It Would Take Some Major Changes To Get Me To Watch Sex & The City 3

Rumors have been floating around for years about a third Sex and the City movie, but now, it may actually be happening. After having reservations about the film, Sarah Jessica Parker reportedly became the last in the cast to sign on, according to Radar Online. But these reports have yet to be confirmed by the cast, and part of me hopes they're not. Don't get me wrong: Samantha Jones is my hero. She and the rest of the SATC characters showed us that it was normal for women to have sexual desires and pursue them, whether or not they were in a serious relationship. They showed us women could be allies, not competitors, and that they could simultaneously achieve professional success and personal fulfillment. But attitudes that were cutting-edge in the late '90s and early '00s seem outdated when you watch the show in 2016. All the main characters are straight, cis, white, financially well-off women. Even though they have thriving careers, they spend surprisingly little time working, especially given how much spare income the main character has for shoes. Most of the plotlines revolve around men. When the show first came out, it was revolutionary just to watch women discuss their sex lives and desires frankly on TV. But the way they discuss it is problematic now. As we've previously pointed out, Carrie dismisses an incident that could qualify as sexual assault as "jackrabbit sex." In a rare episode that features a person of color, Samantha fetishizes a Black man. Stanford is the stereotypical gay friend, rather than a fleshed-out character, and when Carrie dates a bi guy, she decides bisexuality is just a midway point on a journey toward identifying as gay. The problems with the show were amplified when the movies started coming out. Part of the second film was set in Abu Dhabi, for instance, where the characters rebel against a culture depicted as backwards, rather than making an effort to understand and respect a foreign culture. When I watch the TV show, which aired between 1998 and 2004 and is based on a 1997 book, I can forgive it as a product of its time. But by trying to transpose these story lines onto a different time period, the 2008 and 2010 movies come off like they're relics of a bygone era. Now that 12 years have passed since the series was last on air, an even bigger update would have to be in order for a new movie to work. I'd be excited to see Sex and the City get a modern, intersectional feminist makeover. Given what we've seen from the show and the movies thus far, however, I'm not confident that it will. I'll always love Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda — so I hope for their sake that HBO won't give us any more reasons to hate them.