"Pathetic hags…" "[with nothing] to aspire to other than being attractive, having pretty clothes and having sex…" -- Dawn Eden on Sex and the City

Sex and the City was the ultimate "chick flick" TV series and like most men, I spent years avoiding it like a prostate exam. However, after discussing the show with the incomparable Dawn Eden when I interviewed her about her surprisingly deep and spiritual book, The Thrill Of The Chaste, I decided to take the plunge and actually watch a season of the show. Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed watching Sex and the City so much that I cycled through three seasons in roughly two months time.

Why was the show alluring? Well, it featured four attractive, single women in their mid-thirties getting into funny situations that revolved around dating and sex -- and then talking about them without men around. For a single man in his thirties, it was almost like watching tapes that had been sneaked across enemy lines. Moreover, the characters, while not necessarily sympathetic, were at least intriguing.

There's Miranda, a feisty, slightly neurotic lawyer who's frustrated with men. She was the only character who would occasionally go an entire episode without having a man in her bed.

Next is Samantha, a walking, talking female libido who has very little to her personality beyond being generally assertive and sleeping with just about any good looking man she can coax into her bed.

Then there's Charlotte, the "nice" commitment-oriented, more "conservative" woman who's totally focused on getting married. She is a very likable character in some ways, but almost as unrealistic as Samantha when looked at as a whole. How do you take a character seriously when she's supposed to be a good girl who actually gets horribly offended when her own friends drop "F-bombs" in her presence, but meanwhile, she ended up sleeping with almost as many different guys as Samantha did during the first three seasons?

And last but not least, there's Carrie Bradshaw, who's supposed to represent the "every woman" watching the show. Of course, the fact that the character people are supposed to be able to best relate to -- is a woman who writes a column about sex for the local paper, is obsessed with high fashion, and spends her time frantically alternating between meaningless flings and long-term relationships -- tells you a lot about the show.

As a group, although the show tries to portray them as likeable, with the possible exception of Charlotte, they're an extraordinarily selfish group of women with meaningless empty lives. Their jobs are an afterthought, they're all as shallow as kiddie pools, and they look at people outside of their little group, including the men in their lives, as little more than disposable playthings that have no purpose other than to make them happy.

Does that mean that Sex and the City promotes a promiscuous, unhealthy lifestyle? Yes, it does, although to be fair, the show does occasionally show the consequences of sleeping around.

For example, one of my favorite moments in the first three seasons is when Samantha gets sick, knocks a curtain rod down, and needs help getting it back up. So, she starts calling all the different one-night-stands she has been with and even though she goes through an enormous number of them, not one of them cares enough about her to come over and help.

Unfortunately, such moments happened far too seldom on the show and were so sanitized that as a conservative, you almost want to cheer when one of the women actually has to deal with a consequence of sleeping with a different guy every week....

Which brings me to the movie. Much to my chagrin, Charlotte and Miranda were married when the movie started and Samantha and Carrie were in long-term relationships. This was horrifying because the dating stories were the heart of the series for the first three seasons. It was almost like watching an A-Team movie where the guys had given up helping people and spend the whole movie playing monopoly and checkers. Continued...