swearing, laughing and thinking aloud; she’s unfiltered (“Sex and the City was bigger than Girls”, she tells
me, breezily, and she’s probably right). In Is There Still Sex in the City?, Bushnell’s voice is just as
distinctive. To the uninitiated, the frequent philosophical musings (“Have I just found a Tinder unicorn?”)
might jar, but to any Sex and the City fan, reading them is like taking a bite from your favourite microwave
meal, the one you thought they’d stopped selling. Even when one of Carrie’s most ridiculed aphorisms from
the show, “I couldn’t help but wonder”, makes an appearance, you can’t help but wonder what you’ve been
doing without Bushnell’s voice for all these years.
That’s not to say the memoir is infallible. In her fifties, Bushnell navigates the dating scene much like she
did in her thirties, trading in tribes and archetypes, such as “cubs” – young men who romantically pursue
older women. “Are middle-aged women now catnip for younger men?” she asks with that teasing Carrie
Bradshaw style. The book can, at times, read like a myopic seduction manual for middle-aged women
looking to manipulate men, with sections such as “Beware the Cub Romeo” – younger men who become
“excessively emotional in the way that only twenty-somethings can be” – and “The Unexpected Cup
Pounce”, known in some circles as “lunging” but in this instance referring to a younger man kissing an
older woman out of the blue. It’s also aimed entirely at heterosexual women, leaving other demographics
out of the conversation. But it wins you over for the same reasons Sex and the City did: through its
unwavering celebration of female friendship. “A couple of people disliked the book because they thought I
was implying that women don’t need men,” Bushnell says. “But that’s kind of the point.”
Nobody is deliberately saying, ‘We’re going to cast this show all white’. It doesn’t work like that. It’s just the
time and the actresses who were available
Bushnell calls herself a feminist but is the first one to admit that her Sex and the City columns would be very
different in 2019. “I think they would be all about #MeToo,” she says, recalling how Manhattan was once
the “Wild West of #MeToo behaviour”, complete with “touching, grabbing and threats when you’re out”.
But, like other women of her generation, Bushnell accepted it at the time. “You didn’t have a choice,” she
explains. “We’re only realising how awful it was now thanks to the internet, because more people can share
their stories and we hear how common they are. These are worldwide problems. It’s not one or two men
behaving badly here and there.” That said, the #MeToo movement is not mentioned in the memoir. Did
she listen to Sarah Jessica Parker on US radio last month talking about experiencing sexual misconduct on
set as a child actor? “No I didn’t, but I’m sure that’s the tip of the iceberg. I’m not saying for her, but I
suspect there are hundreds of child actors out there who have experienced that.”
The TV series would look different today too, Bushnell says as we move on to discuss one of the biggest
criticisms levelled at Sex and the City: its all-white central cast. “Would people cast a show like that today?
No, they wouldn’t,” she says, pointing out that the programme was cast in 1998. “The truth is that one of
those characters could’ve been...” Bushnell pauses, aware of her phrasing. She reconsiders. “Nobody is
deliberately saying, ‘We’re going to cast this show all white’. It doesn’t work like that. It’s just the time and
the actresses who were available. If somebody [had] said: ‘Hey, here’s an African-American or Hispanic or
diverse person who’s right for this part’, nobody would say no. There’s not as much calculation in these
things as people think. It was just really a reflection of the time.”
Despite the criticisms and the fact that the last film was panned by critics – Bushnell admits that the
humour was overblown – fans still want more Sex and the City. A third film was in the works, with the script
rumoured to kill off Carrie’s husband, Mr Big, and follow her journey through grief and recovery. But the
project was shelved for reasons that are still unclear, though it’s thought that a fallout between actors Kim