"Women have the right to behave every bit as badly as men" is not a claim made by the big-screen version of the television hit Sex and the City—it is the film's presupposition. In the world of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte, women are every bit as callous, petty, unforgiving, and sexually promiscuous as any man. It's not an aberration, the film reveals, it's just the way things are.

I have a confession to make. I am not familiar with the television series. But I assume that I am not alone in seeing the film version of Sex and the City as a stand-alone experience. The filmmakers go out of their way to make sure that I am all caught up on the storyline before the opening credits are finished. The world into which I am ushered is one of tremendous financial privilege and faint moral obligation.

Arriving at the theater on opening night, my screening was approximately 85% female, and the demographic seemed split between women in their late teens and women in their mid-thirties to early-forties. In the four years since HBO cancelled Sex and the City, a sanitized version of the show has found its way into syndication. It would be easy to bluster that an army of innocents, beguiled by the fashion of the syndicated version, will be blindsided by the fornication in the film. But let's not be naive—the film is called Sex and the City. Rather than wring our collective cultural hands at what this film might do to those who see it, I think it is more instructive to look at what this film reveals about the culture that both created it and made it a box office smash.

Women, Men, and the Abandoning of Morality

The worldview of Sex and the City is that women and men are completely equal. The lead characters are wealthy, educated, and career-driven. They are drawn to fashion to the degree that powerful men in films are depicted as drawn to sports cars. Their love lives are, with one notable exception, train wrecks—but that's okay because they can still hang out together. Distance is no barrier. Samantha, a west-coast publicist, regularly abandons her live-in boyfriend to jet out to NYC. She is never gone from the gals long enough to be missed.

With the exception of the happily-married Charlotte, the other three women poorly treat the men in their lives. Carrie appears more interested in her wedding than in being wedded to the man in her life, identified by the nickname, "Big." Miranda is so caught up in her legal career that lovemaking with her husband has become an infrequent, somewhat burdensome, chore. And Samantha, the only character in the film that received enthusiastic applause from the audience when she first appears on screen, is so self-absorbed that she throws over a man who nursed her through chemotherapy so that she could resume a life of random sex. Samantha's next-door-neighbor—described as a man who beds a different woman every night—rather than being rejected as the eternal adolescent, who is the nightmare of every commitment-minded, single thirty-year-old woman, is lauded as a fleshly Adonis, the idol in whose image Samantha wishes to be recreated.

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