Carrie Bradshaw, Matador

The bullfights in The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway, 1926) remind me quite a bit of Sex and the City (HBO, 1998‐2004). Yes, specifically the bullfights. I’d like to tell you why, and in great detail.

Your rhetorical question sets me up perfectly to briefly summarize The Sun Also Rises, a book that most people have not read. That’ll make it much easier for a wider audience to understand what I’m getting at here. You always know just what to ask. I love you.

The Sun Also Rises was Hemingway’s breakout novel, more or less a true story, and yet another entry in that tried and true genre of “friends hanging out in a major city.” Here’s the gist of the book, which I am about to spoil in its entirety:

• A Hemingway self‐insert character lives in Paris in the early 1920s, writes for an American newspaper, and hangs out with several “literary scene” friends who come from money. These include the Jewish1 Princeton alum and ex‐boxer Robert Cohn and the Lady Brett Ashley, a British socialite.

• Brett is cool, chic, and ahead of the curve in terms of style and personal behavior. The book credits her with adopting the bob well before it becomes fashionable. She is in many ways the original flapper, beating out Zelda Fitzgerald by several years.

• Almost every male character, Robert Cohn and Hemingway’s self‐insert included, is in love with Brett, who in turn has dalliances with everyone. Except for Hemingway’s self insert. Like Hemingway, his self‐insert saw action in WWI and suffered an injury, but very unlike Hemingway, his self‐insert has been rendered sexually impotent as a result.

• For the first half of the book, the gang goes through their normal lives in Paris, bickering, going to Parisian cafés, having strong emotions. Then a subset of the gang (Hemingway’s self‐insert, Robert Cohn, published author Bill Gorton, Brett’s Scottish fiancé Mike Campbell, and Brett) descends on Pamplona for the festival of San Fermín, to see the running of the bulls and attend bullfights. Hemingway’s self‐insert has done this before, but none of the rest of the group has.

Before the bullfights, Hemingway’s self‐insert explains, in dialogue Bill Gorton, that they are likely to see the bulls attack other animals placed in the ring:

[HEMINGWAY’S SELF INSERT:] “They let the bulls out of the cages one at a time, and they have steers in the corral to receive them and keep them from fighting, and the bulls tear in at the steers and the steers run around like old maids trying to quiet them down.”

[BILL:] “Do they ever gore the steers?”

[H:] “Sure. Sometimes they go right after them and kill them.”

[B:] “Can’t the steers do anything?”

[H:] “No. They’re trying to make friends.”

[B:] “What do they have them in for?”

[H:] “To quiet down the bulls and keep them from breaking horns against the stone walls, or goring each other.”

[B:] “Must be swell being a steer.”

The group sees this happen in their first fight; a bull gores one of the steers, killing it. Later, sitting at a café, the men start comparing each other to bulls and steers:

“Did you see the one hit that steer?” Mike asked. “That was extraordinary.”

“It’s no life being a steer,” Robert Cohn said.

“Don’t you think so?” Mike said. “I would have thought you’d loved being a steer, Robert.”

“What do you mean, Mike?”

“They lead such a quiet life. They never say anything and they’re always hanging about so.”

A steer, for the agriculturally uninitiated, is a bull that has been castrated. This is the 1920s equivalent of saying you’re an alpha chad and someone else is a beta cuck. In this case, the insult falls flat, as Robert has recently fucked Mike’s fiancée and everyone knows it. The Sun Also Rises is one of the cattiest books ever written. Under Hemingway’s highly constructed hyper‐masculine image, he had the soul of a messy bitch who lives for drama.

The men are animals, so says this metaphor. They’re amicable steers, castrated (almost literally, in Hemingway’s self‐insert’s case) with no courage, or they’re raging bulls like Robert or the young matador Pedro Romero who fuck and fight and who none can control. But steers aren’t part of a bullfight, not really. The fight is between the bull and the matador. If the men are all cattle, who do the bulls face?

Brett, of course! Brett’s the matador. She’s the one who faces the bull‐like men directly in, uh, “combat,” and in an inversion of the matador’s sword entering the bull to kill it, Brett “kills” by ‐ you know what, this is already probably someone’s undergrad thesis, I don’t need to elaborate. Brett’s the matador, she either subdues the men or is badly harmed by them.

Why does she do it? The same reason literal matadors do, because it’s the greatest thrill life can offer. “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

The Sun Also Rises was a smash hit. Legions of young men across America adopted Hemingway’s brooding, literary, masculine mannerisms. Legions of young women cut their hair short and decided to emulate Brett’s freewheeling and libertine personality.2 Does that remind you of any other media property? Perhaps a TV show, one released in the late 90s and early 00s?

