It seems that I may have been labouring under a misapprehension, ladies. I thought we had all agreed on one thing: the older you get, the less you care – what anyone thinks of you, about saying what you really feel and asking for what you want. Most of that youthful self-consciousness ebbs away as you advance in years, and not before time.
Silly me. Turns out, the opposite is true – or at least according to the second series of And Just Like That. As far as the Sex and the City sequel is concerned, women in their fifties are insecure, unable to communicate and scared to have even the most basic honest conversation with their loved ones. There’s something to look forward to, then.
The show is no stranger to criticism, with accusations that the original characters are unrecognisable, the new ones too one-dimensional, and the plot lines like a checklist of issues that the scriptwriters felt beholden to ticking off, rather than exploring with any great emotional depth.
But there’s something about the insecurity that has bubbled to the surface in the latest episodes that makes me want to scream, and goes against everything I’d been looking forward to as my own forties and fifties appear ever closer.
Take the major storyline in episode two, which sees Carrie torpedo her own podcast because she can’t say the word “vagina” on air – a prospect so awful that she feels “humiliated, mortified, I want to die” over it. What? The original Manhattan sex columnist, who made her name writing about anal sex and the taste of sperm, has suddenly become that prudish? I don’t know about you, but the older I get the more comfortable I seem to be with talking openly about all sorts of below-the-belt health issues, and if there was a job on the line, I’d say vagina (though shouldn’t it have been vulva?) into a microphone as many times as required. So would the old Carrie – albeit prefaced with, “I couldn’t help but wonder…”
And as for her agonising about having accidentally agreed to attend a rooftop party with Franklyn, the podcast producer she’s having weekly assignations with (that prudishness may be rubbing off on me)? I was banking on that people-pleasing instinct having withered away by midlife.
Then there’s Miranda, the ballsy lawyer who could identify a “he’s just not that into you” scenario a mile off, but who is now so fearful of asking her partner, Che, what’s bothering them that she convinces herself their relationship is nothing more than sex. Who can’t make her mind up about whether to get a robot tattoo, and is pathetically grateful to the owner of the parlour for having the most cursory of salesman-like conversations with her.
And what about Charlotte, who is too nervous to tell her own husband, Harry – a man not known for taking offence over anything much – that he’s not her date to the Met Ball. We’re supposed to believe that these two have been married for 17 years, yet they can’t seem to untangle the simplest of crossed wires.
The characters in the original series regularly lacked self-awareness, but they were less inhibited and clumsy than this. And even their messiest moments were handled with humour. I know that people can evolve as they get older, but Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte seem to have devolved.
Of course, there are moments in life – whatever age you are – when your confidence deserts you, your certainty wavers and you do care very much what other people think of you. Arguably some of those are being explored on screen, from grief to sexuality to being on the brink of an empty nest. Not to mention that the characters are presumably menopausal.
The more years that roll by, the more of such rough patches you will have experienced. That stuff teaches you how to survive, but also strips you of patience – meaning you basically have less time to tolerate other people’s nonsense. It’s why friendships can fracture, when those people on whom you thought you could rely simply don’t show up in the hard moments, or make your crisis all about them.
As the author of a book on female friendship, I spoke to dozens of women in their fifties, sixties, seventies… even nineties, and I know that friendships can suffer from miscommunication at any stage of life. In fact, the only realistic cause for self-doubt among the characters of And Just Like That – the group’s failed friendship with Samantha – is not explored, or even mentioned, in the first few episodes of the new series.
I was hoping for more than this from the women who showed my generation how our twenties and thirties might look, and that we could speak our minds, vocalise our desires and lay our emotions bare with our partners and friends.
What about a storyline that celebrates the ways in which women can reinvent themselves in their fifties and own it – with no quivering insecurity? Wouldn’t that be more exciting to explore and offer more opportunity for their friendships to shift and mature, instead of being reduced to Carrie phoning Che to have a teenage conversation about dating Franklyn? Yes, the women might be facing some of the same scenarios they did in their thirties, but the assumption that they’d react to them in the same way is disappointing.
These successful, previously self-assured, confident, outspoken women have been reduced to timid versions of their former selves. It’s a massive missed opportunity to show that, for the most part, older women don’t give a fuck.
Claire Cohen’s book, BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship, is out now