In her series, The Single Woman in Hollywood, Hayley examines the ways that single women are portrayed onscreen, plotting them on a highly scientific matrix of Horny/Sexless and Messy/Organized.
“Listen to me: The right guy is an illusion. Start living your lives.”
This is our introduction to Samantha Jones in the pilot episode of Sex and the City. She is a single woman who is in full control of her sexuality, with a high-powered, high-paying job.
Samantha Jones is Horny and Organized.
The Horny/Organized quadrant of our Single Woman Matrix is endlessly fascinating. It covers an impressive breadth of characters, but it also comes with damaging subtext: a woman who does not need external validation when it comes to sex or career is a threat. Pop culture has reduced the four Sex and the City protagonists from nuanced depictions of singleness to one-note parodies: Carrie is neurotic, Miranda is uptight, Charlotte is prude, and Samantha is a slut. It is interesting how, despite the fact that all four women engage in a lot of sex throughout the show, Samantha is the one who gets the “slut” label.
It is easy to see how Samantha has been turned into a threat. Her most memorable line is from the moment she ends a perfectly good relationship with her long-term boyfriend, Smith Jerrod:
“I love you, but I love me more.”
It’s been thirteen years since Samantha broke up with Smith, and this decision is still groundbreaking and rare. We hardly ever see single women choosing to remain single. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) emphasizes this with a brilliantly scathing piece of writing advice delivered to Jo by her publisher, Mr. Dashwood: “If the main character is a girl, make sure she's married by the end. Or dead, either way.”
This isn’t to say that every woman in the Horny/Organized quadrant needs to (or wants to) remain single. The experience of the Horny/Organized woman is vast, and while Samantha Jones may be the most heightened version of this quadrant, one of my other favorite examples is Donna Meagle on Parks and Recreation.
Donna is one of my favorite characters. She’s introduced as a mid-level government employee who is incredibly competent at her job. Then over time, you’re treated to these incredible morsels of her backstory. We find out that her cousin is Genuwine, that the Pearl Jam album Vitalogy was written about her, and that she owns a condo in Seattle.
Donna’s most compelling story lines are the ones that deal directly with her sexual agency, like the episode where she and Ann happen to be at the same speed dating event. Ann is a mess, and it’s Donna who gives her a quick rundown of how to get a man’s attention, before downing two shots and getting back to work. There is an inherent kind of cheesiness to Parks and Rec that renders a lot of the sexual references a little silly. But even within this weird chaste adult world, Donna reigns supreme as someone who uses her sexuality for her benefit, who understands men, and who uses them to get what she wants. Her confidence and coolness are a great contrast to characters like Ann (Horny/Messy) and Leslie (Sexless/Organized).
Mad Men highlights a lot of the issues that society continues to have around women finding professional success at work and sexual agency in their private lives. Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson are both Horny/Organized, and they’re great examples of how these qualities can manifest differently and still be perceived as a threat by the men around them. They are both dismissed constantly for daring to live their lives with the same agency that the men they work with every day live theirs. With Mad Men being set in the 1960s, the sexual politics that dominate the workplace feel exaggerated for a modern audience, but the same issues around women being taken seriously for their professional prowess remain today — “Girlboss” culture is not revolutionary, it is just a re-branding of the same professional decorum standards that have been dictated by men for decades.
The reason why a Sex and the City revival series without Samantha doesn’t make sense is because Samantha represented a crucial demographic of single women onscreen. There are external factors as to why Kim Cattrall is not returning for the series, and I fully support that decision. A Samantha-less show means we no longer get to enjoy seeing what a single and over-60 Samantha is doing with her life, which is a bummer, though I know that whatever she is doing, she is doing it on her own terms.
After all, it was Samantha herself who said, “I will not be judged by you, or society.”