second-class citizens who are expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic wellbeing. Sex and the City is set in this world, but it conceals its brutality behind a veneer of cocktails and laughter. In reality, female friendship is the first thing to be sacrificed in the cut-throat competition for rich husbands. To my mind, Sex and the City is the equivalent of one of those Soviet propaganda films in which the factory workers are depicted as happy, singing citizens of tomorrow. The truth is that women like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda are wretched, unhappy and isolated. The key to their survival is not the sisterhood, but a combination of slimming pills and anti-depressants.

So Did It Teach Us Anything That Came In Useful Along The Way? [Guardian]

Related: Sarah Jessica Parker On 'Sex And The City' [Premiere]
Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like A Few Words With Carrie Bradshaw [NY Mag]
'How To Lose Friends' & The NYC Media Dreamworld

Beauvoir had a famously open relationship with Sartre, but, as Lisa Appignanesi pointed out in the Guardian, Sartre was the one who insisted on sleeping with other people, and Beauvoir was the one who went along with it. According to Appignanesi, "In this lifelong relationship of supposed equals, he, it turned out, was far more equal than she was. It was he who engaged in countless affairs, to which she responded on only a few occasions with longer-lasting passions of her own. Between the lines of her fiction and what are in effect six volumes of autobiography, it is also evident that De Beauvoir suffered deeply from jealousy."

Sylvia Plath famously killed herself after fellow poet, husband Ted Hughes, left her for another woman. Plath had a history of mental illness and one prior suicide attempt, but her obsession with Ted and his betrayal arguably hastened her demise. Although she pursued her own career with vibrant ambition, she still typed his manuscripts for him.

Rebecca West was a 20-year-old, up and coming critic and journalist when she met H.G. Wells. They began a passionate love affair that would last a decade. What's the problem with that? Wells already had a wife, and several children. When West became pregnant out of wedlock with Wells' baby (a big deal when it happened in 1913), she decided to keep the child. According to the book, after she told Wells she would bear their child, An Affair To Remember: The Greatest Love Stories of All Time, "Most of the adjustments were made by Rebecca. She moved from rented house to rented house. She had nothing but Wells — from time to time — and her writing." Most of the time, Wells remained at home with his wife.

The moral of this story is, many great feminists were not so "feminist" in their love lives, and no one can be a shining example of any -ism 24/7. (The verdict is still out on whether or not Carrie's a "feminist" considering the entirety of her "self" is constructed around her love life. Her shoes remain fantastic, though.)

Can A Feminist Really Love Sex And The City? [Guardian]
'Our Relationship Was The Greatest Achievement Of My Life' [Guardian]
An Affair To Remember: The Greatest Love Stories of All Time [Google Books]

The edict against Julia was lifted once — in a stunt carried out during New York Fashion Week last September — but for the most part, no mention of her was made. Readers (most of them, no doubt, New Yorkers) wrote in unsolicited after the blog launched to request that we not mention her, which only served to underscore that I'd made the right decision in keeping her off our roster of blog-worthy media and cultural personalities. Except when I spotted her and her (admittedly adorable) white dog from afar at some media clusterfuck, in my mind, it was (almost) as if she didn't exist.

The thing is, Julia Allison and her sisters in conspicuous consumption and shameless self-promotion do exist, and it's getting harder and harder to ignore them. Their latest assault came via the NY Times' "City" section, which devoted some 2,000-plus words (and multiple four-color photographs) to Julia in a piece titled "Channeling Carrie" yesterday. My reaction to the piece was not unlike the expression shown on a woman shown standing behind Julia in a photograph taken at her 27th birthday party in NYC's West Village: a mixture of curiosity, uncertainty, discomfort and mild disgust. (Or maybe I'm just projecting.)

In the article, Julia practically crowns herself the new queen of New York narcissism: "If Carrie Bradshaw were coming to New York today," the Times quotes her as saying, "she would be me." To a Times reporter interviewing her on video for an accompanying web feature, she strikes a more humble note, explaining that being "compared to a character who has inspired a lot of women by opening herself up and questioning the issues that concern not just single people in their twenties and thirties but of all ages, that's a compliment."

Maybe so, but here's the question that no one seems to be asking regarding both Sex and the City and the Scary Sadshaws it has spawned: What important issues did the series identify and illuminate? What barriers did it break? What did the characters ("Carrie & Company") ever do for anyone outside of themselves? What, praytell, was so damn groundbreaking about a group of narcissistic rich white women with a love of shopping and gossiping about their sex lives? (Despite what Candace Bushnell thinks, the themes of no-strings-attached sex, female friendship, conspicuous consumption and social-climbing had been amply investigated long before she came on the scene.)

I'm willing to admit that it's possible the problem isn't with the Scary Sadshaws but with me — perhaps, as Julia asserts, I can aspire to be both "serious and thoughtful" while also being "shallow and frivolous", although I don't see how I'd have the time — so last night, I went online and spent $300 on a box-set of every episode of Sex and the City ever produced. (It comes in a suede cover in a hue of hot pink not unlike the plastic case covering Julia's white MacBook.) I've decided to watch all 94 episodes between now and the premiere of the Sex and the City movie on May 30 — around 12 episodes a week — in the hopes that I can embrace my inner Carrie Bradshaw and figure out what all the fuss is about (perhaps I'll even learn to like pink!). At the very least, the next time I see Julia, we'll have something to talk about...although Candace Bushnell can still kiss my middle-income black ass.

Channeling Carrie [NY Times]
Web And the Single Girl [NY Times]

Earlier: Before Sex & The City, Talking About Sex Was Practically Illegal
Julia Allison Asks: What About Fashion Makes You Want To Hurl?