Charlotte York. When women get to be people in media, and when they don't.

Teenage Feminism

I’ve never really been a SatC person. I feel like I have to preface this essay like this not to distance myself from a piece of media, but because I do not intend to write from the top of a hoard of stolen valor.

I was dragged into a showing of the first SatC movie by my mom when I was sixteen. I watched it with at least two layers of ironic distance and vague teenage-feminist disdain. Then, I proceeded to watch my mom’s DVDs of all six seasons multiple times, with both layers still mostly intact and also the added excuse of needing to improve my English.

I have mostly held the same unoriginal opinions about this show and their characters ever since I first watched it in ~2009: Carrie Bradshaw is horrible and her relationship with the male lead is entirely dysfunctional. Miranda Hobbes is a tragic character study that reveals the most hideous sentiments 2000s popular culture held about professionally successful women. Samantha Jones would have been the protagonist of the show if the creators hadn’t been cowards.

And then there’s Charlotte York.

When I was 16, Charlotte’s character was something of a guilty pleasure for me. The silly, ditzy, hyperfeminine broadway princess, who’s only aim in life is to find a husband. How ridiculous! How backwards. Except, in private, she was always my favourie character by a long shot. The choices she made were the only ones that seemed to make at least an internal kind of sense, and her relationship with the bald jewish divorce lawyer she gets paired up with over the course of the show is by far the easiest to root for.

Back in the day, I lacked the media literacy 10 years of youtube video essays have since then provided me with.

Why Charlotte York is the only character in Sex and the City who gets to have an actual character arc

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