Is There Still Sex in the City?

By Candace Bushnell

Sometimes it can be fun to wonder what became of our fictional heroines. Did Elizabeth Bennet move into Pemberley and discover that her prejudice and her pride were well founded when Mr. Darcy turned out to be a stuffed shirt with anger-management issues? And what of Carrie Bradshaw? After she bagged her Mr. Big, did she list her $40,000 shoe collection on eBay, move to the suburbs, have a bunch of kids and grow old gracefully? Or did Carrie find herself in her 50s child-free, single again and wondering how to get back in the game, only to have her gynecologist recommend a Mona Lisa laser treatment because “your vagina is not flexible enough”?

Ugh. Such are the humiliations awaiting the female in middle age. That you-gotta-laugh-or-you-cry place is where Candace Bushnell, with her usual sparkling candor, begins “Is There Still Sex in the City?”

More than 20 years ago, Bushnell created a cultural phenomenon when she described Manhattan mating rituals in a weekly newspaper column. It was as if Truman Capote and Margaret Mead had made a beautiful blond baby who combined anthropology with higher gossip. Part reportage, part memoir, those columns begat a book, “Sex and the City,” which begat a TV series of the same name. By focusing on the friendship of four 30-somethings, it lent warmth and humanity to a world that could be chilling in its loveless calculation. “Sex and the City” actually posed a serious sociological question: What happens when women have sex like men? Except we were too busy laughing at Bushnell’s artful acronyms to notice.