“Fashion roadkill”

If I were to tell you that I was mind-blown by an episode of Sex and the City I watched in an airplane, you might express concern. Bear with me.

“The Real Me” first aired June 2001, when I was a senior finishing high school in lower Manhattan. If I relate to it on some primal level, it could be because I was physically if not socially in the spaces in question, the outdoor ones at any rate. (Some high school kids did go to upscale nightclubs but I wasn’t one of them.) That show intro, with the Twin Towers, really does place things in time, in an end-of-an-era moment for society and, coincidentally, for yours truly.

It’s a great episode for, it pains me to say, Bechdel-rule reasons. It’s all about what the women are up to, with men and dating barely entering into it. Charlotte looks in the mirror at her genitals for the first time, while Samantha pays for a nude photo shoot of herself. Miranda does go on some dates, but with a man who only finds her attractive when she looks shlumpy. He picks her up at the gym, where she is presenting in a way that let us say foreshadows future developments both for Miranda the character and Cynthia Nixon herself (but it’s also how I dress for the gym, so), but is put off when she dolls herself up on a date.

There is also a funny-painful side plot wherein the girls try to set up their gays, each of whom is like, you think I should go out with HIM? I had misremembered the show (perhaps based on spinoffs) as having sent the message that if you know two gay men, they should form a couple. Well. “The Real Me” actually roasts the ladies for doing that thing.

But the main plot is that main character Carrie has been asked to be in a fashion show. Margaret Cho, a comedian I was somewhat obsessed with at the time and even went to go see, plays the fashion show organizer. The theme is a mix of fashion models and real New Yorkers on the runway. Carrie has been asked in her capacity as… dun dun dun… a real New Yorker.

This leads Carrie to devote that episode’s five-minute, smoke-cigarettes-while-writing-a-few-hundred-words-of-musings workweek to the angst brought forth by realizing how the world sees her: not as a fashion model.

Which, look, Carrie knows she is a short woman in her 30s, a columnist by trade. But to be classified so bluntly as not-a-model throws her all the same. She learns that she is more of a Fran Lebowitz than a Heidi Klum (both are also in the runway show.) She makes a crack about Ed Koch (former and in my warped mind current) NYC mayor also being in it, and learns from the Margaret Cho character that he is, in fact, in it as well. When the scene eventually came where Chekhov’s Ed Koch struts down the runway in Gucci, I positively gasped. Apologies to anyone on the plane trying to sleep at that time.

What’s so difficult about all this, for Carrie, is that she is, relative to an Ed Koch or a Fran Lebowitz, model-adjacent. She’s a young-ish, pretty, spectacular-maned, undeniably slim, dancer-postured woman. But she moves in circles where her dating pool is that of actual professionally-hot-for-a-living women. Most women will experience being the hottest in the room some of the time. If you’re Carrie, in the Meatpacking District of y2k, this isn’t happening for you.

In very possibly the same month, I myself appeared as a runway model.. in the Stuyvesant High School (geeky STEM magnet school) fashion show. A group of boys came to cheer me on, even. But also, this was the Stuyvesant High School fashion show.

I was thinking about this in terms of The Last Straight Woman, and how it is sometimes misinterpreted as being about ugly women. It is, rather, about the fact that if you put all post-adolescent girls and women together, and separate out the young and especially stunning, this leaves nearly all of us. The unfortunate-looking, but also the girl-next-door pretty. The (heyday) Heidi Klums, no, but Carrie Bradshaw, Carrie and all the ladies of SATC, yes.

Am I the best spokesperson for ugly-woman-hood? These things are subjective. But probably not, no. Nor for that matter is my (as Edina Monsoon once put it) “still very much menstrual” self the one to speak for older women. But I’m uglier and older than the proverbial 20-year-old fashion model who serves as a stand-in for the female experience in much of post-#MeToo feminist discourse. I also, like Carrie, happened to spend my young adulthood surrounded by actual models, which was I suppose a constant reminder that there are the real beautiful people and I’m not and never could be one of them. Maybe this was liberating, in a way. It never occurred to me that I could be A Beautiful Woman, which rather puts a cap on how much effort one spends with that goal in mind.

This is the episode where, famously, Carrie tumbles in her massive high heels on the runway, but gets back up and works it. She’s not a model, and that’s fine. She still dates a photographer, much as models will.

Also: I am such a Carrie and upon this rewatch was embarrassed for ever having even fleetingly pondered being any of the others. The writing, the overthinking, the shopping. She’s the Jewish one, unstated I think but she is.