βWhatβs on display most often in Sex and the City is a kind of same-sex eroticism whose job is to perform the sensitive caring labor necessary for keeping the dream of the heterosexual good life intact. The phone calls, the late nights, the affectionate nicknamesβthey pour themselves into each otherβs lives. When Charlotteβs boyfriend asks her to play seventeenth-century backgammon, the girls hold an impromptu salon on anal sex in the back of a moving taxi. When Carrieβs indefatigable neighbors start screwing across the alley, the whole sex-starved gang comes over to watch, sucking on candy. This is lesbianism as heterosexualityβs fixer, rushing from one crisis to the next like Michael Clayton in Michael Clayton or Ray Donovan in Ray Donovan, disappearing evidence and bribing exes with breezy professionalism. Itβs a curious thing that heterosexuality, in a show that purports to be taking it into the twenty-first century, doesnβt actually work without 24/7 technical support. It is a curiouser thing that, thanks in part to Sex and the City itself, teams of women across America are convinced to provide this technical support for free. Maybe thereβs some kind of feedback loop at work here: heterosexuality forbids you from being a dyke, then makes you gay for your girlfriends. Iβm hardly convinced that any of our protagonists actually like men; what they do seem to like is liking men, because empirically speaking, liking men translates, almost all of the time, into being with women: touching their hair, rubbing their shoulders, sharing their feelings.β