A few weekends ago, I grabbed dinner with some of my girlfriends. As we were getting up to leave, one of my friends laughed and said, “Would we ever pass the Bechdel Test?” We all paused for a second, and then laughed again because we knew the answer. We’d just spent almost the entire dinner talking about men. Who was dating who, who wasn’t texting back, who was confusing, who was emotionally unavailable. It wasn’t a bad night, and there was nothing wrong with the conversation itself, but the comment stuck with me. On the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how naturally our conversation had drifted there, and how little we’d talked about anything else.
Not long after that dinner, I started watching Sex and the City, expecting it to be a feminist comfort show. Four women in New York, designer shoes clicking down city sidewalks, successful careers, and the confidence to talk openly about sex, love, and ambition; it felt like the blueprint for modern womanhood. But a few episodes in, something started to bother me. Despite centering four independent, career-driven women, Sex and the City would fail the Bechdel Test in nearly every episode.
To be fair, the show premiered in 1998 and ran through the early 2000s, a very specific cultural moment. This was the era of flip phones, Cosmopolitans, low-rise jeans, and the idea that “having it all” meant balancing a career and a man. Carrie Bradshaw typed her columns on a laptop that would barely run Google Docs today, Miranda fought to be taken seriously in a male-dominated law firm, Charlotte clung to the idea of marriage as a life goal, and Samantha rejected monogamy entirely, yet somehow, nearly every conversation still circled back to men.
Watching it now, in 2026, feels like time travel. The fashion is iconic, the humor still lands, but the priorities feel strangely familiar. Carrie will spend an entire episode agonizing over why Big hasn’t called her back, even while juggling deadlines, friendships, and a career most people would kill for. Miranda, a Harvard-educated lawyer, spends much of the series spiraling over the possibility of ending up alone, even as she builds the career she once thought would be enough. Charlotte measures her success by an engagement ring. Even Samantha, the most sexually liberated of them all, often frames her independence in direct opposition to men as if they’re still the axis she’s orbiting. What surprised me wasn’t just that the show centers men; it was how much I recognized myself in it.
As a college-aged woman, I like to think my priorities are different. My friends and I talk about internships, classes, burnout, post-grad anxiety, and the pressure to “figure it all out” by our early twenties. We’re career-focused, ambitious, and hyper-aware of independence. But if I’m being honest, so many of our conversations still center on men. A bad date can dominate an entire lunch, a situationship update can derail a study session and someone not texting back can suddenly feel more urgent than midterms, deadlines, or our own goals.
Carrie famously says she can’t stop thinking about Big, even when he’s done nothing but disappoint her. Watching her spiral over whether she’s “too much” or “not enough” felt uncomfortably close to conversations I’ve had with my friends; conversations where we analyze texts like evidence, replay interactions, and try to decode someone else’s intentions instead of asking what we actually want.
The early 2000s context explains some of this. At the time, the idea of four women openly discussing sex on television was radical. The show pushed boundaries, and for that, it deserves credit. But it also reflects a generation that was told empowerment could coexist with centering male approval and that tension runs through every episode. Independence was celebrated, but romance was still framed as the ultimate prize. What’s harder to sit with is how little has changed.
Today, instead of Big not calling, it’s someone leaving you on read. Instead of wondering if you’ll run into him at a restaurant, it’s checking Instagram stories to see who’s watching yours. The technology has evolved, but the emotional labor feels eerily similar. We’re still negotiating our worth through romantic attention, just in a digital landscape that makes it constant and inescapable.
Watching Sex and the City made me wonder how often my own conversations would pass that test. How often do my friends and I talk about our friendships not in relation to dating? How often do we talk about our ambitions without framing them around how “intimidating” they might be to a partner? How often do we let a man take up more space in a conversation than our own lives?
One of the most telling patterns in the show is how rarely the women sit together and talk about something unrelated to men for more than a few minutes. Even brunch, their sacred ritual becomes a debrief of romantic chaos. And while that’s entertaining television, it’s also a mirror. I’ve sat at tables where every woman is accomplished, funny, and driven, yet the conversation still somehow returns to who’s dating whom.
This isn’t about blaming Sex and the City, or my friends, or even myself. The show didn’t invent this pattern, it reflected it. And in many ways, it still does. We’ve inherited a cultural script that tells women our stories are incomplete without romance at the center. Even when we’re thriving, we’re taught to look for what or who is missing.
Watching Sex and the City now doesn’t make me reject it. If anything, it makes me appreciate it as a cultural time capsule. The women of the show were allowed to want more, but they were never fully allowed to want outside of men. And maybe the real question isn’t whether the show passes the Bechdel Test, it’s if we do.
