And Just Like That, Nobody’s Having Sex
by Mack Gregg
*Spoiler Alert*: This blog contains spoilers for Episodes 1-4 of And Just Like That
Nobody’s having sex in the much-anticipated Sex and the City reboot. With the exception of Big’s regrettable masturbation moment in the first episode and the teenage wall-banging perpetuated by Miranda’s gross son, Brady (Niall Cunningham), nobody on this show is getting off, or even trying to.
Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the only character in the original series who actually liked sex, has quit Manhattan for Europe. The three remaining friends—Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis), seemingly libido-less, are left to navigate life as women in their 50’s fueled by airplane-sized bottles of Tito’s and anxiety alone.
Their lack of interest in sex can’t be just an age thing. If Sex and the City has done anything right in the past, it’s been to show us that women still have sex beyond menopause, and enjoy it. No, there’s something else going on with the new, sexless Sex and the City. And it has to do with masculinity.
And Just Like That begins by killing off Mr. Big. a prescient choice on the part of the showrunners, as Chris Noth, the actor who played him, has since been accused of sexual assault by a total (thus far) of five women. Even if it wasn’t touched by sexual scandal, a post-#metoo, post-woke-Twitter Sex and the City would already have to walk a very thin line around issues of gender, sexuality, and race. The original series, an envoy from a specific moment of 90’s television, has not, as a number of Buzzfeed articles will attest, “aged well.” Given the whitewashing of Manhattan in the original show, and its harmful representations of trans people and people (especially women) of color, the 2021 update has a lot of history to reckon with.
In fact, as Sophie Gilbert observes in The Atlantic, the reboot is less a reboot than it is a corrective: its “primary motivation seems to be making amends for sins of the past.” It seems that in (over)correcting for the wrong turns they made back in the 90’s, the showrunners had to kill Mr. Big. There was no way that the rich, powerful, Wall Street exec, the type of man over whom the original series tended to fawn, could survive.
The reboot-cum-apology has no tolerance for male agency, power, sexuality, or even personality—much less Big’s swagger, or, heaven forbid, his signature eyebrow-waggling. The husbands who are left—Harry (Evan Handler), Steve (David Eigenberg)—may as well be last season’s accessories. When Steve rests his head on his gross son Brady’s shoulder during Big’s memorial, it’s sweet—until you realize that, even under normal circumstances, Steve is basically incapable of holding his head up. He mostly flops around like a discarded glove, waiting for Miranda to make him a sundae and choose what cerebral-but-rewarding television show they’re going to watch. His limpness is a physical manifestation of his inability to actually parent his son, and of the fact that, as Miranda revealed in Episode 4, he hasn’t had sex with his wife in five years.
Harry, for his part, is thoroughly browbeaten by Charlotte whenever he tries to parent; his one attempt to defend his probably-trans child from Charlotte’s terroristic uses of Oscar De La Renta is thoroughly shut down. Harry’s about to take it up the ass in an impending colonoscopy, which Charlotte is, naturally, also in charge of scheduling (and rescheduling, around her social calendar). The only way straight men are permissible in this 2021 reboot is if they are passive, desexed, and their bodies are curated and controlled—sexually, medically—by their wives.
The show’s sole source of sex appeal is Che, Sara Ramírez’ charismatic, nonbinary mixed-race Latinx comedian, who always does the absolute most. Not only is Che now doing all of Sex and the City’s masculinity, they are also, ostensibly, doing all the humor. In an uncomfortably long Gender Studies 101 lecture disguised as a comedy special, they educate viewing audiences on the dearth of trans media representation, on the basics of gender identity, and on how to live life fully (“You’re not happy with who you are? Step out of that box and change it!”) Miranda, who gets all weird and shiny-eyed after watching the comedy special, seems to want to step out of her box—or, to be more precise, she seems to want Che inside her box. She and Che share a hot (ish), slow-motion marijuana shotgun at a crowded queer bar.
