Carrie Bradshaw Has Always Been a Terrible Prude

This week’s episode of And Just Like That… picks up where we left off twenty years ago: Carrie Bradshaw and Aidan Shaw are in bed together in a fancy hotel. They can’t seem to get room service delivered, but it seems like they’re having a lot of sex. Later on, Carrie confides in Miranda that she’s having the best orgasms of her life. (No wonder she’s smiling so much).

In true Carrie Bradshaw style, I couldn’t help but wonder… What kind of sex are they having? What does Carrie actually get up to in the bedroom? These seem like pretty basic questions to ask about the star of a franchise literally titled Sex and the City, who supposedly made a living and afforded an infinite supply of Manolo Blahnik heels by writing about sex.

But this season of AJLT has made one thing abundantly clear: Carrie Bradshaw is a prude at heart. 

In the first episode of AJLT Season Two, we saw Carrie get herself into professional hot water because she refused to say the word “vagina” in a pre-recorded ad that would be played during her podcast. In the real world, viewers lamented not only that Carrie seemed to have such a problem with the word, but also that she didn’t take the opportunity to address misinformation about vaginal odor products. (There were entire think pieces about it). In AJLT, Carrie’s prudishness ended up tanking her entire podcast and, completely ludicrously, the entire production company. That escalated quickly!

There have been other glimpses of Carrie The Prude: In Episode Four, when Che and Miranda revealed they bought a strap-on, Carrie got up and tried to leave the room because she didn’t want to be involved in the conversation. (What a buzzkill!). Then, in Episode Five, Carrie turned her nose up at the idea that she would ever have had an “STD issue.” 

My first reaction was to consider Carrie’s prudish pivot as yet another example of how much she has changed since the SATC days. After all, from the outset, AJLT has practically bombarded us with how different the two shows are. This seems like strangely judgy behavior for someone who was a sex columnist in the Nineties and besties with sex-positive PR guru Samantha Jones. Are we to believe Carrie never had an “STD issue” in her life and would consider that shameful? Or that a strap-on is too much for her to discuss? 

The original SATC featured plenty of these types of storylines. In Season Four, Charlotte’s vagina was “depressed” and Samantha’s lesbian lover Maria bought her a strap-on — and threw her back out with it. In Season Six, Samantha even used her vibrator to help put Miranda’s son Brady to sleep. (Don’t worry, it was brand new!). In terms of sexual health, Samantha once got tested for HIV and Charlotte caught pubic lice in the Hamptons. (Though, in classic SATC-style, none of these plots were sensitively handled).

After thinking about it, I’ve realized that Carrie has always been reserved about her own sex life. On SATC, we very rarely got into the juicy details of the sex she was having nearly as much as the other characters. In the first SATC movie (please, let’s not talk about the second one), Carrie refuses to answer even the most basic questions over a girl-talk lunch, like how often she and Big have sex. This leaves Samantha and even Charlotte to share their details instead. Think about it: Over six seasons and two movies, we never even learned what Mr Big was into in bed — or Aidan for that matter. By comparison, we know much more about the men who have been with Carrie’s friends, like Trey, Steve, Richard, Smith, Harry, and everyone they met (and dumped) along the way.

Whenever we did see more details of Carrie’s sex life, she was often occupying a more conservative role. When her short-lived politician boyfriend (played by Mad Men’s John Slattery!) asked her to pee on him in Season Three, she politely turned him down — as is her right, of course — but then she took it a step further by publicly kink-shaming him in her column after he broke up with her. Here, the details of Carrie’s sex life were only revealed to underline her “normalness” in relation to him. Another censorious Carrie moment happened when she walked in on Samantha mid-blowjob and slut-shamed her for it. (She insisted she didn’t, before eventually admitting she probably did). Or when she stormed out of a restaurant because Samantha began talking about dating a guy (played by Bobby Cannavale!) with “the funkiest-tasting spunk.”

As a fellow writer, I’ve always found the ethics of Carrie making bank by writing about all her friends, while sharing so little about her own sex life, a little iffy. But perhaps, at the turn of the millennium, this was a conscious decision to make Carrie more relatable and likable to a wider audience. People watching at home — particularly those who weren’t living a fabulous, sexy NYC lifestyle — could put themselves in Carrie’s (expensive) shoes, discovering the world of weird and wonderful sex as onlookers first, participants second. Instead, we got to know Carrie on a much deeper level emotionally.

I once watched a documentary about the making of Friends — an even straighter and whiter NYC-based show that aired over the same years as SATC. In the pilot episode, Monica sleeps with a guy on the first date. But this moment almost didn’t make it in: Producers screen-tested the storyline specifically because they were worried viewers wouldn’t like Monica. Thankfully, the focus groups didn’t care, but it showed just how concerned bosses were about how young women were portrayed sexually on TV. Although SATC was aimed at a different audience, it’s possible that some of these anxieties filtered down into Carrie — the face of the show — actually being one of the more sexually reserved characters. (Seriously, even Charlotte was more adventurous and forthcoming). 

In AJLT, we’ve seen Miranda get finger-blasted and Charlotte come out as a “cum slut” (Miranda’s words, not mine). Seema tried to navigate a penis pump and Anthony had a Demi Moore Ghost moment with some dough and an Italian poet. While Carrie has always bared her emotional soul, we’re still largely shut out of her sex life. She might have written a lot of books about sex, but when it comes to sharing the details about herself, Carrie Bradshaw is a closed book — and a total prude, too.