The Infantilization of Carrie Bradshaw
I couldn’t help but wonder…are we all secretly destined to end up like Carrie Bradshaw?
In a fit of summer boredom, I spent the last month watching Sex and the City for the first time. For a young woman born at the end of 2004, this show doesn't scream nostalgia and familiarity; it acts as a curious time capsule for a world beyond my ken.
I watched the pre-dating app landscape, the strange relationship politics, and the lack of actual politics with fascination. Much can be and (has been) said about these aspects of the show. However, something I found particularly insidious as a 21st-century born-and-raised consumer was the extreme infantilization of the show's lead, Carrie Bradshaw.
In the show's early seasons, Carrie is 32 years old. Despite SATC being considered groundbreaking for its age representation, this wasn’t outside the norm. For example, most of the friends cast would turn 30 around 1998/1999. However, by the show's end, they were in uncharted territory as Carrie neared 40.
In the early seasons, Carrie feels plausible—apart from, well, practically every aspect of her lifestyle. But I'm not interested in her economics but in her characterization. In the early seasons, I found her somewhat likeable. Sure, she is a bad girlfriend, but she's significantly less whiny and more self-possessed. But starting around Season 3, her character takes a severe nosedive into insufferability. I kept trying to pinpoint what about her had become so utterly disdainful to me. By season 6, she was so unlikable that I nearly couldn't finish the show.
So, what changed? Was it just the show wearing me down? Was it my internalized misogyny? Perhaps there's a bit of both.
As Carrie ages, the show has to reckon with a difficult reality: 38-year-old women, especially in the early 2000s, are not seen as sexy, glamorous, or aspirational. But for the show to work, Carrie must be all those things. She must be desirable to men and aspirational for women.
So, how does the show choose to remedy this? Despite her age, she's written like a girl. This is communicated through various methods, including her physicality, her fashion, her dialogue, and the show's narrative arc.
SJP does a lot of the heavy lifting here. If you've been on the SATC side of the internet (I pity you), you've likely encountered the vitriol hurled at Parker for this performance— particularly its juvenility. The lip-biting, squealing, and melodramatic responses to rain and squirrels are infuriating and are some of the clearest examples of Carrie's infantilization. But I hesitate to dig too deep here, as most of the conversations around Parker's performance reeks of misogyny.
Her fashion also reflects the juvenile nature of her character. All the women on the show have distinct styles. Miranda wears suits, Charlotte wears knee-length dresses, and Samatha wears lavish fur coats. In season six, Carrie wears predominantly dresses, pink in practically every episode, and a large diversity of prints and patterns, like gingham, tie-dye, and stripes. By the show's end, tutus are a fashion staple for her. She wears multiple tutus in the finale. All these features of her style make for some impeccable outfits—don't get me wrong. But they also all evoke youth and girlishness (maybe it's not a coincidence that her resurgent popularity coincided with the 'girlification' of everything).
Finally, and most personally infuriating, is her interactions with men. Her most significant relationships in Season 6 are with Big and the Russian, who are canonically much older than her. In the later seasons, Carrie's relationship with Big was increasingly uncomfortable to watch. The pet name he uses for her throughout the show is 'kid' or 'kiddo'; this is particularly evident in the final season. She also plays into her 'kiddo' nickname, often infantilizing herself through her physicality in his presence.
In addition to the dialogue, she is narratively dependent on men, especially in Season 6. She's supported financially by the Russian, and when she chooses to move to Paris with him, she feels trapped and expects him to save her. When he doesn't, Big comes to her rescue. In the final episode, she has practically no agency, bouncing between the whim of the Russian, her friends, and Big.
It doesn't take much to notice that the show is infantilizing Carrie. But this is a lot more complicated than a simple narrative choice. The infantilization is written into the plot to convince us that Carrie still fits into our concept of a 'desirable woman' despite being 38. Therefore, whether we accept Carrie as desirable or not, we are being sold a definition of desirability that centres on youth, and this is deeply problematic because it has real-world consequences.
