Girls & Sex and the City: Female Friendship in the Media

If you’re a young woman in New York, there are a couple of quintessential television shows that you will often be asked if you've seen. The reigning two winners in my book are Sex and the City and Girls. Two vastly different shows with one very similar goal: to make women feel seen.

Though these shows are set in different times and different locations and have characters of different ages, the core idea of both is female friendship, a theme that defies these differences.

To most women, their group of like-minded girls is a safe space, a home, a haven of femininity and understanding. The media has never understood this or, rather, has never cared to display it in this manner. Often, what we are presented with in the media about female friendships is nasty, competitive, and male-centered. We grew up on Cady Heron from Mean Girls sabotaging her best friend/enemy Regina George with Kalteen bars to gain weight. What were we possibly expected to think of the friendship's women held with each other, and what friendships we would go on to hold?

Thankfully, I believe that this narrative has changed over the past 10 years thanks to an influx of series centered on a girl group and their companionship. The shift from the catfight narrative to female friendship outshining romantic relationships is a change in the media that has truly united women—not to say female friendship is all glitter and sparkles (though I often feel it is).

These shows don’t skip past the complexity of different individuals and the relationships that they hold. Rather than traditionally throwing a man and a love plotline into the story to save the girl, her group of women does.

I would identify Sex and the City as an interesting outlier to this pattern in earlier media. This show was undeniably fresh and candid for its time. It was before we had coined terms like “situationship,” “no contact,” or “ghosting.” It was before you could make an online dating profile with your best pictures and a dating resume full of lies. But, it encapsulated all of these dating themes before we really even understood how to label them. For one of the first times, the camera’s target was a group of girls at a brunch table discussing the intimacies of their last hookup loudly and hysterically. The first time we heard “locker-room talk” in girl form.

Sex and the City feared no awkward sexual encounter. There was no such thing as TMI.

A scene I could never forget, even if I tried, was Samantha Jones pulling a stuck diaphragm out of Carrie Bradshaw in a moment of panic. This kind of female vulnerability was something that had yet to be presented to the world, only unspoken between real women who loved each other that much.

Sex and the City normalized the world of casual dating for women. I don’t think I even need to go into the double standards of sex between genders, because it is and has been so strikingly present not only in the media but also in everyday life. To sum it up quickly, if a man is free with his sexuality, he is strong and attractive, but when a woman is, she’s a slut.

Sex and the City had no time for this narrative. In fact, the entire plot of the first episode is the main girls—Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte—deciding they must start “having sex like men.” As the show continues, we learn the depth of these women’s lives and goals and how their sex lives reflect their ideals.

The best part is that each girl thinks so distinctly separately from the others, but they all accept and love each other for just that.

A full scale of promiscuity is displayed by these girls, from Charlotte, looking for the perfect man to get married and have children with, to Samantha, who moves from man to man each night and couldn’t care less about any of them. Meanwhile, Miranda is cynical about men and their place in a woman's life, while Carrie relentlessly chases men who don’t treat her right. They each represent a different view on sex and relationships that we all have associated with ourselves at some point.

Now, if we just hop on the 6 from Carrie’s Upper East Side apartment, transfer to the grueling L train, and end up in Williamsburg over a decade later, we would land in Lena Dunham’s Girls. The woke, hipster-millennial version of Sex and the City. These 15 years between the two shows opened up even more space for the female vulnerability presented. And by vulnerability, in the case of Girls, I mean painfully uncomfortable realness.

In fact, on my first watching I was almost worried Dunham had gone through my personal diary. Some of her thoughts aligned so closely with the ones that I feared to say out loud. The show was realer than real; it was Dunham’s most raw and vulgar thoughts about being a woman displayed through her own squad of girls. It was like Sex and the City if everyone was struggling to find a job, pay off their student loans, and couldn’t afford bottomless mimosas every weekend. The two shows held beautiful parallels in the aspect of femininity and friendship, but other than that—lacked any similarity.

Girls came right at the height of dating apps and “casual” relationships. It came with the rise of social media, when Instagram was bursting at the seams with trends, and when your Twitter profile bio informed others of your relationship status. In the same way that women felt comfort in exploring their sex life through watching Sex and the City, women felt comfortable exploring all messy aspects of their lives through Girls. It took the next step from complicated romantic relationships to all-around messy lives: the lives young women in New York are actually living.

It’s true, most of us have chased after someone who didn’t want us back, but most likely it wasn't a Wall Street businessman. And most likely, we weren't wearing last-season's Dior.

Girls followed a similar archetype to Sex and the City, with a four-girl friend group, each girl carrying a distinctive personality type. But rather than each woman presenting a different outlook on love and sex, each girl has a completely different outlook on the world and her future.

Hannah Horvath, the lead character—played by Lena Dunham—is an unapologetically self-centered and messy aspiring writer. Her closest friend, Marnie, is the opposite: an uptight and deeply insecure young woman who is unsure of what to do with her life. Shoshanna represents the eccentric and innocent dreamer of the group, and Jessa, who is the self-defined “free spirit.” They all hold beautiful strengths and deep-rooted flaws. Similar to Sex and the City, there isn’t one specific girl that your thoughts or opinions align with. Each girl reflects an aspect of ourselves that we may recognize, even if we don’t always like what we see.

What makes Girls so important to this shift in representations of female friendship is the way it allows these relationships to exist alongside everything else going on in their lives. Their friendships are complicated by growing up surrounded by insecurity and jealousy—along with shitty boyfriends, career struggles, and simply becoming different people. But Girls does not reduce these relationships to their conflict, nor does it attempt to place the blame. And the very last thing to ever be written into an episode of Girls, is a man saving the day.

Sex and the City paved the way for Girls by proving that female friendship could be at the center of a series, rather than just existing in the background. Television like this is what reminds me of the beauty of female friendships because, past all of the drama, inside or outside that relationship, women are there for each other. There for each other, through all differences and without any judgment.

Have you watched Sex and the City or Girls? Which is your favorite? Leave a comment below