As high as this post-COVID, post-legalization shotgun fantasy gets me, as much as I long for the gay Miranda fanfic to come to life in the real show, does Che really have to be the one to turn her out? Don’t they have enough to do? Isn’t she already gay? All I can say is, I hope Ramírez is being paid the MOST. Also, I’d like to know, where did they find all those jovial, laughing, snapping, cheering trans extras? And could I borrow them for the next time I teach my Intro to Queer Studies class?
Che may be carrying the whole show, but the heaviest burden that they bear within And Just Like That is that of redeeming the original series of its transphobia. The show’s past includes, most notably, Samantha’s racist, transphobic treatment of trans sex workers of color when she decides to gentrify the Meatpacking District. Trans legend and SATC fan LaVerne Cox said in an interview that “It was disappointing to me, as a black trans woman, to see black trans women enter the world of ‘Sex and the City’ and be so thoroughly othered.” Unfortunately, as a number of trans social media influencers have observed, a Latinx/white transmasc character is not adequately positioned to serve as a fix for the transmisogyny and anti-Blackness of the original series.
Ramírez, for their part, has done a lot to try and mitigate the potential harm that a show like And Just Like That could cause, as it attempts to incorporate queer/trans narratives. In an interview, they explained their contributions:
I really appreciate that it’s been collaborative in the writing…I’ve pitched ideas that have made it into the writing, which has felt really great. I also asked that we get some support, some advocate energy in the writers’ room for Che as a non-binary person. I suggested they reach out to GLAAD as they look out for LGBTQ+ representation in the media, and they did. They helped us every step of the way to ensure that we are not harming the queer and trans community with this representation and with the language that they use.
“Not harming the community” is unfortunately a pretty low representational bar, especially for a show that is supposed to be funny. Che’s jokes, when they actually are jokes, feel a little “off” to a transmasc viewer (me), especially when they talk about their own body and sexuality. Che jokes that their version of masturbation is sitting in a baseball stadium watching people try to guess their gender. During their comedy special, after yelling “Suck my dick,” they make this correction: “Actually, I don’t have a dick; if I did, I would have had this special five years ago.” I don’t know Che well, but I can tell you one thing I know for sure. Che has a dick. In fact, they probably have at least six. Yes, I get that what they mean is “bio penis,” and that it’s meant as a critique of misogyny in the media, but, still. Get any butch I know up on a stage and the last thing they’re going to do is announce to the world, “I don’t have a dick.”
There is a stereotype of transmascs as overly earnest, perpetually immature, long-suffering, and ultimately no fun. This is why it was a really nice idea to make Che a savvy and world-wise comedian. It’s also too bad that Che’s jokes turned out to be so deeply unfunny. These stereotypes about unfunniness are also, I think, why the showrunners decided to make Che nonbinary rather than a full-on transsexual. Nonbinariness might be confusing to a cis viewing audience at first, but in the end it’s and more palatable than someone taking T and getting their tits chopped off. If Che were a trans man—or a nonbinary person who had had medical interventions—they would be sad and less funny. They might actually have needs, might even take up some narrative space, might get their own subplot. If they were a man, they would also become too sexually threatening. This is why they don’t get to actually masturbate, or to have a dick—why their jokes are more about neutralizing their swagger than they are about, for example, having fun with the actual hilarity inherent in queer sex. Without reaffirming a state of dicklessness, Che’s swag would just be too much active masculine sexuality for this show, no longer a show about sex, to handle.
So if the new Sex and the City is not about sex or dating, what is its central driving factor? Showrunner Michael Patrick King—who once lost his shit after his more recent show 2 Broke Girls was called out for peddling racial stereotypes—has been going through his own racial reckoning. When asked in 2012 if he’d continue to include Asian stereotypes in his show, he answered with the apparent non-sequitur:“I’m gay.” We can hear in his cries of I’m gay, I can’t be racist the existential pangs of someone forced to account for his privilege as a white gay man, seemingly for the first time. The show’s plot mirrors this. If the central romantic plot of Sex and the City circulated around white women trying to snag wealthy white husbands, the central romantic plot of And Just Like That is white women trying to woo Women of Color into creepy, exploitative friendships. In a show where men have long been commodified and objectified into a parade of penises and penthouses, we can hardly expect better treatment for the women who have become the objects of Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte’s desire.