These consequences appear in many facets of our lives. A youth-centric standard of femininity is highly unrealistic, which can have severe implications for women's health and happiness. It also puts actual girls in more significant harm by positioning them as the ideal. And it is rooted in a concerning male desire to control and maintain power over women. If you're interested in a deeper analysis of the consequences of such depictions of femininity, the substack ‘Your Fave is Selling a Pedophilic Fantasy' by Jade Fax is a great read.1
In addition to upholding problematic standards for all women, this is a particularly un-empowering way to depict women in their 30s. It acts to reinforce the already rampant devaluation of ageing women by selling us a narrative where the female lead can only remain desirable by cosplaying as a girl. This negative representation is upsetting for one of the most successful shows of the last two decades and one of the only shows to centre on slightly older women. It would have been an excellent opportunity to explore and critically engage with the effect of aging on a woman's identity. As mentioned earlier, Carrie is desirable to both SATC and her fans within the show's context. However, how that desirability is depicted and how Carrie understands that aspect of her life would change the show's dynamic entirely. If Carrie had used the column as a narrative format to ask more meaningful questions about female desirability, the show could have engaged with its depiction of Carrie meta-textually.
Instead of asking: Twenty-something girls: friend... or foe?
She could have asked: Why is it so hard to let go of our 20s?
Some might argue that the show challenges these standards through the character of Samantha. Samantha was a groundbreaking character—one of the first women on TV allowed to truly enjoy sex (without also being evil). However, the show never depicts Samantha's lifestyle and character as desirable or aspirational. A contemporary viewer may find it so, but that was not the show's intention. The other characters frequently ridicule her, and most of her plot lines are played for laughs—the joke being that an ‘older’ woman is pursuing sex successfully. Hilarious. Presenting sexually liberated older women as the butt of the joke is not a good representation.
Carrie's portrayal is undoubtedly problematic. But why did I have such a visceral reaction to seeing ‘older’ women act so young? Even a momentary perusal of the Sex and The City subreddit makes it clear that her most undesirable quality is juvenility. But nobody is making the 'infantilization' point on Reddit; instead, they are complaining about how much they hate Carrie and, by extension, SJP personally. But what's so hateful about being a juvenile 38-year-old woman?
The writers attempt to make us desire and aspire to Carrie by infantilizing her, backfired. Watching her infantilize herself only brings the expectations we have for women of her age into clearer view. She's so hateful because we don't let women of her age act like that on screen. We want her to be more mature, less consumed by the fashion and beauty industry, and more competent—because those are traits we value in women of her age. Therefore, we feel alienated by her because she appears to us as an 'other.' She scares women because we are afraid of turning out like her or want to make it clear that we are not like her. We know that even though the show presents her behaviour as desirable and likeable, we would suffer a way worse fate in the real world if we acted as she does.
In contrast, Miranda and Charlotte never received this audience response because, by the end of the show, they are both in the 'correct' roles for women their age. Samantha, like I mentioned before, was always played for laughs.
Carrie is a fascinating character. She is an amalgamation of unmet expectations, illuminating the pressures on women of all ages. Whether or not the viewer comprehends the broader cultural implications of her infantilization, they are almost certainly hating her for it anyway. She was 'girlified,' to appeal to consumers, but this was a gross miscalculation.
None of this is Carrie's fault or the fault of the SATC show runners. In bell hooks's third instalment in her trilogy on love, Communion, she speaks to this, writing in the introduction.
‘All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents, then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved—that "femaleness" is not good enough."2
When I was younger, my father placed a treat up high for my dog to reach; she would jump for hours, but her attempts would be futile. Meanwhile, my younger sister and I would resent her (the dog) for making so much noise. I bring this up to say that Carrie (like all women) is the dog; we blame her rather than the hand that feeds her. It's much easier to be angry at women than it is to be angry at the invisible forces of the patriarchy, and that is a product of its design. You don't need to like Carrie: no matter how you spin it, she's still an unlikeable character. But we can at least understand that no matter how her ‘femaleness’ manifests, it will never be good enough, therefore she must be a girl.
https://www.amazon.ca/Communion-Female-Search-bell-hooks/dp/0060938293
Insightful! Owning and claiming and distorting “girlness” the way Carrie did is akin to how Courtney Love presented herself. This was happening in many arenas. Carrie wasn’t as obvious as Courtney but using this well worn trope of “girlification” as a way of claiming the narrative was a way of pushing boundaries… there is a recoil and collateral damage that that I think your analysis showcases well.
Not everyone agreed that a “slut walk” was a good tool for establishing a new healthier power dynamic.