Samantha Jones, postfeminist icon
As 'Sex and the City' hits Netflix, a reconsideration of a legendary character who tried to have sex 'like a man.'
All six seasons of Sex and the City hit Netflix this week and I just keep thinking about Samantha Jones. In the pilot episode, which first aired back in 1998, the four women are out at dinner and Samantha declares, cosmo in-hand: “You can bang your head against the wall and try and find a relationship or you can say screw it and go out and have sex like a man.”
“You mean with dildos?” asks Charlotte.
“Nooo, I mean without feeling,” says Samantha.
In a voiceover, Carrie tells us that Samantha is a “New York inspiration,” a “public relations executive” who routinely sleeps with “good-looking guys in their twenties.” Samantha goes on to tell her friends about sleeping with a man whose name she can barely remember. “Afterward, I didn’t feel a thing. It was like, ‘Hey babe, gotta go, catch you later,’ and I completely forgot about him after that,” she says. “For the first time in the history of Manhattan, women have both power and money. Plus, the equal luxury of treating men like sex objects.”
Rewatching this scene, I remembered just how meaningful it felt as a teenager to encounter these women on TV talking unabashedly about desire and pleasure.
But I also realized that this series-opening gambit is a perfect representation of Samantha’s unfortunate erotic ethos: sex is about getting yours. This ethos is a product of the show’s late-nineties and early-aughts era. Samantha is a caricatured reflection of the dovetailing neoliberal and postfeminist sexual sensibilities of that time, which placed an emphasis on individual choice, agency, power, and control.
“The only place you control a man is in bed,” she says later on in season one. “If we perpetually gave men blow jobs, we could run the world and still have our hands free.” She has more thoughts on blow jobs: “The sense of power is such a turn-on,” says Samantha. “Maybe you’re on your knees, but you’ve got them by the balls.”
The whole point of having men “by the balls” is to use them for your own ends. She sees a ruthless focus on one’s own pleasure as a way to guard against disempowerment: “Fuck me badly once, shame on you,” she says. “Fuck me badly twice, shame on me.”
Samantha is in favor of women sleeping with men to advance their own careers. She argues that “men and women are equal opportunity exploiters.” Samantha applies this lens of power to both sex and money: “Getting money for sex is simply an exchange of power,” she says. Samantha approaches men and sex like a savvy, self-interested consumer. A couple choice Samantha-isms:
“Tell a man ‘I hate you,’ you have the best sex of your life. Tell him ‘I love you,’ you’ll probably never see him again.”
“A guy can just as easily dump you if you fuck him on the first date as he can if you wait until the tenth.”
The show often treats men as consumer objects. “By using men, female characters develop their identity,” write the scholars Fien Adriaens and Sofie Van Bauwel in a paper on the postfeminism of Sex and the City. “Men are reduced to a brand.” At one point in season one, Carrie compares a man to “a flesh and blood equivalent” of a DKNY dress. “You know it’s not your style,” she says, “but it’s right there, so you try it on anyway.”
Samantha—a woman so armored against emotional intimacy that she panics over a man trying to hold her hand—is uniquely objectifying. She likens a “fuck buddy” to a “dial-a-dick” and, when one of her pals wants to turn a purely physical relationship into something more, Samantha is incredulous. “You’re gonna take the only person in your life that's there purely for sex... and turn him into a human being?” she asks. “Why?”
Her sexual irreverence and outrageousness is played for laughs, and those laughs have catharsis built in. Samantha is the reverse of the stereotypical womanizer, so her use of men feels earned, like payback. The payoff is questionable, though: Samantha shrewdly works the system for her own gain while never actually escaping it.
She isn’t interested in politics or dismantling anything. As Samantha puts it, “I don’t believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party, I just believe in parties.” That could be the slogan of postfeminism, which offers women “particular kinds of freedom, empowerment and choice in exchange or as a kind of substitute for real feminist politics and transformation,” as the feminist scholar Rosalind Gill has written.
A quarter of a century after Sex and the City first aired, I think we’re seeing how easily that feminist substitute is conflated with the real thing. Case in point: the current Gen Z backlash against sex positivity, which confuses a feminist movement with its mainstream, commercial cooptation. With the show reaching a new audience on Netflix, hopefully Samantha will be recognized as a testament to the insufficiency of political substitutes, as opposed to a refutation of feminism itself.