She made a children’s book, wrote about microwave ovens, and contributed to pioneering women’s magazines before finding an empty space of conversation among New Yorkers: sex from a liberating approach. By the 90s, the writer Candace Bushnell he already had his own status in the press—whether his own or that of his alter ego, Carrie Bradshaw—and it wouldn’t be long before he sold five columns to the Atlantic publishing house in the form of a book titled Sex and the City.
She was raised in rural New England and was barely 19 years old when she landed in NY with the dream of going against the sexism which he had witnessed during his childhood and adolescence. “Whatever your job is, you have to make it interest you.. You have to learn to make anything interesting,” was his mantra in the first professional stage of his life that lasted 15 years, before getting his own column.
It was 1995, almost 30 years ago, that is, a time that still lacked questions about male power in Hollywood and in which women had to adapt and remain silent to maintain their few places in production companies and studios. “It took me a while to sell it to Darren Star“Bushnell told Observer about the process it took for the project to be adapted to television.
And he added: “They say publishing is or used to be a bit of a gentleman’s business. You don’t make much money. But in television and entertainment, there is a lot of money. “When there is a lot of money to be made, people are generally not equitable.”
In an interview with The New Yorker, he confessed to them that in his years as a journalist he could not consider said magazine as a possibility among his work ideals. For this reason, his usual collaborations were with lower-ranking publications such as Mademoiselle and Good Housekeeping.
“I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. It wasn’t even a possibility”, he explained in reference to his lack of connections within the journalistic elite. “I was really broke before writing ‘Sex and the City’. When she was in her early thirties, she lived uptown, in one of those buildings where the old people died and we snuck into their apartments. […]”he recalled. The reality was harsh, but the thought of that little Candace who never wanted to be a mother remained inside her and she repeated to herself: “I don’t like babies”.
Although his column addressed sexuality as such (the title had a meaning), this was not its main topic. “I didn’t write much about sex”he admitted Candace Bushnell more than two decades later. “There were some things, like threesomes, but it wasn’t anything graphic. I always felt that wrote about power structures between men and women and heterosexual relationships. She believed that she was being much more of a social anthropologist”.
His method of observation was to go to the city center every night to look closely at the people and the way they treated each other. “People come here and want things. New York society matters to them and they aspire to enter it“, he explained to Observer and, in conversation with The New Yorker, ambition was evident as the theme that ran through each of them. “What makes New York a perfect place for it is that the people who come here are ambitious. If not, it is very difficult to live here,” she opined.
Once the project Sex and the City In the chain HBO was underway, the writer was a consultant and was involved in the writers’ room during its first two years of broadcast. So, her real-time experience of her also contributed to the on-screen experiences she lived herself. Carrie BradshawSarah Jessica Parker’s character.
However, the level of identification decreased and, for Bushnell, it ended up being buried when Carrie and Mr. Big established a relationship that was anything but healthy: “They break up, get back together, and then Mr. Big leaves Carrie and marries someone else.. Someone he thinks is marriage material, meaning more conventional and less problematic, which is exactly the same thing that happened in my real life. I thought maybe it was the end of the seriesand it fit my thesis that guys like Big come and go, but your girlfriends are always there for you.”
But HBO wouldn’t leave it there and would squeeze the story out for four more seasons, two movies and a spin-off which is currently broadcast on streaming by Max. He regretted that they made Carrie have an affair with her already married ex-boyfriend. “That’s when a part of me ‘un’ became Carrie Bradshaw because to me she was not a feminist“, critical. “I’m pretty much the opposite of that.”
On another occasion, he stated that “Carrie Bradshaw ended up being a quirky woman who married a very rich guy. AND That is not my story, nor that of any of my friends.. But TV has its own logic.”
The original argument of Sex and the City She was a feminist, just like her creator, who had met single, brave women in New York. That sisterhood of caring for each other in a world made by and for men laid the foundations for the series. However, the punishment measured everyone equally with negative qualifiers, whether they were successful or not.
The progressive ideas of Candace Bushnell Today they would fit more into a discourse of empowerment, but even fans of television production have questioned that daily life in New York is only focused on white characters and a very limited diversity is seen (an absence that is currently trying to remedy – with stumbles— And Just Like That…).
“In my world were there only white people?“, the columnist asked herself and defended herself by pointing out the television guidelines of that time as responsible: “No, of course not, that’s not new york. But, for the show, that’s how people interpreted things back then, that’s how people were on television. “I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to be unpleasant, they just weren’t thinking about it.”
To date, Bushnell no longer wants to talk about Sex and the City, but respect the fact that the audience still wants to do it because of its current popularity. As for his professional outlook, he prefers to pay attention to his new work, feminism, and “being your own Mr. Big,” as he continues to try to “show women a different way of thinking about themselves and their lives outside of the patriarchy”.