To extend François Truffaut’s formulation, in the same way there’s no such thing as an anti-war film, there’s no such thing as an unglamorous depiction of young artists in an urban center. Like La Bohème, like Girls, like Sex and the City, The Sun Also Rises makes the artist’s life in Paris seem thrilling, even as the characters do nothing but complain. There is a sense, I think, that these depictions impart, that there is only one way to live your life all the way up, that you must enter the arena they describe, and fight bulls.

These depictions have real staying power, and you can see their impact on this very app. When you first make a Substack account, before its algorithm places you into a narrow silo, the app recommends you a genre of post that others have derisively termed “sex diaries.” Examples of the genre the algorithm has served me: Mia Sherin, Femcel (who, despite the name, has sex), Girl Insides, Maudite femmelette. Emma Newman-Holden writes fiction, but has similar vibes.

These newsletters, invariably written by 20‐something women, most often living in New York but sometimes in London or Los Angeles, are often not directly about sex, but cover anything from dating, friendships, advice, gossip, and so on. They’re Sex and the City columns. Many of these women will tell you, without you having to ask, that they are trying to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I am now going to discuss Sex and the City without providing background knowledge on the show. If you are confused at any point, please ask your wife or girlfriend to explain.

Each of the four main Sex and the City characters get exactly what they want.

What does Charlotte want? Charlotte wants to be loved. Charlotte wants a romantic love, to be held and cherished like the moon and the stars, to have her husband’s devotion sink in past his bones. She gets this! She has to learn the hard way that her husband has to choose to treat her this way, that she cannot convince a man to change his ways by leading by example, but she does get this in the end.

What does Miranda want? Miranda wants to be right. She wants other things (career success, a decent man in her life, happiness) but she wants to be right more. Unfortunately she is also a pessimist, about men, about work, about her own capabilities, about what she can get out of life. Again and again she settles, and even when it seems like she has found peace in domesticity, she is betrayed and let down. It is all just as she predicted.

What does Samantha want? Samantha wants to have sex. She indeed has sex.

What does Carrie want? Carrie wants to be seen, to be known, hence her chosen profession. Carrie Bradshaw’s life is public. It is a performance. We, the viewers, see the show from her perspective, and you could argue that Carrie herself views her life as a TV show, that, in producing a weekly narrative column, she has come to view everything in her life as a narrative meant for public eyes, to the point that her writer’s instincts are now less tools to a craft and more involuntary habits, tics.

A matador’s job is not just to kill the bull. That would be boring. The matador instead must heighten the drama of the bullfight by deliberately placing himself in harm's way. Hemingway describes the ideal bullfighting technique:

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness.

The matador places himself in front of a charging bull, lives to tell the tale, and then is scrutinized for how stoically and beautifully he did so. The matador knows this and behaves accordingly.

“Men look at women,” art critic John Berger famously claimed, and “women watch themselves being looked at.” The bull sees the fight as a fight; he charges horns‐first and aims to kill. The matador sees the fight as a performance. The bull watches him, yes, but so does an audience. It is not enough to kill the bull. The matador must entertain.3 4

At least the matador stops performing after leaving the arena. Carrie has made her entire life into an arena; she honors her craft by never making contortions, keeping her lines straight and pure and natural; her columns tell the titillating truth of her real life. In order to keep the truth titillating, she must deliberately put herself in harm’s way, and she does so, consciously or not. Even after leaving the Star and ending her newspaper column, she behaves this way, perhaps metatextually aware that she is a fictional character in a TV show.5

Unfortunately, men are people, not bulls, and life is life, not a story. She spurns the boring, stable, reliable Aidan Shaw, who loves her, and chases the fascinating and enigmatic Mr. Big, a man who exploits Carrie’s need for dramatic tension at every turn and who, even in marriage, does not seem to care whether Carrie lives or dies. She finds, repeatedly, that her life refuses to make itself into a clean and tidy arc. Her desire for her life to have narrative structures big and small has built her career and denied her happiness. It is her greatest strength and greatest flaw.6

The Sun Also Rises makes much of afición, a Spanish word that shares a root with “affection” but, in the context of bullfighting, means something closer to a combination of “fandom” and “love.” Afición is the condition of captivation with bullfighting. An aficionado will travel a thousand miles and empty his savings to see a promising bullfight, because there is nothing more thrilling. Not all who have afición are matadors (most aren’t), but to be crazy enough to stand in front of a charging bull, you must have afición.

What of the Substack sex diarist? Why do so many young women want to be Carrie Bradshaw? Why are they trying to emulate a fictional character, one that suffers constantly, and often at her own hands? What makes a girl want to move to the city, start a newsletter, and try (ostensibly) to find love while broadcasting her every thought to the world?

Because they are afflicted with afición. At a young age, they watched Carrie stare bulls in the eye and gracefully dodge without fear. Nobody lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters, and these women want to know what it means to truly live. So, come what may, they enter the arena.