“What’s 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 nicknames—they pour themselves into each other’s lives. When Charlotte’s 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 Carrie’s indefatigable neighbors start screwing across the alley, the whole sex-starved gang comes over to watch, sucking on candy. This is lesbianism as heterosexuality’s 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. It’s a curious thing that heterosexuality, in a show that purports to be taking it into the twenty-first century, doesn’t 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 there’s some kind of feedback loop at work here: heterosexuality forbids you from being a dyke, then makes you gay for your girlfriends. I’m 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.”
