But the fact is that I watched it, and that was wrong. In my defense, I was up late working, and a rerun just happened to come on one of the three channels I get, because I'm the one guy in North America still using rabbit ears. "Going down with the ship" is a noble way to put it. Plus, the remote control was totally at the other end of the couch.
At first, I just let the show play in the background, glancing up from my laptop every now and then whenever someone said a word like "orgasm" or "boobs," which happened approximately 200 times a minute.
Sample dialogue:
Woman 1: "Your boobs look great. Did you orgasm last night? Men are dumb."
Woman 2: "My orgasm was great. Men are dumb. Boobs."
But then, subconsciously at first, I started getting caught up in the storyline – something about Sarah Jessica Parker hooking up with an old boyfriend, and then Kim Cattrall hooking up with an old boyfriend, and then someone else hooking up with an old boyfriend, and then the girls getting together to drink cosmos and say "orgasm" and "boobs" some more.
I could actually feel myself getting dumber as I watched, but was able to justify it as the price you sometimes have to pay for escapism, ranking it somewhere on the brain damage scale between sniffing glue and shouting "Drill, baby, drill." And it was just one episode, so I figured there was no harm done. I did worry for a moment about what kind of affect the show was having on my dog, but he was busy licking his tender parts, so I figured he was fine. Or was he doing it BECAUSE of the show? I wasn't sure.
Sex and the City is the kind of show that you can hate on principal, whether you've seen it or not; it's self-indulgent, silly and, like Sarah Palin, unapologetically aimed at the lowest common denominator of viewers – the kind that would brainlessly lap up an over-romanticized version of female empowerment in which a gaggle of 40-something ladies are morphed from sex objects into catty, high heel-wearing predators. Fierce! To make it worse, these ladies spend their time prowling a fictional world in which all men are portrayed as little more than pathetically unaware slabs of dudeness who can be lured into any bed with a can of Bud. But the joke's on them – some of us don't even need the Bud. So you just wasted, like, a couple bucks.
As I continued to watch the show, however, I realized how this portrayal of reality was actually viable, how the characters, in between their many, many orgasms, actually had some thoughtful things to say. I caught myself thinking things like, "I've seen worse," and, "Wow, this actually isn't a total disaster. Not bad." My expectations were set so low that, just by virtue of that fact that it wasn't a complete train wreck, Sex and the City seemed like a success. So there's another link to Sarah Palin.
A few nights later, by which I mean the very next night, I was doing some more late-night writing on the couch when, to my complete surprise, the clock struck 12:30 a.m. and Sex and the City came on again. Naturally, what with me being a dude and all, I wanted to turn it off as quickly as possible. The problem was, the remote was under my dog, who, when not licking his tenders, had spent his evening expelling gas at an alarming rate thanks to a doughnut left too close to the edge of the table. I decided to just call it a wash and watch the show.
Next night, same thing. There I was, sitting in front of the TV, no longer bothering to pretend I was working, watching Sex and the City and nudging the volume down notch by notch so my sleeping wife wouldn't learn my dark secret. I was hooked. It felt dirty, like I was sneaking out to my garage with a flashlight and a box full of gay porn. Only, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I wasn't gay. I just sort of kind of didn't totally hate watching this show. What did that mean? Oh, I was confused.
They say that a habit only becomes a problem when you start doing it alone. That's how I knew I was in trouble. Night after night, I sat there on my couch waiting for Sex and the City to come on with a sickening mixture of guilt and titillation, like a Republican lurking in a men's room stall.
But I wasn't totally alone. There in the dark, with my dog softly tooting in his sleep, I had Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, laughing, crying, constantly orgasming and doggedly working their way through life's important questions, one boob at a time. Questions like: When Jack broke up with Carrie on a Post-it Note (of all things!), was it really because of her hair scrunchie?
I had to see that episode twice before I could really decide. Which means, of course, that I had indulged in my disgusting habit long enough for the reruns to become re-reruns. It was a terrible period in my life, full of self-loathing, sleep deprivation and denial. And it might still be going on today had my wife, who apparently wasn't fooled for a second, not finally confronted me about it. And by "confronted" I mean "totally made fun of me and threatened to tell our friends that I stayed up to watch Sex and the City." But I only stayed up AND watched it, I argued. She didn't buy it.
As Carrie once wrote in her column, "Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate." I'm not really sure what that means – not even the show's scriptwriters know – but it sounds neat. And sometimes neat-sounding nonsense is exactly what you want to hear. Just ask Joe Six-Pack.
But in a weird way, my mistake really did make my fate. If I hadn't made my dark descent into the world of Sex and the City, I would never have been able to write this column, which hopefully brought some joy to your life. And like I've always said, "Joy is the snowy mountain that life skis down."
