Stop Whistling, Start Listening — Strong women on TV - Samantha Jones: The third in an occasional series

Strong women on TV - Samantha Jones: The third in an occasional series

Sex And The City’s Samantha Jones may seem like an odd, obvious or slightly tacky choice for this occasional series, but it’s easy to forget how genuinely surprising her character was when the series started in 1998. People tend to think of her as the woman who ‘had sex like a man’ but she didn’t. For a start, that was an experiment that Carrie attempted. Secondly, and most importantly, she had sex like a woman - it’s just that she didn’t view sex or relationships in the way women traditionally did in TV and movies.

Women on TV and in films are usually emotionally over-wrought. If they have sex, they’re either in love with the man before they do, or fall instantly in love with him afterwards. They’re usually in relationships and one-night stands are usually immediately regretted.

Samantha was different. She had sex with men because she fancied them and wanted to have sex to them. Sometimes she saw them again and sometimes she didn’t. She separated love and sex in a way which was honest and worked for her.

I don’t mean to imply that this is how all women want to be or should be. For many women sex is closely linked to emotion and that’s just how they want it to remain. Not all women want their sex lives to be a string of unattached encounters. But Samantha was the first character who showed that some women did just want that, and that it was okay. Not just that but it wasn’t unfeminine or unwomanly. I’m sure many saw her as a slut or worse and disapproved of her behaviour, but that was half the fun of watching her - revelling in the rebelliousness of her behaviour.

Much of the criticism of Sex And The City is that people (mostly men who didn’t like the show) couldn’t believe that women wanted to be like the women in the show. This just proved how much they were missing the point. The women I know, many of whom loved the show, didn’t want to be the characters. Miranda was too career-driven and neurotic, Carrie too whiny and needy, Charlotte too prissy and marriage-hungry and Samantha probably too brazen for most of us, but we did find their lives, stories and adventures to be hilarious. Samantha’s endless merry-go-round of men and unbelievable stories over brunch were fantastic viewing (funky spunk anyone?).

In between all this sex of course, Samantha also managed to run her own PR business and have a fantastic career. She made her own money and spent it on herself, however she wished. She never needed to be provided for or looked after. Even when she had breast cancer, while she did have Smith to fall back on, she was the one who kept going, showing great strength and bared her head at a charity event, honestly tackling the symptoms she was suffering from.

She wasn’t immune to emotion or relationships by any stretch of the imagination. She had her heart well and truely broken by Richard, and finally gave in to the devotion and love shown to her by Smith Jerrod. But these were relationships which just developed with the men she met and who pursued her - she wasn’t actively seeking them. She also had little or no maternal instincts which, while she supported Miranda when she had a baby, showed itself time and again in her few interactions with Brady.

However, it was the friendship between the four woman that was really the main reason to keep watching. There was such fantastic love and support between them and while they had their ups and downs, they were always there for each other. That’s the part of the show my friends could really relate to. Sex And The City showed how close women could be and especially how they discussed the ups and downs of relationships and sex.

There’s been a lot of debate about whether Sex And The City can be considered a feminist show or not. For me, it doesn’t really matter either way (although I think it was). It was funny, smart and outrageous in turn and most of the scenes which left me open-mouthed or made me laugh-out-loud were stolen by Samantha Jones. She was a fantastically sexual character, and was one-of-a-kind on television.