The show knows what it’s doing, to an extent. At first, I thought Miranda’s horrifically failed attempts at being an ally—which, as she told her Black law professor she read about in How to Be an Anti-Racist—were sort of interesting. Her honesty about her good intentions, and their repeated failure, was compelling (if hard) to watch, and her professor’s gracious yet boundaried way of educating her—a role that is, after all, more suited to a professor than to most—was also compelling.
Yet it quickly became clear that white women’s cluelessness was going to be a central stumbling block of the show, and that women of color were going to be there each time to smilingly catch Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte as they fell. By Episode 4, in spite of her inexcusable discourses on Black hairstyles in the middle of class, Miranda has somehow wheedled her way into Professor Nya Wallace’s confidence. Miranda has made an impassioned defense of women’s right to have kids and also work (or something) in class. Nya (played by Karen Pittman), impressed, invites her out for dinner, and confesses her own doubts about whether she, a career woman who is trying to get pregnant, can really “have it all.” Nya’s totally unprofessional overshare (note: “professor-student confidence” is NOT a thing, nor should it ever be) puts Miranda back in her comfortable position of authority, as an experienced mom and career woman. This whole exchange—we can overcome racial tension by our shared experience as uterus-havers—is possibly the most 90’s thing ever, making recourse to the undercurrent of biological essentialism that fed the original series’ transmisogyny.
Miranda’s racism is rewarded again after she chews out and nearly attacks Che during Big’s funeral, for giving her gross son a hit of weed. A few minutes later, Carrie introduces Che as her boss. Che not only graciously forgives Miranda and says her behavior was justified (it wasn’t) but then goes so far as to shotgun a nice hit of the same weed into her big ol’ Karen mouth the next time they see each other.
The women and queers of color on this show are, we’re learning, unendingly generous. Certainly, anyone less understanding would be unreasonable and downright mean. That, at least, is what I imagine Michael Patrick King was thinking when he oversaw this script, which was, no doubt, designed to fulfill his own fantasy of being forgiven for the show’s past and present racism.
“Episode 4: New Friends” dialed the cringe factor up to twenty with Charlotte’s attempts to woo her new friend, documentary filmmaker Lisa Todd Wexley, or LTW (Nicole Ari Parker). In planning a dinner party, she panics when she realizes the bad optics of her all-white friend group. Worrying that LTW will think she has no Black friends, she harasses her Black neighbor to the point of intense discomfort, trying to get her to make an appearance at the party. She and Harry then attend LTW’s party. She coaches him in the elevator beforehand on the proper pronunciation of Zadie Smith’s name, then goes on to mistake a party guest for another Black woman she knows. When she admits to LTW at the end of the episode how desperate she’d been to have another Black couple at the dinner party, LTW laughs and says she felt the same worry: that Charlotte and Harry would be uncomfortable as the only white couple at her dinner party. We laugh and we move on, closer friends, in some weird fantasy mirror-world where racism just means people are a little uncomfortable and fixing racism is, therefore, just a matter of alleviating discomfort.
Reconciliations happen fast, and they happen without a lot of internal work. The three women of the original cast each win their new friends despite being reactive, anxious, and shrill, over and over, sending a really toxic message to white viewers: you can keep not doing the work, and you can still “have it all:” your multi-million apartment, your well-lit shoe collection, your abiding milquetoast husband, and, best of all, your colorful, ethnically diverse friend group. I do have hopes for Nya, who appears to actually have her own subplot developing outside of the world of Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda, as well as for Charlotte’s gender nonconforming child, Rose (Alexa Swinton). Let’s hope we don’t have to continue to watch Charlotte put her kid through hell for the rest of the season, and let’s pray that Che gets a sex scene, a good one, like, real soon.
Mack Gregg is a writer and a Ph.D candidate in English at the University of California, Riverside. They can be found on Instagram at @mid_evil.