The last single girl in New York? Not quite.

[Note: contains spoilers. However, if you care about spoilers I’m pretty sure you already saw the movie.]

So, I gotta admit that I’ve never been a fan of Sex and the City. When the show first aired, I lived nowhere near New York and wasn’t particularly compelled by a story about women buying designer clothing. Later, I came to appreciate the symbolic importance of a series about confident single women having all the sex they wanted (and talking about it!) but every time I tried to watch it, I was turned off by the contrived plotlines and annoying characters.

As a single woman living in New York, however, I figured once Carrie et al. hit the silver screen, I’d better go see what all the fuss is about. So after a naïve attempt to get tickets for opening night (what was I thinking?) I finally ended up seeing it last weekend.

As expected, the film was little more than a two and a half hour montage of Sarah Jessica Parker scampering around in ridiculously expensive clothes, wearing even more ridiculously expensive shoes. Sure, there were a few very vanilla sex scenes amidst all the haute couture product placements, and I gotta give Samantha credit for doing her darndest to objectify the male body.

Indeed, Sex and the City excels at superficiality. The biggest mistake of the film was in trying to do more.

Witness Carrie’s miraculous recovery from her post-jilting funk, aided by her very own guardian angel, “Saint Louise” from St. Louis. The days of “Mammy” may be gone with the wind, but apparently rich lil white girls still need black women for spiritual guidance (even at, ahem, age 40). In addition to cleaning Carrie’s apartment and organizing her closet (really?), Louise helps Carrie learn what love really means.

And what does love really mean? Well, taking it from Louise, Carrie and even bitchy, callous Miranda, it means forgiving the guy who screwed you over and/or broke your heart, so you can get married and live happily ever after.

And herein lies the ultimate betrayal of everything this show was supposed to stand for. Even though I didn’t personally watch Sex and the City, I saw the show as a testament to women’s desire (okay, let’s make that straight white upwardly mobile women’s desire) to be single, have sex, and live in New York City. And while I take these things for granted, I also realize that the show (and its popularity) is a product of both the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution. There was a time not so long ago where being a single woman living in New York writing about sex would have been unthinkable, much less cause for a syndicated television series.

What made Sex and the City so fabulous was its unapologetic love affair with the glitz and glamour of being young and single and yes, addicted to shopping. Of course it’s unrealistic, of course it’s superficial. But it also speaks to a certain type of desire for autonomy (Charlotte is after all the only character without her own income) that holds water with millions of women across America.

But in the end, the message of the film was this: settle. Being single is okay when you’re young, but once you hit forty, you better get yourself a man post-haste. It doesn’t matter if he humiliated you (Carrie), dumped you (Louise), or cheated on you* (Miranda), if you don’t want to end up alone on New Year’s Eve (gasp!), you better take that asshole back.

Interestingly, Samantha is the only one of the four who decides to stay single, mostly because monogamous domesticity doesn’t particularly suit her (or, as she puts it, “I love you but I love me more”). This becomes apparent when she shocks her friends by gaining 10 pounds (gasp!). Turns out that Samantha has been eating in order to resist the temptation to cheat, displacing her sexual desires into food. Carrie responds with a wholly unconvincing “Of course you would look great at any size, but… are you happy?” No, she's not, so she ditches the relationship in favor of the freedom of single life.

I hope that audiences saw Samantha’s decision as powerful and self-affirming, that being single is not the same thing as being alone, even at age 50. But the fact of the matter is that within the film, her narrative was a lonely one, unable to compete with Charlotte’s miracle pregnancy, or Miranda’s joyful reunion with Steve on the Brooklyn Bridge, or even Carrie’s no-frills “just you and me” wedding at City Hall.

Powerful female sexual autonomy, once the trademark of Sex and the City, is now marginalized within its own master narrative. Something tells me that doesn't bode well.

*which you probably deserved anyway because you wouldn’t sleep with him